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Tasktop nabs $100M to turn DevOps metrics into visualizations at scale

April 8, 2021 Big Data

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Value stream management (VSM) platform Tasktop today announced that it raised $ 100 million, bringing its total raised to over $ 129 million. The company says it plans to use the funding to accelerate growth while expanding the size of its customer base.

As traditional businesses pour billions into digital transformation initiatives, they often struggle with the complexity of the teams, tools, and metrics at the core of those investments. Technical leaders deeply understand the software development process and business leaders know the investment strategies, but the two aren’t always aligned. In a study, Geneca found that 75% of executives surveyed admitted that their projects were either “always” or “usually” doomed right from the start.

Vancouver, Canada-based Tasktop, which was founded in 2007, offers a VSM platform designed to reduce time to market and increase the velocity of software development. Sitting above the software development toolchain, Tasktop integrates with software development tools like Jira Software, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, and more to allow organizations to see potential blockers.

VSM was born out of the frustration that most enterprises aren’t adequately adaptive. According to Forrester, only 16% say that they can release software more than once a month. For Tasktop’s part, the company asserts that VSM allows organizations to break down silos as well as identify and remove bottlenecks, eliminate waste, and accelerate delivery.

Tasktop’s platform overlays the value stream to provide abstractions, visualizations, and diagnostics that measure all types of software delivery work. Connectors let customers send work between different dev tools, eliminating duplicate data entry and automating traceability. And Tasktop’s testing regimen runs 500,000 tests daily over 300 tool versions to ensure they work properly, handling tooling and API changes to minimize outages and delays.

Coinciding with the new funding, Tasktop this morning launched a dashboard within its Tasktop Viz product — VSM Portfolio Insights — that rolls up analytics generated at the individual product value stream level to the executive plane. The dashboard presents consolidated insights into the performance, quality, value, and impact of delivery, including:

The progress of the shift from project to product-based IT
The ability to respond rapidly to the market
The business processes capable of acceleration
The value creation and value protection areas currently lacking appropriate
investment

Since the birth of VSM, the market category has grown exponentially compared with the longer-tail development of agile and DevOps. The expansion speaks for itself with players like ServiceNow, IBM, Digital.ai, and of course Tasktop joining the fray. Last December, Tasktop announced record year-over-year growth with a 30% uptick in both revenue and customers. The company now claims to serve leading brands, including over half of the Fortune 100.

Sumeru Equity Partners led Tasktop’s latest funding round, a strategic investment. Management and existing investors also participated.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Transforming Big Data into Actionable Intelligence

March 23, 2021 Sisense

Attempting to learn more about the role of big data (here taken to datasets of high volume, velocity, and variety) within business intelligence today, can sometimes create more confusion than it alleviates, as vital terms are used interchangeably instead of distinctly. However, when investigating big data from the perspective of computer science research, we happily discover much clearer use of this cluster of confusing concepts.

Before we dive into the topics of big data as a service and analytics applied to same, let’s quickly clarify data analytics using an oft-used application of analytics: Visualization!

Looking at the diagram, we see that Business Intelligence (BI) is a collection of analytical methods applied to big data to surface actionable intelligence by identifying patterns in voluminous data. As we move from right to left in the diagram, from big data to BI, we notice that unstructured data transforms into structured data. The implication is that methods of data analytics are applied to big data, the methods of data preparation and data mining for example, to bring us closer and closer to the goal of distilling useful patterns, knowledge, and intelligence that can drive actions in the right hands.

Hopefully this clarifies these complex concepts and their place in the larger analytics process, even though it’s common to see pundits and outlets tout BI or big data as if they were ends in themselves.

AI-driven analytics is a complex field: The bottom line is that datasets of all kinds are rapidly growing, causing these organizations to investigate big data reporting tools or even approach companies whose whole business model can be summed up as “big data as a service” in order to make sense of them. If you’ve got big data, the right analytics platform or third-party big data reporting tools will be vital to helping you derive actionable intelligence from it. And one of the best ways to implement those tools is to embed third party plugins.

the data journey infographic blog cta banner 770x250 1 Transforming Big Data into Actionable Intelligence

Big data challenges and solutions

When you have big data, what you really want is to extract the real value of the intelligence contained within those possibly-zettabytes of would-be information. To best understand how to do this, let’s dig into the challenges of big data and look at a wave of emerging issues.

