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| MATR Newsletter - Fri Sep 26, 2014 |
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." President Franklin D. Roosevelt - Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937 - "A Path Appears" - Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity http://www.matr.net/ar ... .html
Montana Nonprofit Association Annual Conference, 10/1-3, Helena http://www.matr.net/ev ... =5187 --- Montana Ambassadors: Larry Simkins, CEO Washington Companies (All Are Invited) , 10/16, Seattle, WA http://www.matr.net/ar ... .html
Early Edge Montana
ikuw Solutions
- Timothy Bartik's New Book on the Economic Payoff of Preschool
"Our economic future and our children's future can be significantly improved by expanding high-quality early childhood education programs, such as pre-K education."
Montana Data Focused Business Cluster
- Agile At 10,000 Feet - Free Online Training - IKUW Solutions, 9/26
Do you work on projects where requirements change and communication within your team and between customers could use some improvement?
Montana Technology Innovation Partnership
- Today's TED Talk - Kenneth Cukier: Big data is better data
Self-driving cars were just the start. What's the future of big data-driven technology and design? In a thrilling science talk, Kenneth Cukier looks at what's next for machine learning -- and human knowledge.
- 43% of companies had a data breach in the past year
That's up up 10% from the year before.
- Jimmy John's hacked at 216 restaurants in 40 states
The chain is the latest victim in a series of security breaches among retailers such as Home Depot, Target Corp, Michaels Stores Inc and Neiman Marcus.
Northwestern Energy
- Brown Bag Event - "Move Your Innovative Ideas Forward" 11:15 Session, 9/30, Dillon, Montana
Do you have Innovative idea or concept? Are you conducting research and development? Are you writing a business plan or want to learn about financing options?
- Brown Bag Event - "Move Your Innovative Ideas Forward" 2:00 Session, 9/30, Dillon, Montana
Calling All Entrepreneurs, Researchers, Small Businesses
The 2014 Compete Smart Manufacturing Conference, 10/9-10, Billings, Montana
- Northwestern Energy volunteers plant trees in Bozeman - part of statewide Montana program to give back to local communities.
The program emphasizes why trees are an important asset to communities, and also outlines safety tips and energy-saving information for consumers.
PrintingForLess
- Just 14 Days Left to sign up and Celebrate the Magic at Compete Smart on Oct. 9-10 in Billings.
HURRY for best Plant Tour selection, Skill Builder Sessions, and gaining new connections! Exciting Grand Prizes and now a MOBILE APP for your Personalized Schedule on the go!
Inteneo Systems
- It's Solution Selectember at PFL
All routes lead to customers.
Montana Ambassadors
- What Business Can Learn From Intelligence
Try to eliminate silos. Businesses have data and analytical silos, and should work toward bridging them with new organizational structures and other means.
Montana Business
- Montana Ambassadors: Larry Simkins, CEO Washington Companies (All Are Invited) , 10/16, Seattle, WA
The Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Montana Ambassadors cordially invites you to its Fall 2014 Speaker Series event. Our keynote speaker will be Larry Simkins, CEO of the Washington Companies http://www.washcorp.com/ and Co-Chair of the Main Street Montana Project http://www.mainstreetmontanaproject.com/
Careers
- Do it yourself - How Sarah Calhoun built Red Ants Pants from the ground up
"I bought 'Starting a Business for Dummies.' I didn't even know what a business plan was."
Come Home Idaho
- Global Women's Summit, 10/10, Missoula
By providing solutions that work, the WIN is fulfilling their mission "to strengthen women and families worldwide through education, enlightenment, and entrepreneurship, in an effort to eradicate illiteracy, poverty, and hunger, and to increase the level of love, prosperity and peace on earth."
Idaho Business
- Idaho Career Opportunities - Implementation Manager, Office and HR Coordinator, Balihoo
We welcome innovative thinkers who want to continually advance new technology and ideas.
Incubators and R&D
- Boise's Balihoo software firm opens Chicago office
Balihoo said it has grown this year thanks in part to a new partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group, or SMG, which Balihoo said is the largest media agency in the world.
