GSA Technology Council

Facebook and Intel Corporation will work together to optimize Facebook’s hardware and software as the company builds out its datacenter infrastructure.  Facebook plans to deploy thousands of Intel Xeon processor-based servers over the next year to help scale rapid global expansion and meet processing needs of the company’s increasingly rich media applications that span videos, music, photos and more.

To maximize the return on this infrastructure investment, Facebook and Intel have signed a collaboration agreement that focuses on technology evaluation, benchmarking and optimization of software for Intel architecture. Intel will work to address Facebook’s processing needs through assessment of various chipset and server platform configurations, delivery of the most energy efficient processors and allocation of software engineering to evaluate ways to harness the optimal performance from Facebook’s servers.

“We are pleased to expand our relationship with Intel,” said Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of Technical Operations at Facebook. ”Intel has demonstrated that the performance of their systems can help Facebook scale our infrastructure and continue to deliver the best experience to users around the world.”

“Intel is excited to engage with Facebook as they are a dynamic force in the evolution of the Internet,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. “Facebook’s selection of Intel Xeon processors for their next round of infrastructure growth is a testament to the performance, energy efficiency and technology benefits Intel can provide.”

Over the past several months, Facebook rigorously tested and benchmarked a number of server platforms and scenarios, and ultimately selected the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series for its round of new deployments that begin in July.

“When you are responsible for providing a fast, high-quality experience to more than 90 million people worldwide, every ounce of efficiency matters,” Heiliger said. “Intel’s Xeon processors play a critical role in achieving our infrastructure efficiency.”

Both companies envision that the collaboration may benefit not only Facebook, but ideally the Web 2.0 industry at-large. Intel plans to work with Facebook to evaluate ways to improve its software performance on Intel-based servers. Intel has a wealth of software engineering expertise as well as such tools as Intel VTune™ and Intel Thread Checker to help companies improve application performance on multi-core Intel processors. Since Facebook’s applications are mostly built on open source technologies, the companies believe that some of the insights from this collaboration may be contributed back to the open source community, benefiting other companies that use similar underlying technologies.

via Intel and Facebook

GE Energy has received a contract of more than $500 million to supply equipment to power the world’s largest aluminum processing complex at a single site. The Emirates Aluminum (EMAL) production facility is located close to the Arabian Gulf near Al Taweelah, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Using natural gas as its primary fuel, the power plant will feature Frame 9FA gas turbines, C7 steam turbines, heat recovery steam generators and condensers, allprovided by GE Energy.

When phase one of the project is complete, the site will have an installed capacity of more than 2,000 megawatts of electricity to be used in the production of 700,000 tons of aluminum per annum. Total production capacity during phase two will reach 1.4 million tons of aluminum, providing an example of technological advancement in the UAE as well as a cornerstone for the ongoing development of the region’s industrial sector.

“Gulf states including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman are investing billions of dollars to build smelters, utilizing the region’s abundant and relatively inexpensive natural gas as a primary source for power generation,” said Joseph Anis, GE Energy’s region executive for the Middle East. “EMAL’s world class, green-field complex will set new standards for the aluminum industry in the Middle East.”

“Over the past year we have seen a growing number of opportunities in the Middle East and worldwide where we can apply our gas turbine technology for projects where the power is primarily used by our customers for industrial processes,” Anis added. “The EMAL project illustrates our ongoing commitment to supply gas turbines with the reliability and flexibility to meet the demands of these applications.”

SNC- Lavalin of Canada and Worley Parsons of Australia have formed a joint partnership to serve as the engineering, procurement and construction management contractors for the project.

“This project is a cornerstone of the enhanced industrial sector that is planned to help pursue Abu Dhabi’s vision for a diverse and sustainable economy,” said Duncan Hedditch, CEO of EMAL. “The companies supporting this project, such as GE, all have solid records for implementing successful projects in the past.”

In addition to benefiting the UAE economy, EMAL is committed to the environment and making sure the production facility meets environmental standards set by the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency.

The EMAL project further expands GE Energy’s growing presence in Abu Dhabi and the region. “The Middle East is one of the most important growth areas for GE Energy in the world today,” noted Anis. “Since the end of 2006, we have announced more than $4 billion in projects across the region.”

