Centerstance

Centerstance quoted in Javaworld Article

Okay, they may not have mentioned our name specifically, but we are the "70 person firm" that is quoted. It is a good article....Check it out!

http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3383

QlikView was featured in the latest article of Time magazine!

click here to view the article!

QlikView is one of Centerstance's newest partners in the management consulting LOB. Be sure to check out QlikView's website for more information about the product! (http://www.qlikview.com/)

Centerstance recognized by Inc.com

 

Centerstance ranks number 10 in Oregon and Washington on Inc.com's Fastest Growing Private Companies list.

Centerstance is pleased to be recognized along with many of our friends and clients on Inc.com's fastest growing list. Ranked number 737th nationally, Inc.com fastest growing list, we are honored to make the list, a true tribute to our consultants and partners.

Centerstance earned its position on the prestigious list following an aggressive growth surge during the past five years. The company has achieved average year over year growth of 200 percent since 2004. This is Centerstance’s first year on the Inc.com list.

The recognition from Inc.com is the most recent acknowledgement Centerstance has garnered for its explosive growth. In 2006 and 2007, Centerstance increased its Portland-based staff by 60 percent, and added more than 35 companies to its roster of IT and business consulting customers. Today, its customer base boasts many market leaders that are based in the Northwest, including Serena Software, Harry and David, Regence and Mentor Graphics.

Great job everyone!! Centerstance would not be on this list if it weren't for all of you. Thanks for all of your hard work.

Gaming and Car Insurance

Allstate Testing Whether Games Can Improve Driving

Allstate Testing Whether Brain Fitness Games Improve Driving

By BARBARA ORTUTAY AP Technology Writer
NEW YORK October 1, 2008 (AP)

The Associated Press
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Could playing computer games enhance mental agility enough to turn people over 50 into better drivers? Allstate Corp. wants to find out, and if the answer is yes, it might offer insurance discounts to people who play the games.

Under a new pilot program called InSight, Allstate will offer specialized computer games to 100,000 customers in Pennsylvania aged 50 to 75. The games' developer, San Francisco-based Posit Science, will track the total number of hours these drivers play.

Then the group's accident rates will be compared to a control group of people who do not play the games.

The games are not all specific to driving. They're designed to reverse age-related cognitive decline and improve visual alertness. For example, a game called "Jewel Diver" has players keep track of underwater jewels that pop up on the screen for a moment before they are hidden under fish swimming around. When the fish stop moving, players click on the fish hiding the jewel. It's like Three Card Monte but without the cheating. Over time, the game gets more complicated as more fish appear on the screen.

Allstate recommends that drivers complete at least 10 hours of training. It's being given as a free option to the 100,000 Pennsylvania drivers, and Allstate plans to decide next year whether to roll it out in other states.

Tom Warden, an assistant vice president at Allstate, said the company chose Posit's technology because it is based on nine years of research into how older drivers' brain fitness might be improved.

While people their 50s and 60s have the lowest accident rates of all drivers, at some point in the mid-60s this rate starts to climb again, Warden said. He hopes the brain fitness software can show "significant benefits here — beyond dollars and cents."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Social Networking for Spies

CIA, FBI push 'Facebook for spies'

By Larry Shaughnessy
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- When you see people at the office using such Internet sites as Facebook and MySpace, you might suspect those workers are slacking off.

A social-networking site for the world of spying officially launches for the U.S. intelligence community this month.

But that's not the case at the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, where bosses are encouraging their staff members to use a new social-networking site designed for the super-secret world of spying.

"It's every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it's much, much more," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

The program is called A-Space, and it's a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.

The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation's entire intelligence community September 22.

"It's a place where not only spies can meet but share data they've never been able to share before," Wertheimer said. "This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella."

Wertheimer demonstrated the program to CNN to show how analysts will use it to collaborate.

"One perfect example is if Osama bin Laden comes out with a new video. How is that video obtained? Where are the very sensitive secret sources we may have to put into a context that's not apparent to the rest of the world?" Wertheimer asked.

"In the past, whoever captured that video or captured information about the video kept it in-house. It's highly classified, because it has so very short a shelf life. That information is considered critical to our understanding."