North Dakota Business and Economic Development
- New system provides access to collections of 14 academic libraries in Montana through one search
Benefits include a dramatically expanded discovery of library resources; a service that recommends relevant articles, based on usage data; the ability for users to save and organize items found during a search session; and the ability for users to save queries, set up alerts for new results, and expand their search to discover citation data not held in participating libraries' collections.
Regional Business
- Fracking in North Dakota: Women in the drilling boomtowns
Fracking has brought in an influx of oil workers--many of them women--from across the country attracted to the high salaries and burgeoning housing market created to accommodate the surge in residents.
University Business Plan Competitions
- Gender Equality - Four things companies can do after watching Emma Watson's speech
It's an important message, and one that is critically important in the workplace.
21st Century Education Initiative - "You Should Care..."
- National Science Foundation Community College Business Plan Competition - Students to Provide Solutions for Real World Problems
Teams should propose innovative STEM-based solutions for real world problems within one of the five themes: big data; infrastructure security; sustainability; broadening participation in STEM; and, improving STEM education.
Education
- Vidcode - a way to teach girls that coding and working in tech is creative and cool!
Vidcode, a video coding app designed with girls in mind that is not only self-expressive, but paired with a hobby girls love - creating and sharing videos. As we continue to test and introduce Vidcode, one thing is clear; girls love it!
- Kids burn more calories if they stand in class
The findings from the study indicate that the implementation of stand-biased desks had a statistically significant and positive impact on the amount of calories burned.
MAPS : Media Arts in the Public Schools
- "The People's Bill" - University of Montana student drafts solution for debt repayment through tax withholding
"I know a lot of people that have been affected by student loans over a significant period of time. They deserve an additional, viable opportunity to pay off their student loans." Mitch Everts
- Why Community Colleges Should Be Free
Community colleges are pillars of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.
- Why Free Online Classes Are Still the Future of Education
Effective uses of the MOOC model are only beginning to take shape.
Missoula Schools Excellence
- MAPS - Growing Bitterroot media arts program gets its own building
MAPS is applying for funding to expand to 12 locations throughout Montana over the next three years.
Montana Education Excellence
- Missoula County Public Schools provides programs to help 130 homeless students - 2,551 in Montana
Missoula County Public Schools report a 33-percent increase in the number of homeless students in schools.
- Missoula's Lowell PTA puts a healthy label on school fundraising
Together, these resources will help Lowell students become more successful and engaged at school and beyond.
Community
- MSU launches three new homepages, upgrades Web infrastructure
"We're very excited to be able to offer more targeted information to these groups of people and are confident it will help improve their experiences on our website."
Funding and Building your Business
- Missoula Assets Mapping, 10/1-3, Missoula, Montana
Assets Mapping is a values-based approach to community engagement that uses citizen input to identify and visualize physical assets within the community. Ultimately, asset mapping results in a series of maps that depict the location of assets, including where they overlap.
- What's Your 'Elevator Pitch' for Greener, Healthier Cities?
We went way too far in our love affair with cars, allowing them to take over both our rural landscape and the city streets that once were built to serve pedestrians and transit.
- Why Don't More Cities Sell Air Rights?
Vertically inclined cities could make a lot of money allowing private developers to build high-rise apartments or business spaces above libraries, city halls and schools.
- "A Path Appears" - Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity
"Just because we can't do everything doesn't mean we shouldn't do something." President Bill Clinton
Energy and Climate Change
- Chipotle's Brilliant Hiring Process
What makes it different than most other fast food chains is the way it hires and develops its employees. And that creates an atmosphere where the people who work there care far more about their jobs than the workers at a typical fast food joint.
- Companies going to greater lengths to find tech talent
"Opening a new IT operations center or relocating an existing one can be very costly and disruptive, but it can make sense for companies facing ongoing challenges attracting and retaining IT talent. Over a 10-year period, operating in a new location may lower their costs and better position them for future growth."
