There is a disease destroying our young people. It is silent, malignant, and fatal. It is called Minecraft and something must be done. If you have children of a certain age chances are they have made a giant Pikachu out of yellow blocks or put up a signpost that says “Poop Here” next to a chicken pen. It is truly terrible.
But there is hope. With Piper, we can turn Minecraft into something more exciting. The kit lets kids create circuits in real life and then see how they interact in Minecraft. It lets you, for example, add a battery and a button to a breadboard and see those parts pop up on the screen. Electricity flowing through virtual wires simulates what is happening in real life. In short, what you make on screen happens in real life and vice versa – sort of. Watch the video to really understand it.
Mark Pavlyukovskyy and his partners created the project as a way to help kids learn electronics and they even got a plug from Steve Wozniak who said “I love Piper because it represents what enabled me to do all the great technology things in my life.” It is, in short, a popular project that looks like it could change the way our kids think about electronics.
The team has sold 1,500 units through Kickstarter and raised $50,000 from Co.lab. They are looking for more seed funding to expand the idea.
The kit includes a Raspberry Pi 2 and a laser cut case as well as wires, buttons, lights, switches, sensors, tiny breadboards, and everything else you need to start building right away!” In other words, it’s great fun and really useful. The kit costs $199 with a Raspberry Pi 2.
While many kids will remain enslaved by the evils of Minecraft if only one escapes and makes a little robot that buzzes and spits out pieces of paper that say “Poop Here,” I think we’ll be in good shape.
Local IT budgets on the rise, but staffing concerns loom large
IT budgets are on the rise for many cities and counties, but technology executives in those local governments still have concerns about investment levels in certain key areas -- and in their ability to retain top talent.
Those trends are among the findings in a new survey by the Public Technology Institute and Deltek. Nearly 300 city and county IT executives were polled on their funding, organizational issues, staff and training needs, technology trends and relations with the vendor community.
Percentage of city/county IT leaders who expect budgets to increase
When asked how top government leaders view IT spending, 63 percent of respondents said their bosses view IT budgets as an "investment for saving money in other business areas." And while more respondents (47 percent) expect their funding to remain the same than to increase (44 percent), just 9 percent were bracing for IT budget cuts.
Concerns remain, however, about funding levels for certain categories of IT investments -- and especially for in-house IT staff.
Percentage of who believe an IT category is inadequately funded.
Levels of concern regarding loss of in-house IT staff over the next year.
Answer Options
Not Sure
Very Low
Low
Average
High
Very High
Hiring away by private-sector
6%
15%
20%
23%
28%
8%
Hiring away by public-sector
5%
15%
25%
31%
18%
6%
Retirement of staff
9%
28%
15%
23%
15%
10%
Staff quitting
5%
25%
31%
24%
10%
5%
Eliminating positions due to budget cuts
7%
39%
28%
15%
7%
4%
Nearly three-quarters of executives responded that their budgets for staff development, training, travel and education will remain the same in the coming year. And more than 70 percent of respondents said they were either dissatisfied, very dissatisfied or unsure in their ability to attract and hire architects / system designers, security / risk assurance personnel as well as developers / programmers.
Managed Solution welcomed Jacob Salisbury as a Technical Support Representative on Monday, August 10, 2015. Jacob has several years experience working in the IT field and joins us with a background in designing and installing energy management controls. He also has experience interfacing between analog and digital technologies and working with wireless protocols and in a strictly command line basis using Gentoo Linux.
Jacob is a California native and has 2 dogs, a German Shepherd named Fritz and a Australian Shepherd/Queensland Heeler mix named Taz. He also has a 100 gallon aquarium with 30 tropical freshwater fish.
When's Jacob's not in the office, he's spending a large portion of his free time producing Techno and House Music. He's a local DJ so you could catch him playing at numerous events around San Diego, Los Angeles and occasionally Tiajuana.
Please join us in welcoming Jacob Salisbury to the Managed Solution team!
At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people - CAREERS
Exploring the relationship between modern technology and dance.
What can you do when you use technology to reimagine something as timeless as dance? Artists Frederico Phillips and Maria Takeuchi sought to answer this question and create a limitless artistic experience. What they discovered broke the bounds of what’s been done before and opened the doors for what’s to come.
Phillips and Takeuchi used Microsoft Kinect sensors to record an interpretive dance performance, which they manipulated in 3D. The resulting video pushes the limits of expression and redefines how modern technology can engage with, enhance and ultimately change the dance experience.
Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow is a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology.