For starters, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created immense volumes of new data to be analyzed. IoT sensors on factory floors are constantly streaming data into cloud warehouses and other storage locations.

These rapidly growing datasets present a huge opportunity for companies to glean insights like:

Machine diagnostics, failure forecasting, optimal maintenance, and automatic repair parts ordering. Intelligence derived from these systems can even be fed to HR teams to improve service staffing, which further feeds to enterprise HR management and performance solutions (AI-based analytics reporting to ERP solutions)
Assembled products shipped also feed directly to ERP on updating supply chain solutions, improving customer awareness and experience

To put it bluntly, the challenge we face is that no cloud architecture yet exists which can accommodate and process this big data tsunami. How can we make sense of the data wont fit in the enterprise service bus (ESB)? (ESB is a middleware component of cloud systems which will be overwhelmed if a million factories were to all try to extract intelligence from their sensors all at once.)

One solution with immense potential is ”edge computing.” Referring to the conceptual “edge” of the network, the basic idea is to perform machine learning (ML) analytics at the data source rather than sending the sensor data to a cloud app for processing. Edge computing analytics (like the kind platforms like Sisense can perform) generate actionable insights at the point of data creation (the IoT device/sensor) rather than collecting the data, sending it elsewhere for analysis, then transmitting surfaced intelligence into embedded analytics solutions (eg. displaying BI insights for human users).

The pressure to adopt the edge computing paradigm increases with the number of sensors pouring out data. Edge computing solutions in conjunction with a robust business intelligence big data program (bolstered by an AI-empowered analytics platform) are a huge step forward for companies dealing with these immense amounts of fast-moving and remote data.

Big data analytics case study: SkullCandy

SkullCandy, a constant innovator in the headset and earbud space, leverages its big data stores of customer data regarding reviews and warranties to improve its products over time. In a twist on typical analytics, SkullCandy uses Sisense and other data utilities to dig through mountains of customer feedback, which is all text data. This is an improvement over previous processes, wherein SkullCandy focused on more straightforward performance forecasting with transactional analysis.

Now that SkullCandy has established itself as a data driven company, they are experimenting with additional text analytics that can extract insights from reviews of their products on Amazon, BestBuy, and their own site. Teams also use text analytics to benchmark their performance against their competitors.

SkullCandy’s big data journey began by building a data warehouse to aggregate their transaction data, reviews. A breakthrough insight/intelligence in product development occurred thanks to the text analysis of warranties through which SkullCandy was able to distinguish between product issues and customer education. The fact that AI-based analytics can delineate between product and education in a text message is groundbreaking. A common pattern was that clients were returning a product as broken when in fact they simply didn’t know how to use bluetooth connectivity.

Data-driven product development also benefitted: Big data analytics allowed SkullCandy to analyze warranty/return data that showed that one of their headsets, which was used more during workouts than previously thought, was being returned at a higher than normal rate. It turned out that sweat was causing corrosion in terminals, leading to the returns. The outcome was to waterproof the product.

Among the many successes SkullCandy achieved, we also see a pattern of value derived from big data.

Big Data as a Service: Empowering users, saving resources

Strictly speaking, “big data analytics” distinguishes itself as the large-scale analysis of fast-moving, complex data. Implicit in this distinction is that big data analytics ingests expansive datasets far beyond the volume of conventional databases, in essence combining advanced analytics with the contents of immense data warehouses or lakes.

In order to get a handle on these huge amounts of possible-information, the AI components of a big data analytics program must necessarily include procedures for inspecting, cleaning, preparing, and transforming data in order to create an optimal data model that will facilitate the discovery of actionable intelligence, identify patterns, suggesting next steps, and supporting decision making at key junctures.