GE Energy has been active in the Middle East since the 1930s, and today has regional offices in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt, along with local service centers in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. The company also has opened power plant offices in the region to oversee local projects.

Emirates Aluminum is a joint venture between Dubai Aluminum Company Limited and Mubadala Development Company and was established in February 2007 to construct the world’s largest, single-site aluminum production facility.

via GE

Collexis Holdings Inc., developer of high definition search and knowledge discovery software, announced today that its premier professional scientific social networking site, Biomedexperts.com, has more than 30,000 registered users, enabling researchers across organizations and around the globe to collaborate more efficiently and effectively.

In April Collexis implemented the first phase of their marketing campaign and since that time BiomedExperts’ user registrations have skyrocketed from 2,000 to more than 30,000. BiomedExperts.com is a collaborative agreement with Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences. Through this initiative, Dell is providing the hardware and continued marketing support for the site and Collexis is contributing knowledge discovery and text mining applications.

“The success of BiomedExperts.com is a testament to the role innovative technology can play in enabling researchers to collaborate and drive meaningful scientific discoveries,” said James Coffin, Ph.D., vice president and general manager, Dell Health Care and Life Sciences. “The possibilities are tremendous when scientists of varying disciplines work together on a similar goal, and in this connected era bringing research communities together through technology can have real and significant impact on scientific discoveries and ultimately patient care.”

Pre-populated with over 1.5 million Pub-Med-based expert profiles, BiomedExperts allows scientists and researchers to directly connect with and explore their own professional contacts, grow their networks and identify researchers with the expertise needed for future collaborations. Through user-friendly search interfaces, potential research collaborators can share data and collaborate with professionals from more than 1,800 organizations and institutions from 137 countries, totaling more than 21 million connections made through the site.

“It’s exciting to see how this tool is paving the way for researchers to grow their professional networks and connect with professionals in the scientific research community,” said Bill Kirkland, CEO of Collexis Holdings, Inc. “And now, with more than 30,000 registered users, we hope the collaborative opportunities will continue to increase rapidly, furthering our mission to provide scientists and researchers with the tools they need to help advance medical science, thereby improving the greater good.”

via Collexis

KEMET Corporation announced today that it will rationalize certain corporate staff and manufacturing support functions to further reduce costs and achieve its financial goals.  Approximately 640 employees will be affected as a result of this action.  The salaried workforce affected represents approximately 12% of the Company’s salaried workforce.

The Company expects to reduce its support costs by approximately $24 million in the remainder of the current fiscal year (approx. $36 million on a full-year basis), and will accrue a severance expense of approximately $20 million, primarily in the quarter ended September 2008.  Approximately 200 employees will be affected in the Company’s U.S. operations, with the balance at various facilities within Europe, Mexico and Asia.

“It is imperative that we match our support costs to the condition of our current market environment,” said Per Loof, KEMET’s Chief Executive Officer. “The actions we are taking today are painful and difficult for the KEMET family.  However, we must minimize our costs at the support level while maintaining world-class service, product innovation, and quality to successfully compete in our market and reach our goals.  We are fully committed to executing our strategies, which are designed to return KEMET to profitability and create shareholder value,” continued Loof.

via KEMET

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the immediate availability of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 software, a photographer’s toolbox for managing, adjusting and presenting large volumes of digital photographs. With new enhancements such as dual-monitor support, radical advances in non-destructive localized image correction, and streamlined search capabilities, Lightroom 2 is aa upgrade intended to simplify photography from shoot to finish. As Adobe’s first application to support 64-bit for Mac OS X 10.5 Macintosh computers with Intel processors and Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit operating systems, Lightroom 2 also provides improved memory performance for dealing with large scale images.

“A worldwide community of photographers provided valuable insight and feedback, as part of the Lightroom 2 public beta program, ultimately helping us deliver a better product,” said Tom Hogarty, senior product manager for Lightroom and Camera Raw at Adobe. “We’ve considered their requests which helped us develop useful features that make it easier than ever for our customers to quickly refine, enhance and present brilliant photographs.”