The goal of A-Space, like intelligence analysis in general, is to protect the United States by assessing all the information available to the spy agencies. Missing crucial data can have enormous implications, such as an FBI agent who sent an e-mail before September 11, 2001, warning of people learning to fly airplanes but not learning to land them.

"There was the question, 'Was that a dot that failed to connect?' Well, that person did this via e-mail," Wertheimer said. "A-Space is the kind of place where you can log that observation and know that your fellow analysts can see that."

Even though Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites that inspired A-Space are predominantly the domain of young people, there apparently is no such generational divide on A-Space.

"We have found that participation in A-Space crosses every conceivable age line and experience line. People are excited, no matter what age group," Wertheimer said.

Of course, the material on A-Space is highly classified, so it won't be available for the public. Only intelligence personnel with the proper security clearance, and a reason to be examining particular information, can access the site. The creators of A-Space do not want it to be used by some future double agent such as Jonathan Pollard or Robert Hanssen to steal America's 21st-century secrets.

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space."

Yes, analysts can collect friends on A-Space the way people can on Facebook. But nobody outside the intelligence community will ever know -- because they're secret.

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CNN's Barbara Starr and Pam Benson contributed to this report.

All About Central Intelligence Agency • Facebook Inc. • MySpace Inc.

Centerstance is now on Facebook!!

Do you facebook? If so, add Liz Dooley (and Jenny Curtis when she finally gets herself signed up) as your friend and Liz will invite you to join the Centerstance group in facebook- just another virtual way to stay connected!

Interesting News Article

Review: Google's Chrome needs more polish

By Peter Svensson

NEW YORK (AP) -- Google Inc.'s new Web browser, called Chrome, does much of what a browser needs to do these days: It presents a sleek appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage "tabs" and offers several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings.

Google's Chrome browser will hog your computer's processor more than the new Internet Explorer 8.

Yet my initial tests reveal that this "beta," or preliminary release, falls short of Google's goals, and is outdone in an important measure by the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

Chrome is a challenge to Microsoft's browser, used by about three-quarters of Web surfers. But it could equally be called a challenge to Microsoft's Office software suite, because what Google really wants to do is to make the browser a stable and flexible platform that can do practically everything we want to do with a computer, from word processing and e-mail to photo editing.

To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on the way other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies used to make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop software applications. Google's online word processing and spreadsheet programs use this technology, but it's also very widely deployed on Web pages to do less sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.

At first blush, Google's focus on JavaScript makes sense. JavaScript can eat up computer processor power, and if poorly used by a Web site, can bring down the browser. One of the things Chrome promises is that if one browser tab crashes, it won't take down the whole program.

Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet Explorer and Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the window. That's a nice move, but it's the browser's performance that really matters to me. And this is where Chrome's attention to JavaScript might miss the point.

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At work, I often have 40 or 50 tabs open in Firefox, grouped in different windows depending on which topic they pertain to. Frequently, Firefox would slow down all the other applications on my computer, then seize up completely.

At first I thought JavaScript was to blame, and blocked it from running. But that made many sites unusable, and it didn't help: The browser still froze.

It turns out the culprit is not JavaScript but another technology used to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash plug-in. It's the program-within-a-program that plays YouTube videos and those annoying "splash" pages that some sites employ to dazzle you with animations before letting you do anything useful on the site.

Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processor time to the point where there is nothing left for other programs. It does this even if you're not actively doing anything. Merely having a YouTube page open on your screen will suck power from your computer's central processing unit, or CPU. This is outrageous behavior for a browser. It's my CPU and I want it back.

Luckily, there's a small add-on program for Firefox that lets the user prevent Flash files from running automatically when a page loads, and it turns Firefox into a stable, efficient browser.

What does this mean on Chrome? Well, it has the same problem. It lets sites running Flash take over your computer's resources. It doesn't hog the CPU quite as bad as with Firefox, but in a way, it's more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there's no way to stop Flash from running. Chrome's controls are quite bare-bones, perhaps because it's still in "beta."

On the plus side, Chrome allows you to diagnose problems with runaway plug-ins easily, because it tells you exactly which pages are consuming which resources. Had I been able to do this with Firefox, it would have saved me from months of browser troubles.