Intelligence drawn from big data has real potential to transform the world, from text analysis that reveals customer service issues and product development potential to training financial models to detect fraud or medical systems to detect cancer cells. Savvy businesses will empower users, analysts, and data engineers to prepare and analyze terabyte-scale data from multiple sources — without any additional software, technology, or specialized staff.

Fortunately, it is now possible to leverage all of these potentials and to avoid the cost and time of in-house development, by embedding expert third party analytics. Recognizing the tremendous task of big data analytics in conjunction with the value of outcomes, the natural propensity exists to use it as a service, and thereby reap the benefits of big data as a service as quickly as possible.

big data in healthcare blog cta banner 770x250 1 1 Transforming Big Data into Actionable Intelligence

Chris Meier is a Manager of Analytics Engineering for Sisense and boasts 8 years in the data and analytics field, having worked at Ernst & Young and Soldsie. He’s passionate about building modern data stacks that unlock transformational insights for businesses.

Tags: Big Data | data analytics

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Blog – Sisense

Georgia Congresswoman Gets into Shouting Match on House Floor

January 5, 2021 Humor

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene got in a shouting match with House floor staff when she refused to wear a mask.

The original article was entitled “New GOP Firecracker Marjorie Taylor Greene Just Bulldozed Over Congress and Media Like a Boss”. So, if you read the article, it says that after the shouting match she stormed off the floor. Question: How does any of her behavior qualify as “…Just Bulldozed Over Congress and Media Like a Boss?” As Joe Bribem would say, “Come on, man!” She shouted then stormed off. She accomplished nothing other than grandstanding if she didn’t stand her ground. Maybe grandstanding was her goal, who knows.

I feel the same way about masks, but if I was going to make a stand about them, I would in fact stand my ground. So far, my only stand about masks has been to wear my Plague Doctor mask to the local Sam’s Club and WalMart one time each. I could barely see and gave up my protest. Instead, I got a mask that says, “This mask is as USELESS as my Governor” and now wear it if I’m forced to wear one to buy groceries or go to the doctor.

On a side note, at least she’s hot!

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

Dave Chappelle To Buy Ohio Fire Station And Turn Into Comedy Club

December 25, 2020 Humor

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio (WDTN) – Comedian Dave Chappelle is set to open a comedy club in what was formerly the Miami Township Fire Station.

The Yellow Springs Development Corporation (YSDC) said Monday that they finalized an agreement to sell the fire station to Iron Table Holdings, LLC, owned by Chappelle.

YSDC said the agreement came after a several-month long process during which interested buyers were first asked to submit a preliminary development plan to the YSDC Fire Station Subcommittee.

Interested parties later toured the facility and presented detailed business and architectural plans for the building. The presentations were evaluated on several criteria including job creation, local impact, environmental impact and diversity.

YSDC said Iron Table Holdings, LLC ranked highest in the criterias of profits/wages/taxes, environmental impact, local impact, diversity and COVID-19 considerations.

The agreement is the first community-based transaction the corporation has carried out.

The OWN Channel To Air John Legend Hosted Special Titled ‘Revisiting Underground’

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How Salesforce overcame its pandemic ‘paralysis’ and learned to ‘lean into the change’

December 3, 2020 Big Data

Radically adapting a business with more than 50,000 employees during a pandemic isn’t easy, even for one built specifically for the cloud era. But after almost 9 months, Salesforce has almost completely transformed just about aspect of the way it operates.

According to Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor, that progress came after a slow start that resulted from the belief that any impact of COVID would be short-lived. Once the company shifted its view toward a long-term outlook, it moved swiftly to rethink just about everything and accelerate its internal digital transformation.

“It’s almost embarrassing when you’re a technology company and you encounter a year like this because it shows all the cracks in the foundation,” Taylor said. “All the ways you depended on your office space and all the parts of your business that work digitally…The term that I use for the feeling in March is ‘paralysis.’”

Taylor spoke at the Web Summit, the annual mega-conference which, like most others, was being held virtually for the first time today. In this case, Taylor pre-recorded his interview before Salesforce officially announced its $ 27.7 billion blockbuster acquisition of Slack. But with the global pandemic still raging, topics such as the future of work and digital transformation loomed large on the Web Summit agenda this year.