The Library module in Lightroom 2 helps streamline and accelerate photographers’ workflows. With the ability to visually organize images across multiple hard drives, Lightroom 2 and its Library Filter Bar makes it easy for users to quickly find the images they need. The Suggested Keywords feature helps photographers keyword their images by making intelligent suggestions based on their own previous efforts. New dual-monitor support allows users to expand their workspace, giving them flexibility to edit and organize images in a way that maximizes an additional display.

In the Develop module, the new Local Adjustment Brush lets photographers fine-tune specific areas of an image to precisely adjust color, exposure and tonal range without affecting other areas of the image. The new Graduated Filter expands the toolbox in Lightroom, allowing for edits to larger areas by applying gradually diminishing or increasing adjustment effects such as exposure, clarity, and saturation, alone, or in any combination. Lightroom 2 also helps photographers print more efficiently by quickly arranging photos of multiple sizes on one or many pages with flexible and customizable templates to maximize paper and ink. Intelligent algorithms automatically determine optimal sharpening for screen or print, producing crisper images faster.

New raw technology gives photographers access to flexible camera profiles. Camera profiles are the visual starting point for the raw processing workflow, but image preferences vary for every photographer. To minimize surprises, Adobe is supplying default camera profiles that closely emulate the visual looks that photographers are used to seeing from their favorite camera, while also providing the ability to create highly customized profiles to suit different tastes. Camera profiles are available for immediate download on Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com) for use with Lightroom 2 and Camera Raw 4.5, along with the DNG Profile Editor for the community to test and create their own profiles.

via Adobe

At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit today, leaders from Microsoft Research outlined their vision for how Microsoft Corp. and academics can collaborate on research projects to develop technological breakthroughs that will define computing and scientific research in the years ahead.

Speaking to more than 400 faculty members from leading research institutions worldwide, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s External Research Division, emphasized the role his group plays not only in supporting specific collaborative research projects, but also in improving the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology and interoperability. Toward that end, Hey announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle. He also discussed collaborative initiatives intended to unlock the potential of multicore computing.

In the area of scholarly communication, Hey said, “Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers — with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We’re supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs.”

Microsoft researchers partnered with academia throughout the development of these tools to obtain input on the application of technology to the needs of the academic community, while Microsoft product groups submitted feedback on how the company’s technology could optimally address the entire research process. The collective efforts resulted in the first wave of many tools designed to support academics across the scholarly communication life cycle.

The free tools now available include:

• Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.

• The Microsoft e-Journal Service. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals

• Research Output Repository Platform. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.

• The Research Information Centre. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process.

All these tools are now available at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx

via Microsoft

Collexis Holdings Inc., a developer of semantic search and knowledge discovery software, announced today that it has contracted with Balan Biomedical, Inc., a medical and consumer health intelligence company, to provide its Collexis Mediator product for the organization to support market research and trend analysis in the field of biotechnology. Balan will use the software as a research and analysis tool to identify and track clinical needs, which will facilitate consumer health research and clinical analytics.

Collexis Mediator offers researchers a meaningful and efficient means of finding information by operating as an advanced text-mining tool and enables the end user to track scientific trends as well as conduct in-depth assessment of a given field of scientific investigation. Along with advanced document search and semantic analysis capabilities, Collexis Mediator is linked to a biomedical-expertise repository of over one million scientists, the profiles of each expert being based on scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals.

“We are pleased that Balan has chosen Collexis to support its market research and consulting in the field of biotechnology,” said Jon Lieberman, general manager, government and enterprise worldwide for Collexis. “This is an example of how Collexis’ technology can be used for more than academic research and fundamental research and discovery, but also for commercial use. The software allows an analyst to scour the market and pinpoint and monitor competition, as well as uncover targets for acquisition. We are excited about this announcement and hope this is the beginning of a lasting partnership.”

Balan Biomedical is working with Collexis developers to create its own analytic algorithm to conduct trend analysis based on data that is compiled through the software. By identifying areas of clinical interest, tracking clinical needs and trending what is happening with biomedical literature, Balan mitigates risk and leads to dramatic improvements in patient health through its innovative method that combines clinical needs forecasting, technology scouting, resource discovery and market assessment and evaluation.