This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Don’t see the technology that you would like to learn? Submit a suggestion to inthetechknow@managedsolution.com and we will be sure to cover it in our upcoming webcast series.
Solar energy in the United States has seen immense momentum throughout the years. When the Solar Energy Industries Association released its annual report in 2008, it concluded that U.S. solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity reached a total of 1.183 gigawatts — a stellar achievement at the time.
Contrast that figure with today, and the number is dwarfed by the United States’ installed capacity of 21.3 gigawatts, enough energy to power 4.3 million homes.
As to what is powering this widespread adoption, one only needs to look at the residential market. According to recently released research by GTM, 72 percent of the market growth in 2014 is a result of solar tech companies offering diverse financing solutions and easy-to-navigate web platforms. Going solar for homeowners has become as easy as online shopping.
The commercial sector isn’t as fortunate, outside of a few large-scale projects driven by Fortune 500 and utility companies. This impasse is mostly because small and mid-scale companies face a number of complications when it comes to investing in solar — the largest being a lack of easy and cost-efficient methods to evaluate and mitigate the risk of any given project.
Tech is changing that. First it made waves in the residential sector, introducing seamless tech platforms with creative financing options to make solar a reality for homeowners. Now it’s paving a path for similar, widespread national success in the commercial space.
Outpacing Commercial Solar
We often hear of large companies, like Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target, deciding to go solar in a move that makes both economic sense and decreases their carbon footprint. If you were to search for large commercial solar sites, such as major corporate headquarters, metropolitan arenas or vast solar arrays, you wouldn’t be hard pressed to find them. They’re abundant, and they’re generally well publicized as a part of any company’s corporate social-responsibility program.
The future of solar has never looked brighter.
However, just because we know of an Apple or Google going solar doesn’t necessarily mean that the greater commercial solar industry is on a consistent upward swing. It is merely a segment of the market that is able to access renewable energy at scale because of their vast resources and investor relations. A significant portion of small and medium-sized enterprises are not adopting solar at record rates.
In fact, in 2014 the commercial solar market was no longer the leading market segment when it came to installed capacity — that’s when residential took over. This flip of leading markets is due to two facts: one being that residents are able to install PV systems at cost-effective rates thanks to technology advancements in established solar companies, the other being that a significant portion of the commercial market is bottlenecked and untapped.
An untapped market is untapped potential, and the tech industry is beginning to take note.
Bringing Small And Medium-Sized Businesses To The Solar Grid
When it comes to making the actual investment, large corporations have economies of scale that drive down costs and increase efficiencies. Additionally, financing of solar projects for these large corporations is generally easier to come by, typically because they have reliable and accessible public credit ratings that satisfy Wall Street’s risk evaluation and mitigation criteria.
Aside from large commercial facilities, we are left with the small to medium-sized firms that haven’t been able to go solar in similar numbers as the nation’s homeowners and their large corporate brethren. Think restaurants, wineries, galleries, printing shops, local gift stores and local religious community centers.
With complex tariff modeling, demand charges, time-of-use rates and limited roof space, as well as layers upon layers of decision-making, an average sales cycle can eclipse 12-18 months. That is if the deal ever closes.
To top it off, most of these smaller commercial facilities lack those readily available and reliable public credit ratings enjoyed by corporations, so even if they are able to navigate the design process, persuading external investors of the viability of the project can be an uphill battle.
This is all changing, and the credit can be given to technology and innovation. With design and modeling tools from companies like HelioScope, Energy Toolbase, Wiser Capital and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Building Component Library (built in conjunction with Concept 3D), the solar industry is beginning to access a large, often ignored market.
These companies have been able to develop software to streamline a complex design and modeling process, enabling solar systems to seamlessly work for the specific needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
The bulk of whether or not your favorite mom-and-pop sandwich shop down the street is going to go solar, however, largely rests on ensuring the cost of capital falls within acceptable risk tolerances for the deal to deliver required returns.
Again, because these types of facilities typically lack reliable and readily accessible public credit ratings that satisfy investor risk evaluation criteria, the cost of capital has generally been too high for many of these projects to take off.
An untapped market is untapped potential, and the tech industry is beginning to take note.
SolarCity, however, just announced its own foray into this space, utilizing California’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing programs to attach a solar lease agreement to a building’s property, essentially negating the need for a risk-rating score. Unfortunately, this option is currently limited to California.
The greater solution lies in technology. If every facility and project could earn a consistent, transparent and highly automated score, then the entire U.S. market would open up.
My own firm utilizes a proprietary cloud-based platform to optimize savings and determine any given project’s bankability. By automating the process and creating a marketplace for hosts, installers and investors, we have successfully brought new capital into a once stagnant market.