Despite being a company that helps customers move their operations to the cloud, Salesforce has a very personal, face-to-face culture. That not only includes its signature Dreamforce conference that draws more than 200,000 people each year to San Francisco, but also its day-to-day work that involves lots of travel for sales, marketing, and customer support.

“We’re an event-oriented company,” Taylor said. “We’re always on airplanes to our customers’ offices. And I think it was that sense of unfamiliarity that really led to paralysis, particularly for customer-facing teams that are used to being face-to-face with our customers.”

It wasn’t just meetings. Without realizing it, the company had become reliant on a particular way of doing business. That meant it wasn’t enough to make some tweaks. Everything had to be overhauled.

“Every single function had to change at the same time,” he said. “And you realized where people were dependent on the machinery of a large company. And you need to be personally proactive to do it. If you’re a marketer depending on the standard ways that you generate leads, all of a sudden those channels are not available to you, and the one channel left, which is digital, it’s completely saturated because every company in the world went there overnight.”

To create momentum around changing, Salesforce started doing all-hands meeting every week with all 54,000 employees. The message was for each employee to think about how they could be helping every customer with whatever needs they might have.

“What’s a relevant conversation today is pretty different than it was a few weeks ago, a few months ago,” he said. “It’s about enablement. How can we train every single employee in the new way that they have to work?”

The key, Taylor said, is stripping away all thoughts about how things have been done to that point and imaging how things should be done as if everything was just starting from the beginning.

“That really demands a beginner’s mind and creativity that I don’t think every individual, and every company really has,” Taylor said. “An expert mind knows one possibility. But for the beginner’s mind, everything’s a possibility. And I think in the age of COVID, it’s really multiple crises at the same time: a health crisis, an economic crisis, a social justice crisis, and a leadership crisis in this country. You need to show up and say, ‘Okay I need to reimagine how we do business.’ Our customers know what differentiates us and we’re enabling a digital transformation which is exactly what our customers need at this moment. But how we engage with our customers needed to completely transform.”

The post-COVID world

Looking back, Taylor is amazed by his own company’s transformation. But with vaccines arriving in the coming months, it is possible to imagine life after the pandemic, even if it still may be many months away.

“If you’d asked me last year, ‘Could you run the business from home, with no events?’, I would have laughed at you,” Taylor said. “Not only did we do that, but we also did it with no preparation. What’s really remarkable right now for us and for all of our customers is that it’s proof that this new digital way of working is possible. But that begs the question, ‘How are we going to work on the other side of this when it’s not imposed on us and we’re not stuck in our home offices because we have to be?’”

Taylor echoed observations about how quickly people embraced ordering groceries online and holding meetings by video. In that case, companies will need to rethink how the traditional office works and what functions it serves when the pandemic is over.

“It has proven that this all-digital work anywhere world can work,” he said. “But it does beg the question about what is the role of the office and what is the role of a headquarters?”

Knowing that a company like Salesforce can operate in distribute ways means evaluating all conceptions about the office, like whether to have assigned desks. Or maybe picking one day of the week that everyone comes into the office. Or maybe having more flexible workdays for employees who are parents.

“I’m looking forward to the day where you don’t have the stress of it being imposed on you, and you can really say, ‘How do we treat the lessons of 2020 as an asset that we can use to transform our culture going forward?’” Taylor said.

In evaluating that, companies also have to examine the toll the changes have taken on employees. For instance, Taylor said that with the ability to meet virtually, the number of meetings has soared.

“I think this year is not sustainable for a lot of our employees,” he said. “On average, our employees have 1.7 more hours of meetings on their calendar every day. In June, we surveyed our customers and only 23% of people wanted to return to their office. Today, 72% of people are clamoring for a semblance of normalcy.”

Looking at Salesforce customers, he sees some of the same lessons being learned. Across many markets, he said the smartest leaders have seized this moment to make long-overdue changes.