So which one comes out smelling like roses? The beta of Internet Explorer 8, released just last week.

When playing a YouTube video, Firefox 3 took up 95 percent of the CPU time on a three-year old laptop running Windows XP.

Chrome came in at 60 percent -- still too much. Especially since Google owns YouTube! You'd think it could make its browser work well with that site in particular.

Internet Explorer barely broke a sweat, taking up just a few percent.

When I told each browser to load eight pages, some of which were heavy with Flash and graphics, Firefox took 17 seconds and ended with a continuous CPU load of 50 percent. That means it took up half of my available processing power, even if I wasn't looking at any of the pages.

Chrome loaded them the fastest, at 12 seconds, and ended with a CPU load of about 40 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 took 13 seconds to load, but ended with no CPU load at all.

So while Chrome's performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, I'd recommend giving the new Internet Explorer a spin.

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Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

All About Google Inc. • Microsoft Internet Explorer • Mozilla Firefox

New Yahoo Product: Fire Eagle

August 12, 2008, 8:27 pm

Yahoo knows where you are

By Michael V. Copeland

SAN FRANCISCO - Given all the drama surrounding Yahoo’s corporate activities, it’s easy to forget that there is a business still to be run and new products to launch. On Tuesday at Yahoo’s San Francisco-based skunk works - known as the Brickhouse - the embattled Internet company unveiled a new location services platform dubbed Fire Eagle. (Yes, it’s a silly name but say it 10 times fast and think of Firefox and it begins to sound OK.)

Location is one of those things that has huge potential for adding a layer of context to all kinds of services on the Web.  Geo-tagging - the practice of adding geographic information to Web sites, photos and videos - is gathering steam across all sorts of Internet-based properties, from restaurant review sites to social networks and house hunting services. What has been missing, however, is an easy way to insert yourself into that growing stream of geographic information.

In essence, that is what Fire Eagle does. You either tell Fire Eagle where you are, or give permission for some device to do it on your behalf - say your mobile phone -  and Fire Eagle broadcasts your location information to the services that you have approved.

So imagine that all your friends on Facebook now get feeds on your location, by city, neighborhood or even street address. If you are driving through a neighborhood house hunting, you could get updates on homes on the market, past sale prices and upcoming open houses. Hungry for Italian? The closest places for a decent plate of pasta come streaming to your phone. Note that you can do much of this today with individual services, but you have to tell each of them where you are. With Fire Eagle, you give your location once, and all kinds of services can access it (again, only with your permission).

Already about 50 applications have integrated Fire Eagle into their services, ranging from Six Apart’s blogging service Movable Type to messaging platform Pownce to neighborhood news site Outside.in.

Yahoo (YHOO) didn’t launch Fire Eagle with any of its own properties - photo service Flickr is an obvious one (automatic geo-tagging of photos) -  but you can expect to see Fire Eagle deployed in the world of Yahoo in the future.

“We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services but we thought that if we just do it ourselves it is much less likely to get wide adoption,” said Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who was his usual low-key presence at Fire Eagle’s launch on Tuesday. “We’re still pretty early stages in this location stuff, but if we can get wide adoption of Fire Eagle across the Web we can become a leader.”

Yahoo will face competition from the likes of Apple (AAPL), which has made scores of location-based services available as downloads for the iPhone, and Google (GOOG), whose Android mobile phone platform is expected to do the same for a range of mobile devices. Yahoo isn’t competing head on with Apple or Google, but rather hopes to tie together all these devices and Web-based services through Fire Eagle. Whether Yahoo succeeds depends on Fire Eagle’s adoption by consumers, and whether it catches fire with the developers that it needs.

How Yahoo makes money from Fire Eagle is less clear, though there are several obvious options. One is to incorporate location into its online advertising services. If advertisers know where you are, they can entice you with deals/coupons/menus on the spot.  Yahoo could also help its partners, whether they are advertisers or application developers incorporate more location into their services with better software development tools that would take advantage of Fire Eagle. Presumably the partners would pay for those tools and expertise.

In every case, whether it’s a social network or an advertiser, a person’s location will only be made available to those services that individuals approve. And if you don’t want anyone to know where you are – illicit affair, job interview - you have the option of hiding your location for a period of time you determine, or even lying.

