By John Breeden IIOctober 1, 2013 
Presagis is known for being on the forefront of modeling, simulation, visualization, and embedded display application software. Its modeling and simulation software suite can help users with training, operations and analysis by accurately replicating terrain, creating precise 3D models and putting it all together into a highly accurate simulation. The company just released the M&S Suite 13, the latest version of its end-to-end solution that includes hundreds of product enhancements designed to speed application development for government users.
With the new features, M&S Suite 13 lets users create simulation content and scenarios faster while achieving greater realism and better performance, according to the company, all within a development environment that is easier to use and more tightly integrated. Its toolset provides an open, scalable and reusable M&S environment.New features of the Presagis M&S Suite 13 include:Creator: The modernized user interface with customizable desktop speeds 3D model development by making it faster to build, modify, and validate models, says Presagis.Terra Vista: A redesigned user interface simplifies the terrain generation process via a logical and step-by-step workflow.STAGE: Including more than 50 new civilian and military platforms and a new auto-population tool, STAGE provides a complete simulation development environment.Vega Prime: More realism is possible through enhanced rendering performance, more light points, depth pass and 3D clouds. Vega Prime 13 now natively supports the distributed interactive simulation and high-level architecture communication protocols, as well as the CIGI standard as part of the base product.
Codero Hosting Names Former Rackspace VP Support COO
By Chris Burt
Hosting provider Codero Hosting announced Wednesday it has named Robert Autenrieth COO and VP, technical operations and supportHosting provider Codero Hosting announced Wednesday it has named Robert Autenrieth COO and VP, technical operations and support.Autenrieth is the fifth former senior executive of Rackspace to join Codero in the past year. At Rackspace Autenrieth most recently was VP of global support operations.In his new position Autenrieth is responsible for management of Codero’s customer support, data center operations, and technical operations teams. He will also be in charge of all aspects of data center strategy.In eight years with Rackspace, Autenrieth had various roles, including general manager of data center engineering/operations, and was involved with developing and implementing strategies for data center management, customer care, engineering, and asset management.“With his extensive hosting technology experience, Robert is uniquely qualified to deliver on Codero’s promise of exceptional service through industry-leading uptime, expert customer support, and unparalleled value and performance,” said Emil Sayegh, CEO and president of Codero Hosting. “Robert led one of the largest teams at Rackspace with hundreds of employees reporting to him, making him an ideal fit to ensure Codero reliably delivers cloud-based services on a massive scale, always advancing our technology to meet growing customer and business demands.”Codero has recently been expanding aggressively in several areas. In April, Codero moved a number of hosting services to Dell PowerEdge servers to meet enterprise hosting customers demand, and alsolaunched on-demand storage services. The web host capped a flurry of appointments and data center openings with the opening of its Austin offices in late 2012.“This is a very exciting time at Codero and I am honored to be part of the team,” said Autenrieth. “As companies shift from internally-run data centers to managed and cloud hosting providers, Codero is perfectly aligning automation, operations, marketing and the right product mix to support the SMB and enterprise markets.”Codero’s promotional materials take direct aim at Rackspace and AWS, claiming faster cloud performance and cheaper dedicated hosting as it attempts to continue to grow its market share. Codero is still hiring for a number of positions.
Former Rackspace Exec Departs to Codero Hosting as COO
By John Casaretto
The halls at Rackspace must be feeling quite different lately as another, actually a fifth former senior executive has left the company to join Austin-Lenexa based Codero Hosting in the last year. The latest is Robert Autenrieth, who as announced today joins Codero as COO and Vice President, Technical Operations and Support. He had previously served as Vice President of Global Support Operations at Rackspace. His role at Codero will include managing Codero’s 24/7/365 customer support, data center operations and technical operations teams. He is also managing the company’s data center strategy from design to execution. This is a critical role as Codero’s brand is built a literal across-the-board level of technical excellence, value and support.
