Monthly Archives: March 2010

For years, Rhiza has produced one of the best online mapping applications on the market. Rhiza Insight is used by our customers to bring location intelligence to their operations and sales departments.

Our customers challenged us to meet more of their needs and we listened. We’ve produced a new version that is still incredibly easy to use and now offers a greater range of tools:

• online presentations
• powerful charting features
• mobile data collection
• collaboration and sharing tools
• and of course, amazing online mapping capabilities

To celebrate, we are relaunching our flagship product with a new name: Rhiza Upshot

Why Upshot, you ask? After talking to our customers about what they love most about our product, we learned that Rhiza Insight helps them get to the upshot of complex scenarios quickly. We invite you to join Rhiza’s growing list of customers like Comcast and the U.S. Department of Energy who turn to Rhiza when they need online tools for data analysis and vibrant presentations.

Visit our new website where you can watch our latest video, download a brochure or request a live demonstration. Let us know what you think!

Axiom News wrote a feature article that highlights how Rhiza’s socially responsible business practices have helped it to be resilient and succeed in this tough economy. You can read the full article here.

At Rhiza, we love to experiment with new ways of visualizing data that help tell better data stories. In most of our work environments, using data is kind of difficult and visualizing is usually left to data experts. We’d love to see a future where sharing data visualizations (maps, charts, explanations, etc) is as easy as recording and sharing a video on YouTube. Not everything produced will be stellar in quality, but at least we’ll all be a lot further down the road towards breaking down the traditional data silos and moving data aggregation and visualization solely out of the hands of database admins and graphic designers. We’ll still need those folks, their jobs will just get a lot more fun!

To this end, when I saw a data animation created by John Detwiler that showed the spread of drilled Marcellus shale gas wells in Bradford County, I wanted to create my own data animation telling the same story, but for the entire state of Pennsylvania. I recruited Jeff Christensen here at Rhiza to work with me on creating a visualization that would not only show the locations of the drilled wells over time, but also visualize the number of wells drilled per month. The video below is the result of that work: Read more »

West Coast office helps Rhiza support growing market demand for easy, online location intelligence tools for streamlined business decision-making.

Photo credit: Seattle Summer by .Bala via flickr

Pittsburgh, PA (December 5, 2012) – Rhiza Labs will celebrate the opening of operations in Seattle in January. While Rhiza’s headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh, PA, the addition of a West Coast office will help Rhiza provide better service to its existing and prospective clients in the West.

“We are excited to engage more directly with innovators on the West Coast who support Rhiza’s mission of moving business analysis solely from the control of analysts and geeks into the hands of executives, salespeople and project managers.” said Josh Knauer, Rhiza CEO.

Rhiza’s cloud-based tools help clients like Comcast, the U.S. Department of Energy and Dunn & Bradstreet embrace data-driven decision-making. Rhiza’s clients sell more effectively through micro-targeting, evaluate key performance indicators faster and discover new business opportunities.

Rhiza also announced it has named Maryl Widdows as Vice-President of Sales and Marketing to help lead the West Coast expansion. “Maryl has been a member of the Rhiza management team from the beginning. She brings a deep understanding of the business intelligence challenges our customers face and will be able to provide a high level of personalized service to our West Coast customers.” said Knauer.

About Rhiza

Winner of InfoWorld Magazine’s Top 10 IT Project Award, Rhiza is an acknowledged innovator in the design and deployment of online tools for decision-makers.  Rhiza’s location intelligence applications integrate and illuminate data from a variety of sources, providing meaningful ways for businesses to better understand their customers, assets, operations and stakeholders. For more information about Rhiza, visit www.rhiza.com

*UPDATE* Coverage of this story in: Wall St Journal, Pittsburgh Business Times, Puget Sound Business Journal and Directions Magazine

One of our customers, the Tides Foundation, recently partnered with Rhiza to analyze the impact of its grantmaking activities. Irene Kao, Project Manager for the Impact and Innovation Department at Tides talks about her experience of using Rhiza Upshot to bring their data to life to tell a continuous story that is meaningful, dynamic, and actionable in a recent blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

Below is a map created by Irene using Rhiza Upshot that looks at the location of the education grants awarded by Tides in 2010 alongside contextual data about the areas of the country where the education needs are the greatest. Irene looked at indicators like per pupil public school funding, reading proficiency, and high school graduation rates. The result was an easy to understand visual framework that can be used to facilitate new conversations about education funding decisions going forward.