“I’m really excited across our customer base seeing the leaders who are treating this as an opportunity to transform rather than just a crisis to respond to,” Taylor said. “At the beginning of this pandemic, every CEO I talked to would about the crisis as something that they would weather, something that they would get through, so then on the other side, they could go back to business as usual.”

But the customers who have navigated 2020 the most successfully are the ones who decided to “lean into the change,” Taylor said.

“There was a wonderful quote from the Chief Digital Officer of L’Oreal, where he said something along lines, ‘We accomplished in three months, what would have taken us three years to do,’” Taylor said. “I think that’s the right mentality.”

As for Salesforce events, Taylor is hopeful those will return but has no doubt they will be adapted in some fashion.

“I’m looking forward to welcoming 200,000 people to San Francisco next year, knock on wood, if this vaccine does what we all hope it will do,” Taylor said. “But what we’ve learned how to do to pull off events like the one we’re doing right now. It’s incredibly valuable, you can watch it in a time-shifted way. You can watch it on your own schedule. The two of us didn’t need to travel to have this conversation right now and it probably lowered some of the barriers to us having this conversation. I’ve heard this from many executives. I have conversations with so many CEOs every week. And I wonder if I would have had that same level of conversation if we felt like we had to be in-person to have them. So in general what I hope on the other side of this for our events and our culture broadly is that we embrace what we’ve learned and really augment the way we run the company.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Dynamics Sucess Stories – Supermarket Chain Gets Existing Data into Dynamics 365 Automatically

September 3, 2020 CRM News and Info

⏩ Problem: Getting existing data into Dynamics

⏩ Solution: CB Linked Server – Connect Bridge with the Dynamics 365 connector

⏩ Provider: Connecting Software

⏩ Customer: Iperal Supermercati S.p.a. owns and operates over 40 supermarkets and hypermarkets in Italy.

⏩ “In just a week, we had the solution we had in mind up and running.”

Ing. Filippo Besana (Business Intelligence Specialist & Data Manager at Iperal Supermercati)

The problem – How to Get Data into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Automatically

It all started when Iperal installed a cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution for customer relationship management. They began tracking each contact with a customer in Dynamics. Unfortunately, they soon realized this involved manually inputting the data when it was not already in the system. All this data was entered manually by using the Dynamics web interface. This was very inefficient and time-consuming.

Moreover, customer data was initially stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. What sense did it make to move it manually when there was new or changed data? To make matters worse, several possible reasons caused such changes. First of all, the customers themselves can edit their data at any given moment, using the many channels available to them, namely the mobile application, the web site, and an interface that is available in every shop. Furthermore, every time the customer makes a purchase, other data relating to the customer changes.

Iperal wanted to make sure all these changes went from their Microsoft SQL Server databases to the Customer Service based on Dynamics.

They felt this was the best way to offer quick and full support to customers if they had any issues. The question was how to get the data there in an efficient, automatic way. “We knew we had to fill in the CRM data in another way. We wanted a way to do it efficiently and in real-time, from SQL Server to Dynamics”, Filippo Besana explains.

Looking for an efficient solution

Once their goals were clear, they started what could have been a long quest for the perfect solution… Filippo Besana goes on to tell us their original ideas for this project: “At first, we thought about developing a data import procedure on the CRM side that would be file-based. We would have to build a massive export of modified data to a file like .csv, send it to CRM and run the import on the CRM side. This would take a long time, and it would be expensive. Plus, the final result would not have the real-time performance we wanted.”

Finding Connect Bridge

After considering other ways they could do it themselves, it was on a quick online search that they landed on Connecting Software’s web site and found the D365 / database sync solution based on Connect Bridge. Filippo Besana says they immediately knew Connect Bridge was what we were looking for: “a middleware software that using a linked server could translate all TSQL queries from/to the CRM Webservice, in a way that is transparent to the developer.” They felt they had found the missing puzzle piece.

