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GET Conference 2010 and the Personal Genome Project

Today was the first meeting of the GET Conference here in Cambridge.  The GET Conference has brought together a unique group of genomics experts, investors and business leaders.  A fantastic small setting lead to limited presentations and a large amount of collaboration and discussion.  Dramatically lower costs for genome sequencing are going to change our lives in myriads of ways.  Today's conference was a creative event discussing concepts ranging from personalized medicine to better disease forecasting.

You can share in this event by seeing the interview with Harvard Professor George Church.  Professor Church is a Professor of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School , Director of the Center for Computational Genetics, and the founder of the Personal Genome Project.  The PGP team created today's event.

Also worth watching is this interview with the Christophe McLeod CEO of 454 Life Sciences talk about new low cost and high speed genome sequencing machines.  Fox Business News covered the event and recorded both of these interviews today. 

OHO is proud to be part of the team that developed  this creative and thought provoking day.

 

Ed Hastings
Apr 27, 2010
Today Drupal turns 9 and release version 7 alpha!

Drupal celebrates its 9th birthday today on January 15th.  Congratulations to Drupal creator and software visionary Dries Buytaert!  And what better way to celebrate the birthday of new software than to add a new release.  Today is also marks the official release of Version 7 Alpha 1.  9 years, 7 versions, and millions of users are quite a remarkable achievement.

We regularly see the power and efficiency that Drupal brings to website design and development projects.  Combining web content management, social networking, and work flow management Drupal is a great tool for many business needs.  It also is quite flexible as we've found out as we've been adding mapping and GIS functionality to social communities.  Drupal gives us a great productivity boost and gives our clients an easy to maintain and enhance website.

So Happy Birthday Drupal!  We're looking forward to another 9 years and seeing you turn 18!

Ed Hastings
Jan 15, 2010
Drupal
10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Website

One of the concerns I most often hear from clients about their websites is "how can I make them more effective?" Well to help out we've put together a list of common items that are quick wins and can help improve almost any website.  This blog post is a sneak preview of these top 10 ideas.  Over the new few months we'll be discussing these in more detail in a series of seminars and white papers. 

10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Website.

  1. Write meaningful page headlines.
    It’s great for visitors and search engine optimization.
  2. Set-up Google Analytics.
    It’s free (!) and tells you how people found your site and what they did.
  3. Take an hour to read your site and update inaccurate information.
    People expect websites to be the most current information source.
  4. Delete 10 pages to remove clutter and out-of-date information.
    You’ll feel better knowing your site is accurate.
  5. Claim your organization on Yelp, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
    Put up some basic information so people find you on social networks.
  6. Cut your word count down to 400 words per page.
    Separating different ideas onto different pages helps people to search and to browse.
  7. Write a sub-head for every 2-3 sentences.
    It makes the page easy to skim and scan – people are in a hurry these days.
  8. Add maps, videos, and pictures to pages.
    The web is primarily a visual medium.
  9. Start online search engine advertising.
    Drive some new traffic to your site at any budget level.
  10. Create an XML site map for search engines.
    It’s not as hard as it sounds and it improves search rankings.

If you'd like a printed card of these ideas or  have questions or comments feel free to send me an email.

Ed Hastings
Sep 25, 2009
Search Engine Marketing, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Website
Drupal Momentum Builds - Acquia Adds 200 Customers in 6 Months.

Congratulations to Acquia, the commercial Drupal support company, for adding 200 new customers over the past 6 months.  That brings them to over 250 customers in less than a year!  Quite a feat at anytime but certainly impressive in today's economy.  

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert gives some insight on his blog and there is also a company press release from Acquia. 

As a veteran of of many content management system (CMS) implementations over the  past dozen years these facts from the press release just jump out at me:

  • Over 400,000 active Drupal sites
  • Over 4,000 contributed modules backed by thousands of active developers
  • Nearly 60,000 downloads of Acquia Drupal, Acquia’s distribution of Drupal

These are astounding numbers that are driven by a very powerful product which jumps beyond the CMS category in many ways..  At OHO we work quite a bit with both Drupal and Acquia and one of most impressive parts of Drupal is how it can be powerful both business users and advanced developers.  It is a powerful building block for marketing and content driven websites.

Ed Hastings
Aug 11, 2009
Drupal
Digital Economy Fact Book - Tenth Edition

Where do you go for good research and data about the internet?  Do you need to know about the number of users online, the number of websites, trends in social media?

"The Digital Economy Fact Book" is a great resource.  Now in its 10th edition it is rich with charts, graphs, and facts.  All organized into interesting chapters.  What makes this book quite a gem though is the thorough reference and citations.  A fantastic starting point to follow up and find the latest details and updates from the original sources.

A great find and book to keep on your digital bookshelf.

Ed Hastings
Aug 10, 2009
Mark Logic User Conference 2009

I'm at the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference in San Francisco.  For those not familar with the company, Mark Logic provides a software platform that combines an XML database, search engine, and application server.  It is a powerful, and exteremly fast, platform for building content rich applications that combine  structured and unstructured data into a single user experience.

The first day started with "The Wisdom of Crowds" author James Surowiecki speaking on how collaboration that follows certain practices can consistently generate results "better than the smartest person in the room."  He also described some interesting software applications that various companies have used to improve results using these techniques.

Wrapping up the day was discussion on the Google Book Project and the Copyright Settlement between MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg and Dan Clancy who leads the Google Book Search Project.  The discussion was actually too brief for me, Dan hinted at some data they have showing how Book Search keeps active titles selling at higher levels than is typical.  How making data searchable generates better book sales or other revenue would be an outstanding stand alone session.

Mark Logic also showed off some new features of the upcoming 4.1 release and discussed cloud computing and social networking.  They tied those 3 topics nicely together with a demonstration application that mines Twitter data called Tweet Explorer.  Tweet Explorer is running in the Amazon EC3 cloud system.  You can follow the conference using Tweet Explorer here:  http://tweetexplorer.marklogic.com/search?q=mluc09%20sort:time  They built that app in about 5 hours using some of the version 4.1 tools – quite impressive.

If you want more follow the conference blog:  http://marklogic-userconference.tumblr.com.
 

Ed Hastings
May 12, 2009
Mark Logic
AddictionAnswers.com 2009 Webby Honoree

Congratulations to OHO client Massachusetts General Hospital for being a 2009 Webby Award Honoree.  Micro site Addiction Answers won the Webby Award in the Health Category.  Addiction Answers was created by MGH, cause media, and OHO Interactive to support The Addiction Recovery Management Service (ARMS) at MGH which specializes in supporting teenagers and young adults between the ages of 15 and 25, and their families, as they deal with their substance-related problems. 

The website was designed and built to meet the needs of young adults, school professionals, and parents.  It makes the expert advice and research of MGH available to a wide audience through the use of compelling testimonials, accessible research information, and topical videos. 

With other honorees in the 2009 Health category included the BBC, American Heart Associations's Go Red for Women, and Prevention.com it is great to see this important initiative of MGH highlighted in such good company.  A complete list is availabe here.

The Webby Awards are the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web's infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities.

 

 

Ed Hastings
Apr 15, 2009
Awards, Education, Mission Driven
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