Trend Spotting
Catherine Russo Cobb • catcobb@mac.com catcobb@mac.com
Ellyn M. Angelotti is the interactivity editor at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg (www.poynter.org), where she teaches and writes about social networking, innovations in multimedia development and how news organizations interact with users.
Angelotti belongs to all the hot networks: AIM, del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, Linkedin, Twitter. The proliferation of online networks, she says, is one of many ways technology is changing the way we communicate.
“Today’s technology has allowed for extending the life of the news. Reading is now just the beginning of the life cycle as readers are inspired to bring in new content,” she says.
For instance, she cites the example of how a personal trainer in Sarasota took the first published picture of the airplane that went down in New York’s Hudson River last winter.
”These things are occurring not only because of the new technologies such as digital cameras, iPhones and the like, but because the technologies are now affordable to the average person. The end result is we are we are seeing the general public doing acts of journalism,” she says.
This has the potential to promote journalism and give it promise for the future, she says, but the need for quality journalists is still very important.
“The challenge is that the general public sometimes mistakenly judges things as journalism that often are not.” The downsizing of news outlets, she says, is partly the poor economy, partly the changing business model. “News organizations are being forced to rethink their business strategies. Consumers are doing things like blogging for free, and Craigslist has taken away a lot of the classifieds. We need to figure out ways to make money,” she says.
More Than a Milk Carton
A web site database of missing and unidentified persons has its roots in Largo. It’s called NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), and it was launched through the efforts of Largo-based National Forensic Science Technology Center (NFSTC) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). NamUs (www.namus.gov) is a national repository for missing and unidentified person records searchable by anyone, says Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the NFSTC.
“It used to be all grassroots research and local coroners sharing what information they had, but now we have a public searchable database with DNA, fingerprints, jewelry, and other data all in one place,” says Lothridge.
Lothridge says that with an estimated 100,000 active missing per-sons cases and more than 40,000 sets of human remains not yet identified, NamUs is a valuable tool for investigating officers.
“Go to our web site and watch the six-minute missing persons video. If that does not bring home the point on how powerful this can be, just think about how someone with a missing loved one must feel,” he says.
Moving, Changing Body Parts Co.
SynDaver Labs used to be based in Sarasota and have the some-what awkward name of Animal Replacement Technologies. Now the re-named company, founded in 2005, is based in Tampa. It designs and manufactures synthetic human tissues and body parts for medical device tests, clinical task training, surgical simulation and military product development, says company president and founder Dr.Christopher Sakezles.
The name “SynDaver” was put into use in 2008.
“The reasons for the change were marketing-related. ‘SynDaver’ is a clever combination of the words ‘synthetic’ and ‘cadaver,’ so the new name provides a more concise description of what we are all about. It is also shorter, easier to say and write, and translates into a more usable web address,” says Sakezles.
The move was partially because Sakezles wanted to be closer to his hometown of Tampa, and for collaboration with the University of South Florida and Tampa General Hospital.
Who needs the stuff SynDaver (www.syndaver.com) makes? Sakezles says medical device developers do for a host of reasons: it provides a cost-effective platform for collecting test data in an environment that mimics human anatomy; it simulates the physical properties of living tissue;
it is reproducible and repeatable; it is free of biohazards and free of the overhead and hassles related to animal studies.
Next up for SynDaver: replicating the entire human body. “We are close but aren’t there yet,” Sakezles says.
The company’s 30 employees are split between Tampa and three Manatee County locations, and operations are fully fund-ed out of its cash flow and infused by small private offerings, says Sakezles, a mechanical engineer and polymer scientist.
New Methods
Sarasota’s MethodFactory has been certified for Micro-soft’s SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) program. Founded in 2000, MethodFactory provides software design, development and integration services to mid-market commercial and government clients. SharePoint is Microsoft’s portal server gaining popularity among businesses.
Steve Walter, MethodFactory’s SharePoint practice manager, says the product is a great portal product for collaboration and organization, but a complicated one.
“Microsoft realizes effective planning is one of the best ways to ensure SharePoint deployment success and user adoption,” he says, “so they developed the SDPS program, which enables partners to provide SharePoint planning and deployment services to clients at no cost.”
SharePoint certification is a good move for this company (www.methodfactory.com) says Walter. “Share Point does a lot of things but because it does, it is a challenge for some companies to get their arms around it. Microsoft certified us and funded us to do the work for the benefit of the customer. It increases the number of customers using it and licensing it.”
Tech FYI
The Tampa Bay Technology Forum (www.tbtf.org) rolled out a You-Tube channel to allow members to become familiar with what the organization offers and current initiatives…Tampa’s Connectwise (www.connectwise.com) announced a partnership with peer group organization Heartland Tech Group (www.htgpeergroups.com) … Largo’s STAR Technology Enterprise Center (www.startecflorida.com) chose Sarasota-based Tracer Pro as the winner of its Innovation ’09 Poster Session. As the winner, Tracer Pro won a half-day strategic planning retreat from Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College.
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