From that point onwards, everything was straightforward. Iperal asked for a demo and checked if a Connect Bridge linked server could handle the few hundred thousand rows they wanted to input. They moved right on to implementation as soon as they confirmed it did. Their main difficulty ended up being how to connect to a server outside their network. “Dynamics only provides a webserver to interact with from the outside”, Filippo Besana details. Nevertheless, they ended up reaching their goals in a short amount of time.

Lessons learned

Looking back on the project, Filippo Besana is happy with the results. “From the SQL developer point of view, the operational tasks are the same as other heterogeneous databases connected by Linked Server. This kept our development times short”. Moreover, it also meant they reached their first goal.

Moreover, “by using a trigger on the main table, we can update or insert new data in real-time“. This meant that they reached their second goal. The project was successful “we are now very happy with the end result”.

How short was this short amount of time to implement the solution? Filippo Besana reveals that “In just a week, we had the solution we had in mind up and running”.

In this case, Connect Bridge enabled an integration project for getting data into Microsoft Dynamics 365 automatically and in real-time. But, in fact, this is a super flexible integration platform, and it can meet any integration challenge.

“More than ever, we are proud to support our customers and bring trust in times of turbulence.”

Mag. Thomas Berndorfer – CEO of Connecting Software

This might be useful for my company!

Why don’t you start by seeing it in action? Check out the demo video that shows how you can connect Dynamics to your database in SQL Server or your bespoke software, without learning any API and without coding. You’ll use SQL and T-SQL only.

Do you want a personalized demo or an analysis of your specific case? Get in touch with Connecting Software’s experts.

For any questions or feedback, please click on Ask the Author below, and I will help you out.

By Ana Neto, Connecting Software. Connecting Software creates integration and synchronization software. Connecting Software is a 15-year-old company, with 40 employees spread in 4 different countries.

We are also a proud “Top Member 2019″ at CRMSoftwareBlog.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Webinar: Turning Co-op Incentive Funds into Business Growth

August 19, 2020 CRM News and Info

Knowing how and where to utilize incentive funds to fuel your growth strategy can be challenging on its own, yet the tracking and deploying of those funds successfully can take even more time and resources.

Work 365, the customer engagement application built on Dynamics that delivers subscription management and billing automation solutions, can now be purchased through Microsoft co-op incentive funds.

In this webinar, Ismail Nalwala, CEO of Work 365, will discuss the following topics:

How Work 365 helps you claim your co-op incentives.
How to track and grow incentives with Work 365 implementation.
Best practices for unlocking new recurring revenue opportunities through Work 365.

This webinar will take place at 11:00am EST on August 20th, 2020. Reserve your spot HERE.

We hope you can join us!

Work 365 offers a Billing and Subscription application that helps cloud companies archive the necessary requirements and processes to grow your revenue.

I am a Dynamics 365 enthusiast. I enjoy building systems and working with cross-functional teams to solve problems and build processes from lead generation to cash collection. Work 365 is a global developer of the Billing Automation and subscription application for Dynamics. Helping companies to streamline business processes and scale their recurring revenue.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

How Two Olympic Hopefuls are Turning the Pandemic into Opportunity

August 5, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered daily life for people worldwide, causing us all to rethink our routines, strategies, and goals. This includes the athletes of Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank, the women’s professional cycling team TIBCO has proudly sponsored for the past 15 years.

Races in which the team competes began to be canceled shortly after the 2020 season started, due to the COVID-19 outbreaks and subsequent lockdowns. However, that didn’t prevent the athletes from pushing through with their training schedules and continuing to pursue their goals.

This is especially true for riders Kendall Ryan and Lauren Stephens, two of the team’s top cyclists who are also training to compete for a spot on Team USA at the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The postponement of the 2020 Olympics due to the pandemic no doubt affected athletes and their training goals all over the world, but Ryan and Stephens are choosing to view the disruption as an opportunity rather than a setback.

How Two Olympic Hopefuls are Turning the Pandemic into Opportunity — *Kendall Ryan (Photo by Jonathan Devich/epicimages.us)*

Ryan felt as if reaching her goal of riding for Team USA in the Olympics was so close she could almost feel it. But when the pandemic hit and the Olympics were postponed, she initially had a difficult time coping with the news. “I was in shock and needed time to process,” Ryan explained. “I had spent the last few years training day in and day out with the goal of the Olympics in mind, and I went from being on the cusp of fulfilling that dream to everything coming to a screeching halt.”