In the NTEN blog Irene says “The map, then, becomes the beginning of a story that continues with partner discussions around strategy and what the work looks like in a year, in two years, and onward. By harnessing quantitative data, our community begins a kind of qualitative “choose-your-own-adventure” story – one that empowers people to make decisions based on firmly anchored information and desired impact.”

For a closer look at how Tides is measuring impact, read Irene’s blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

At Rhiza, we believe deeply in operating our business in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. Our CEO, Josh Knauer, has been a member of the Social Venture Network (SVN) since 1999 and serves on the organization’s Board of Directors. SVN is a network of innovative business leaders who passionately believe that responsible businesses can help create a more just and sustainable future.

Rhiza’s presence and engagement at the fall SVN 2011 Conference was deep: Mike Higgins, Maryl Widdows and Josh Knauer were all in attendance, Rhiza was the lanyard sponsor, Josh was the Conference Chair, and led two sessions at the conference. One of those sessions, Leveraging Emerging Technologies to Change the World was widely covered around the web, including a blog post on the SVN Blog and another posted to fellow SVN software company, Singlebrook Technologies’ blog. There was also quite a bit of Twitter coverage.

While the Rhiza Team is widely known for its leadership in data collection, visual analysis and publishing, you’ll be hearing a lot more about our efforts to bring definition to our responsible business practices.

We welcome your feedback and highly encourage you to take a look at the Social Venture Network and join us at their next conference.

As we are all constantly reminded this Halloween season, the Zombie Apocalypse is nigh. If you are planning on surviving the upcoming hordes it might pay off to do some advance planning. As with many impending disasters whether you live to repopulate the planet can come down to something as simple as being in the right place. It won’t matter how well you are prepared if you are surrounded by thousands of shuffling goons whose only goal is to eat your flesh.

So where should you go to maximize your chances? Ideally, you’ll be somewhere where the zombie disease will spread slowly so it won’t take you by surprise. This sickness spreads like a virus. One infected being can infect many others, who in turn, will infect even more until the population has reached a saturation point. If there are fewer people to infect the contagion will spread more slowly. Therefore, it would be prudent to live in a place with less population density. (Data from World Atlas)

Another factor to consider is the survival rates of your neighbors. If they can avoid zombie attacks they will not be available to infect you. Ideally, you’ll want to be surrounded by a fit population, a population of people capable of outrunning an attack. Therefore, you should be interested in places where people are more likely to engage in physical activity. (Data from American Health Rankings)

Finally, it’s a good idea to surround yourself with people who will not only survive the zombies, but fight back. The only way to get rid of zombies is to destroy their brains. Therefore, it is advisable to seek camaraderie with people who possess such an ability. Gun owners of any age will be uniquely equipped to reduce zombie numbers with minimal harm to themselves. They are less likely to need to approach a zombie (vs. hitting one with a blunt object like a bat) and thus can be effective while staying out of harm’s way. So, even if you are not a gun owner yourself, it is optimal to live somewhere where there are people who will use their personal firearms to remove sources of contagion. (Data from the Washington Post)

Here is a composite map taking all of the above factors into account. The more Zombie resistant areas are gray in color and the zombie friendly ones are in green.

Other geographic components to consider:
- Zombies have difficulty crossing rivers and mountains. You can seek areas strategically where there are barriers to keep the teeming masses from following you.
- If the outbreak gets serious enough to the point where utilities are cut off you might want to consider areas with ready supplies of water and a climate that is neither too hot nor too cold. Stay out of the southwestern states!
- The island of Hawaii has a welcoming climate and is isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Now might be the time to invest in that Pineapple Plantation. If an outbreak occurs elsewhere and it shuts down its shipping and airports there is hope for its inhabitants.
- Alaska is young, has lots of open space, and plenty of firearms. However, life could get difficult if you’re without utilities in the dead of winter.