Chief Executive Officer of Balan Biomedical Elisabeth Hager remarked, “We chose Collexis after conducting lots of research; we thought about building our own (text-mining tool), but were excited to learn that one with such impressive technology was already built. Collexis supports our business model nicely and we are very impressed with the level and quality of work—I anticipate Balan will incorporate more Collexis technology and products to support our market research and analytics in the future.”

via Collexis

American Media Services Interactive announces the naming of Martin Quessenberry as Chief Technology Officer and additions to the Online Development Team he will oversee. The team will create and support all initiatives involving the company’s interactive properties as well as Internet projects.

“I am thrilled to have Martin aboard to direct our online initiatives,” said Charles Andrew Whatley, President of AMSi. “His unique skill set and perspectives will be an invaluable asset in building out our digital platform.”

Quessenberry spent the past 11 years with the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL as Director of New Media. He was instrumental in development of the team’s overall brand and web presence. He also served as the team club site supervisor for the NHL in New York.

Joining Martin on the Online Development Team are web veterans Keith De-Lin and John Slattery. With over ten years of experience in web development including multimedia presentations, flash development and various animations for such clients as Tampa Bay Lightning, St. Pete Times Forum, 3Com, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Symantec, Keith De-Lin will serve as Director of New Media. John Slattery, who joins the team as Director of On-Line Programming, brings 12 years of experience in online application development, and web 2.0 community portals for such clients as Colliers Arnold International, Tampa Bay Lightning and The Village.

“The addition of Martin, Keith and John to the AMSi online development team is yet another example of our commitment to provide the highest quality of creative and technical solutions and support for the clients of AMSi worldwide,” said Whatley.

via AMSi

Zimbra, a Yahoo! company in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software, has announced the release of Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop Beta. Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop gives everyone access to a simple, centralized place to manage work, school and personal e-mail even when they are not connected to the Internet. Through internet protocol support called Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Gmail can now be accessed offline at the same time, from the same place. Additionally, Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop allows users to use the iCal standard to take their calendar offline.

“Zimbra is focused on creating communication and collaboration solutions that ease the pain points of traditional e-mail, and switching between multiple e-mail accounts is one of the communication headaches that users encounter on a daily basis,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president. “With Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, we have taken our world-class collaboration suite and made it available for everyone for use anywhere, anytime, with any email account.”

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop gives users access to the same sleek Zimbra experience, and showcases the latest technologies that have until now only been available via Web-based applications including:

• “Mash-ups” with other services; for example, when viewing an e-mail, users can see their schedule by hovering over a date, or see the status of a flight by looking at a flight number
• Powerful search that can quickly scan a user’s e-mail and pull up relevant content
• Built-in organization capabilities including automatically converting e-mails into conversations and advanced tagging
• Advanced calendaring that gives users access to their most important appointments and schedule even when they are on the go

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop also includes a number of features designed to help users stay organized, such as document creation, spreadsheets, task management and document storage, giving users a robust alternative to other desktop applications. New features include online and offline access to

• Zimbra Documents, a document and spreadsheet program, which gives users the ability to embed complex objects such as photos into documents and spreadsheets. With the addition of Zimbra Documents, Zimbra Desktop users can easily create and edit documents and simple spreadsheets without having to switch between desktop programs or e-mail large attachments
• Zimbra Briefcase, which allows users to upload, store, and conveniently access any files including spreadsheets, documents, presentations and others. Instead of keeping all attachments in e-mail you can simply store them in the same place with Zimbra Briefcase, and access them from anywhere, online or offline
• Zimbra Tasks, a task management system which allows users to manage to-do lists simply and easily by monitoring start and due dates, priority, progress and percent complete

via Zimbra and Yahoo!

Earlier this week Verizon Wireless released results from its 2008 “Big City Wireless Use” study, revealing that South Carolina has experienced a large increase in text messaging among the company’s customers.  The study showed a nearly 500 percent increase in text messaging use in South Carolina over a two year period between April 2006 and April 2008.

Greenville earned South Carolina’s number one spot for sent text messages in the study.  In April of this year Greenville Verizon Wireless customers sent and received nearly 116 million text messages, a huge increase compared to the 19 million two years ago in 2006. 

The purpose of Verizon Wireless’ “Big City Wireless Use” study is to provide both the industry and customers with data on mobile phone use trends throughout the country.

via Verizon Wireless