While she was disappointed, Ryan didn’t allow her years of hard work to fall by the wayside. Instead, she worked with her sports psychologist, who helped her refocus her motivation and keep her eye on the prize. “I want to be an Olympian and proudly represent my country, and I want to win a gold medal. Sure, I have to overcome the challenge of repeating the last year of preparation, but now I know what it takes and I can do it even better,” Ryan said.

“I want to be an Olympian and proudly represent my country. Sure, I have to repeat the last year of preparation, but now I know what it takes and I can do it even better,” Ryan said. Click To Tweet

When the Olympics were pushed, Stephens viewed the news as an opportunity. Due to an injury in 2018, she felt she hadn’t been riding to her full potential, which hurt her chances at earning her place on the Olympic team. “I see the postponement as a second chance. Toward the end of the 2019 season the pain was lessening and my performance began to improve. Unfortunately, it may have been too late to prove I deserved a spot on the team in 2020. Now I feel as if I have a second chance to prove myself,” said Stephens.

While pushing the Olympic games back a year presented its own set of challenges for the athletes’ training schedules, Ryan and Stephens also have to be far more flexible with their methods. Normally, the women would be in gyms, riding on velodromes, and using Team TIBCO-SVB races as a large portion of their training. For now, they have to settle for solo workouts on the roads near home or inside via virtual training.

Going digital with their training has had some perks, however. “As long as you have a decent internet connection and a nice turbo trainer, virtual training can be a really great tool. You can do it at any time of day, you don’t have to worry about cars or traffic lights, and the video game aspect of it is kind of addicting,” said Ryan. Another positive to virtual training is that the cyclists are still able to ride together as a team. “Riding virtually is a fun way to stay competitive and engage with other riders while group riders and races have been put on hold. I have been able to find a rhythm using races and group virtual rides to get in a good mix of intensity and endurance,” Stephens explained.

“Riding virtually is a fun way to stay competitive and engage with other riders. I have been able to find a rhythm using group virtual rides to get in a good mix of intensity and endurance,” Stephens explained. Click To Tweet

Virtual cycling has been a great alternative for the entire team to stay in touch and continue training by competing in virtual races. The team just wrapped up the inaugural Virtual Tour de France, where Stephens won the second stage as well as the final stage, and the team defended the yellow jersey, won the mountain jersey, the points jersey, and the overall classification, and won the overall title.

In-person racing resumed for the teams this past weekend, and both cyclists are looking forward to continuing to prove themselves to the Olympic selection committee through their performance and teamwork. Ryan and Stephens were named to the long team in June 2020, but it will be another year before the final team is announced. While the two athletes undoubtedly had their cycling careers thrown for a loop at the onset of the pandemic, they both have spent years building solid foundations that allow them to adapt their training methods and prove they have what it takes to succeed.

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The TIBCO Blog

Miso’s kitchen robots will slide into White Castle restaurants this year

July 14, 2020 Big Data

Take the latest VB Survey to share how your company is implementing AI today.

Food prep robot startup Miso Robotics today announced that fast-food chain White Castle has signed on as a customer. In a pilot later this fall, White Castle plans to bring Miso’s robots into kitchens and benchmark them for speed in production, taste, quality, and backend point-of-sales integration ahead of tests, with a rollout to locations across the U.S.

Miso says that Flippy has already been testing out the White Castle menu at the company’s Pasadena, California R&D kitchen.

As declines in business resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic place strains on the hospitality segment, Miso believes that robots working alongside human workers can cut costs while improving efficiency — and overall safety. The company asserts White Castle’s decision to test Flippy creates an avenue for reducing human contact with food during the cooking process and ensuring consistency, while at the same time freeing up human cooks to focus their attention on less time-consuming and repetitive tasks.