“We think it’s a good idea that users can lie about where they are,” says Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo’s Brickhouse. “Like I don’t always tell my mother where I am.”

Happy Birthday Centerstance!!

 

Centerstance turns 5 years old today!! We have come along way since Arne and Mike's cardboard desks and the fact that one pizza fed everyone at the first employee meeting.

Congratulations Everyone!!

Interesting Article on Social Networking and Business

Social networking and bottom-line business

2008-06-16 by Terry Brock
Portland Business Journal

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

That is an old adage that is particularly true with technology and with the new phenomena of social networking.

This trend of connecting with people that you know, or even casually have met, is gaining more and more momentum. It is similar to Relationship Marketing in that you connect with people. Done properly, it can serve as a way to get feedback from various people who are in your list of contacts.

However, there are many people that are treating it like just another way to grab business cards. Much like those who attend a lot of "Networking" functions and brag about how many business cards they've distributed, unless there is a real relationship with someone, it doesn't matter. You want to connect in a genuine, real way with people who can help you in business. To "connect" with someone you don't know through a popular social networking site would be comparable to collecting a thousand business cards from people you don't know. It only leads to spam and those doing the spamming are not respected and certainly don't know much about real Relationship Marketing. They also don't see real business benefits by spamming people either with spam email or other frivolous connections.

The next generation of social networking is emerging now. It thrives on people who have a specific interest. It could be a group of podiatrists in Chicago, people interested in a given candidate in a particular area or members of a "group within a group."

One technology empowering this is Ning. The Chinese name for "tranquility" is the root of this site started by Marc Andreessen (yes, THAT Marc Andressen of Netscape fame) and Gina Bianchini. These two geniuses have come up with a technology and style that helps people connect online for specific purposes.

I'm a member of one Ning group called "NSA Next" which is for interested "young-minded" speakers of the National Speakers Association. It provides a way for us to connect online and talk about matters, within the speaking business, related to our own interests.

That is what Ning, and other successful social networking sites are about. They provide a way for people to gather and share information.

Contrast that with some other sites which only have people "connecting" with someone they barely know. Many people think that the more "contacts" they have the better they are.

Well, I guess that will matter just as soon as we all hold a contest and give a prize to the person with the most business cards in their closet!

It doesn't matter how many people you say are your "contacts." What matters in business is cultivating profitable relationships baed on value for value exchange.

Social networking relates beautifully to what I call R-Commerce, Relationship Commerce. It is about relating to people in true value-for-value exchange.

It is natural, as people like to connect with others. Technology fuels that ability. This is what technology has done through the ages. Think of the first telegraph. It gave people the ability to connect with others over a long distance. Newspapers gave people the ability to share their ideas with others. Radio let people hear a live voice and opened a world of technology unknown before that.

Television moved to a new dimension to see people moving live.

Today, the Net is different than these other media. It is more like an on-going act, not something that is stuck and unmovable. It is the ability to connect with others immediately from anywhere. This is where we're moving. It is spontaneous and ever-changing.

What are some implications for your business? Think "Sale of the Hour" if you're in the neighborhood. Of course, the neighborhood could be your website. It could also be a physical location.

We really want that human, pressing the flesh, seeing someone in person experience. We still want and will always need that face-to-face meeting time. However, that is the ultimate limit. You still can only be in one place at one time. You preclude all other possibilities when you've selected one place.

My friend, Corbin Balls says, "You can't share a virtual beer." We'll always need face-to-face meetings. However, technologies like Ning provide the ability to get close to a specific group of people with a special interest. Check out what others are doing with Ning at www.Ning.com and see for yourself.

More and more jobs are being found through social networking. There are probably some who still get hired by traditional newspaper classified ads. However, that market is fading fast. Social networking and instant messages are replacing it for many today.

Yes, there are some who still have a traditional resume on paper. However, more and more jobs are offered and accepted through social networks like Twitter (limit of 240 characters) MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and others. This is where people congregate. This is where people are hanging out more and more. This is where smart marketers hang out as well.

Social Networking is a logical extension of both technology and our desire to connect with real, genuine relationships. Serious marketers and business people of all types are looking into it. The benefits have only begun to appear.

Click here to view article on the Portland Business Journal Website