- Startup paying $250,000 salaries
By asking people to forgo higher salaries in favor of equity, startups fail to attract a broader variety of talent -- say, people with kids who can't afford the financial risk, Carter said. Instead those employees decide to work for bigger companies.
- What Make s Great Boards Great
It's not rules and regulations. It's the way people work together.
- How the tech elite teach Stanford students to build billion-dollar companies (in 11 quotes)
"If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you're doing, it's almost always a sign that it's too complicated."
- Is the new technology at Macy's our first glimpse of the future of retail?
Macy's made this investment as part of a broader strategy to attract more millennial-generation shoppers, who have become crucial to boosting the retailer's business.
- Best practices to recruit University of Montana graduates
If Montana businesses want to recruit these talented students and keep them from going with out-of-state firms, they should follow a few simple guidelines:
Connectivity & Communications
- Wyoming Wind power proposed to supply 1.3 million people in the Los Angeles area
If completed, it would become Wyoming's second-largest wind power project. The biggest under development in the U.S. is a 1,000-turbine site planned by Denver-based The Anschutz Corp. near Saratoga, in south-central Wyoming.
- Where to Go when Climate Change really hits the fan.
"The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades."
- Elon Musk's 'other' Gigafactory breaks ground in Buffalo
When fully operational, the plant will produce enough panels per year to generate a gigawatt of electricity, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor. The facility is expected to employ 1,450 people.
- Federal report shows how solar panels may hit utilities' profits
Rooftop, photovoltaic, or PV, solar could cut utility earnings by as much as 15 percent, according to the report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
- Net zero home: Couple builds house that generates as much energy as it uses
As owners of what could be the Bitterroot Valley's first zero net home, the Mehlschmidts' electric bill for the past four months has come in at $5.25 a month. That's the cost of delivery that goes on everyone's bill.
Government Technology
- Will the FCC Vacate State Broadband Restrictions?
As the Internet of Things expands and demand for connectivity rises, high-speed broadband will likely become a necessity rather than a luxury for most homes and businesses.
- Lack of Water and Energy Efficiency Is a Problem for Rural Broadband
Why consuming less water and energy means less infrastructure money to build the information highway in rural California.
Cool Stuff That's Coming
- Government Procurement: We're Doing it Wrong.
The biggest danger in all of this is that these efforts will ultimately fail to take hold - that after a few promising prototypes and experiments, governments will revert to the time honored approach of issuing bloated RFPs through protracted, expensive processes that crowd out smaller firms with better ideas and smaller price tags.
- Turning the Government RFP Upside Down
A Philadelphia program called FastFWD recognizes that government doesn't have all the answers and invites collaboration from entrepreneurs.
HACKING AND VIRUS ALERTS
- Google Glass-style helmet combines protection and data for industrial workers
The DAQRI Smart Helmet provides industrial workers with hardhat protection while also using an augmented reality to help them navigate sites.
- Alba - Ex-Tesla and NASA Engineers Make a Light Bulb That's Smarter Than You
It's fairly easy to see how Stack, by riding the light bulb's coattails, could quickly become the spine of the connected home.
Transportation
- The Internet Braces for the Crazy Shellshock Worm
A nasty bug in many of the world's Linux and Unix operating systems could allow malicious hackers to create a computer worm that wreaks havoc on machines across the globe, security experts say.
- Missoula's Mountain Line introduces electric bus system idea
Electric buses could be a ride coming to Missoula. They're quiet, considered more fuel efficient, and the battery recharges quickly.
- Federal Highway Administration to Develop Guidance for Protected Bike Lanes
The department's new strategic plan, released last year, emphasized pedestrian and bicycle safety and highlighted the need to create connected walking and biking networks that work for all ages and abilities, which is also a focus of the secretary's new bike/ped safety initiative.
- New Tool Maps Bay Area's Expensive, Unused Parking
Through a new database launching today, it aims to show that, despite their central place in both zoning code and development plans, parking structures in Northern California's urban core are actually underutilized as residents drive less.
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