“There are a number of benefits to employing Flippy, and a major one is to redeploy valuable team members where they are needed more today to create the best possible customer experience,” a Miso spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “There’s now greater demand for delivery, takeout, enhanced cleaning schedules. That’s all front of the house work that a few years ago didn’t need to be accounted for in staffing to keep customers satisfied. Flippy can keep the production up and meet the quality standards customers expect, so staff stays focused on shifting new demands.”

Miso has long claimed that its flagship robot Flippy — and Flippy’s successor, Miso Robot on a Rail (ROAR), which White Castle has agreed to test — can boost productivity by working with humans as opposed to replacing them. ROAR, which is expected to begin shipping commercially by the end of 2020 for around $ 30,000, or half the cost of a single Flippy unit, can be installed on a floor or under a standard kitchen hood, allowing it to work two stations and interact with a cold storage hopper. On the software side, it benefits from improvements to Miso AI (Miso’s cloud-based platform) that expand the number of cookable food categories to over a dozen, including chicken tenders, chicken wings, tater tots, french fries and waffle fries, cheese sticks, potato wedges, corn dogs, popcorn shrimp and chicken, and onion rings.

ROAR can prep hundreds of orders an hour thanks to a combination of cameras and safety scanners, obtaining frozen food and cooking it without assistance from a human team member. It alerts nearby workers when orders are ready to be served, and it takes on tasks like scraping grills, draining excess fry oil, and skimming oil between frying as it recognizes and monitors items like baskets and burger patties in real time. Plus, it integrates with point-of-sale systems (via Miso AI) to route orders automatically and optimize which tasks to perform.

Miso says it saw “tremendous success” last year, serving up more than 15,000 burgers and more than 31,000 pounds of chicken tenders and tots. Flippy will soon flip burgers at more than 50 CaliBurger locations globally, and so far it’s been deployed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Chase Field in Phoenix, and CaliBurger locations in Pasadena.

More recently, Miso said it would deploy new tools to its platform in CaliBurger restaurants as part of a pilot with CaliGroup intended to improve safety and health standards. In the coming weeks, in partnership with payment provider PopID, the company will install a thermal-based screening device in a CaliBurger location in Pasadena that attaches to doors to measure the body temperatures of people attempting to enter the restaurant. Miso also says it will also install physical PopID terminals so that guests can transact without touching a panel, using cash, or swiping a credit card — all of which can transfer pathogens.

Despite Miso’s claims to the contrary, think tanks like the Brookings Institution anticipate automation will cause the loss of countless jobs. Roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation, meaning at least 70% of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology, according to a report. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters, and others in food services.

But some restaurant industry executives claim high turnover rates underscore the need for automation. The official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015 to 2017 period, with the average cost to replace a worker estimated at $ 2,100 to $ 2,800.

“We started talking to White Castle about a year ago. They came to us with the same challenges much of the industry was experiencing — labor, operational costs to stay competitive mounting, and the need to meet on-demand delivery culture with high quality. In truth, the pandemic just accelerated conversations,” the spokesperson said.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Is there an intuitive and rational way to automatically convert ranges into coordinates?

June 15, 2020 BI News and Info

I’m tired of typing and deciphering coordinates of the corners rectangles, and I’m wondering if anyone has found a better way.

A rectangle can simply be described by two lists x = {x1, y1} and y = {x2, y2}, but the coordinates of the corners quickly becomes the jumble {{x1, y1}, {x1, y2}, {x2, y2}, {x2, y1}} (if the coordinates are listed clockwise). It gets worse for cubes and higher dimensions.

I’ve found one promising approach. This is to create two lists for the points on the different axes, x = {x1, x1, x2, x2} and y = {y1, y2, y2, y1}, and then combine them with Transpose@Join[{x},{y}]. This approach extends to higher dimensions and also works for polygons, but it still requires the manual duplication of values.

One could write a function to do this in a black box, but I wonder if there a way to do elegantly and intuitively convert pairs of ranges into coordinates for rectangles?

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Is there an intuitive and rational way to automatically convert ranges into coordinates?

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