Finally, if you’re looking for an affordable place to ride out the coming disaster, it’s possible to mix the above information with median home prices for a metropolitan area. Little Rock is looking mighty good!

Where would you live if you wanted to survive the Zombie Apocalypse?

Actually, Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” But I think we should apply the same logic to companies — and not just because they are legal “persons”

At Rhiza, we’ve always tried to be a responsible company. But what does that really mean? My background is in computer science and philosophy. It’s not that weird a combination. Both disciplines search for rules to make sense of the world with, and both have a (sometimes unfortunate) weakness for pedantic precision. So I have a natural tendency to want to clarify and systematize.

What I want to do here is to explore the definition of a socially responsible software company, or, at least, start a process for arriving at the definition.

Right now I have some intuitions, some things I think we’ve gotten right so far, and a lot of questions. The questions are probably the most important part. If this is a topic that interests you, please leave a comment. I’m also going to the Social Venture Network conference next week. I expect it to provide a firehose of relevant information (and if you’re going to be there, come find me and we’ll chat).

I’m also hoping to get some other folks at Rhiza to weigh in with their opinions. Here is a non-exhaustive and possibly wildly off-the-mark list of topics we may be discussing in this space over the coming days and weeks:

• Doing good for your employees. Frankly, I’m not sure this is “socially responsible” — it may just be enlightened self-interest! (Then again, maybe those two things aren’t so far apart.) Anyway, we have a lot of cool policies involving flex-time and working from home and babies in the office. But what else could we be doing? And how do we balance the demands of a start-up? Does success require a level of intensity that compromises other aspects of life? Or is that a false choice?
• Being green. There’s a lot of interesting technical complexity wrapped up in this one. Our office is LEED certified; how meaningful is that? Is hosting web-based software in the cloud more or less green than other strategies? Does it matter which cloud you pick? Should we encourage people to work from home and save the carbon, even if productivity takes a hit?
• Are some products inherently more responsible than others? Loads of potential controversy here! Some people think video games are bad for you, others extol their benefits. Fortunately, I can dodge that one since we don’t make video games. But you get the point: are there things we could put into or take out of our product that make it intrinsically more responsible? Or is it all a matter of perspective? Since our tools help people make data-based decisions, as a rationalist I like to think that the tools are intrinsically good. But maybe some would disagree.
• Customers! Must socially responsible companies worry about whether their customers are doing good? Is the answer different if you’re selling a one-size-fits-all product or if you’re doing custom work? Again, I am sure this is fraught with controversy.
• Open source software. There’s a big part of the geek community that thinks one of the most socially responsible things you can do as a programmer is to contribute to open source software. But there are obvious competitive implications for companies who do that. Can a balance be managed? And, assuming you are convinced that open source is the way to go, which of the zillions of licenses should you choose (and why)?

Okay. Enough questions. Write thoughts, send links, come find me (or Josh or Maryl) next week if you are in Philly. What do you think makes a company socially responsible? What would you like to see us do? Finally, I’ll bookend with another quote (from Upton Sinclair), just to remind us why these questions can be hard to think about:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Rhiza’s CEO, Josh Knauer, will be giving the keynote address at the GeoTec 2011 Conference in Vancouver, Canada on September 29, 2011. Josh will speak about emerging technologies and how they are changing the way organizations are using maps and data for decision making.

If you’d like to meet with Josh while he’s in Vancouver, please let us know.

Rhiza’s parent company, MAYA, announced that it was moving all of the MAYA Companies to downtown Pittsburgh. I didn’t think this was a big news story, but apparently Marketwatch decided to publish the news. The expansion of the MAYA Companies into a downtown skyscraper is just one indicator for how well the companies (including Rhiza) are doing and how much growth we’ve all experienced. Feel free to read the full article to get all of the details.