This underserved market is driving a new boom in solar. According to the 2015 Solar Investment Index, for example, a staggering 83 percent of investors will make an investment in solar a priority in the next five years, with one in five already having made commercial solar investment a priority in the same timeframe.
A Bright Future
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the new boom in solar lies in the innovation and disruptive nature of tech bringing down the cost of capital required to make more solar projects possible, as well as simplifying the entire design and sales cycle.
This is true of both markets. Homeowners have been able to reap the joys of lower electricity costs while ensuring a positive impact on the environment, and now the small and medium-sized business market is starting to enjoy similar benefits.
Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow is a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology.
This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Don’t see the technology that you would like to learn? Submit a suggestion to inthetechknow@managedsolution.com and we will be sure to cover it in our upcoming webcast series.
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Scott Harris joined the Managed Solution team as a Senior Systems Engineer on May 20, 2015. He was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and grew up on the peninsula in Redwood City. Scott attended Sequoia High School, which offered the first computer programming class in district history. He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's computer science program in 1978 and moved back to the Bay Area to work in the burgeoning computer industry a few years later. In 1985, Scott landed a job at NASA/Ames Research Center's National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Comples (NFAC), one of the largest wind-tunnel research facilities in the world. PDP-11/70 front-end systems running RMS and VAX/VMS post-processing systems were used there. Booting the PDP-11 was done by flipping a row of paddle switches on the front of the computer chassis in the bit-pattern for the boot-address. These computer systems filled two rooms, along with the controls for the wind tunnel mechanical equipment. Scott worked at NASA for 11 years as a software support engineer, and later developed a wind-tunnel data acquisition and analysis program on the Mac using the LabView graphical programming language.
In the early 1990's Scott came down to San Diego to present a paper on his LabView Data Acquisition System (LDAS) at the IEEE Conference. He fell in love with San Diego, and in 1996 relocated his family for a job at Qualcomm. He worked at Qualcomm in the networking department as a software developer writing web-based and backend reporting tools for internal customers in Java and Perl. Eventually, Qualcomm began to favor 3rd party software over in-house developed code, and Scott assumed the role of application engineer, writing smaller integration software to tailor the 3rd party products to suit Qualcomm's custom requirements. Authentication, Monitoring (including SCOM) and Application Performance Management servers were his main areas of expertise.
During this time Scott was an avid bicyclist, commuting 25 miles per day for several years. He is also an accomplished musician, playing several instruments including guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. His current favorite instrument is the harmonica because it is so portable. He wrote a book on the harmonica at http://www.theharpguy.com. Scott also enjoys playing craps. He has written several simulation programs to test his systems. The results of these prove that there is no such thing as a winning system, only ones that let you lose money more slowly. Scott rarely travels, but he did spend a summer in Mexico as an exchange student, and 3 weeks in Turkey in 2010 for his honeymoon.
In 2015, after 19+ years at Qualcomm, Scott's position at Qualcomm was eliminated and this led to Scott's timely and fortunate new association with Managed Solution. "I felt at home immediately, here, and truly appreciate the special opportunity to work with such a talented and experienced group of engineers, support staff and managers," says Scott.
Please join us in welcoming Scott Harris to the Managed Solution team!
At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people - CAREERS
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Managed Solution welcomed Jacob Salisbury as a Technical Support Representative on Monday, August 10, 2015. Jacob has several years experience working in the IT field and joins us with a background in designing and installing energy management controls. He also has experience interfacing between analog and digital technologies and working with wireless protocols and in a strictly command line basis using Gentoo Linux.
Scott Harris joined the Managed Solution team as a Senior Systems Engineer on May 20, 2015. He was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and grew up on the peninsula in Redwood City. Scott attended Sequoia High School, which offered the first computer programming class in district history. He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's computer science program in 1978 and moved back to the Bay Area to work in the burgeoning computer industry a few years later. In 1985, Scott landed a job at NASA/Ames Research Center's National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Comples (NFAC), one of the largest wind-tunnel research facilities in the world. PDP-11/70 front-end systems running RMS and VAX/VMS post-processing systems were used there. Booting the PDP-11 was done by flipping a row of paddle switches on the front of the computer chassis in the bit-pattern for the boot-address. These computer systems filled two rooms, along with the controls for the wind tunnel mechanical equipment. Scott worked at NASA for 11 years as a software support engineer, and later developed a wind-tunnel data acquisition and analysis program on the Mac using the LabView graphical programming language.