“With his extensive hosting technology experience, Robert is uniquely qualified to deliver on Codero’s promise of exceptional service through industry-leading uptime, expert customer support, and unparalleled value and performance. There is no one better suited to design and manage the Codero global data center footprint and customer care delivery,” said Emil Sayegh, CEO and President of Codero Hosting. “Robert led one of the largest teams at Rackspace with hundreds of employees reporting to him, making him an ideal fit to ensure Codero reliably delivers cloud-based services on a massive scale, always advancing our technology to meet growing customer and business demands.”
Autenrieth is deeply experienced and had been central for a number of years within Rackpace’s global operations across the board from strategic planning, customer support, product engineering, and everything in between. Personnel have been known to move within the hosting industry, but it’s rare that it happens on this level to the same company and it typically indicates, vindicates that a significant opportunity and effort is under way under that new roof. That certainly seems to be the case at Codero which continues to roll out unique products and services that focus on exceptional business value.
“This is a very exciting time at Codero and I am honored to be part of the team,” said Autenrieth. “As companies shift from internally-run data centers to managed and cloud hosting providers, Codero is perfectly aligning automation, operations, marketing and the right product mix to support the SMB and enterprise markets. I look forward to providing the leadership, strategic planning and tactical implementation necessary to take the operations and customer support teams to the next level ensuring we deliver exceptional service to every customer, in every interaction.”
One can only conclude that the acquisition of an executive with Autenrieth’s background can only mean continued growth for the company. It certainly means continued product development from the team, and it also indicates a potential expanded base of enterprise data centers. It’s opportunities in the cloud market that Codero has seized on, developing easy to use, easy to integrate thoughtful and cutting-edge technology solutions with great support offerings at a cost advantage when compared to competitors. Meanwhile, Codero is continuing to grow and expand its team.
Austin data center operator hires new COO
By Christopher CalnanData center operator Codero Hosting has enlisted local tech executive Robert Autenrieth as its chief operating officer.Autenrieth was previously vice president of global support operations for San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting Inc. (NYSE: RAX). He will be based at Codero’s Austin office.Last year, Kansas-based Codero expanded to Austin, nine months after enlisting a local tech executive Emil Sayegh as CEO. The company’s Westlake Drive office employs 20 workers, including product development, marketing, customer support and sales workers, company officials said.In February 2012, Codero enlisted Sayegh— who was previously the Austin-based vice president of cloud services for California-based Hewlett-Packard Co.(NYSE: HPQ) — to grow Codero’s Austin office. Before joining HP, he was vice president and general manager of Rackspace’s cloud computing division.Codero, which was founded in 2009, is operated by APH Inc. It employs 50 workers. The company operates data centers in Chicago, Virginia and Phoenix.
Codero Hosting Names Former Rackspace Executive as COO
Autenrieth will manage Codero's customer support, data center operations and technical teamsBy CJ ArlottaDedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting services provider Codero Hosting named former Rackspace (RAX) executive Robert Autenrieth as the company’s COO and technical operations and support vice president.
Dedicated, managed, cloud and hybrid hosting services provider Codero Hosting has named former Rackspace (RAX) executive Robert Autenrieth as the company’s COO and technical operations and support vice president.In his new role, Autenrieth will be responsible for managing Codero’s customer support, data center operations and technical operations teams, while also managing Codero’s data center strategy – from design to execution.Autenrieth most recently worked as Rackspace's vice president of global support operations, providing executive oversight of strategic planning, tactical alignment, customer support and product engineering for Rackspace on a global level.He spent eight years with Rackspace in total, working in various roles, including general manager of data center engineering/operations, where he developed operational strategies around data center management.Codero Hosting President and CEO Emil Sayegh said in a prepared statement that Autenrieth is well-suited to design and manage the Codero global data center footprint and customer care delivery.“Robert led one of the largest teams at Rackspace with hundreds of employees reporting to him, making him an ideal fit to ensure Codero reliably delivers cloud-based services on a massive scale, always advancing our technology to meet growing customer and business demands," he said.Autenrieth said in a prepared statement that Codero is correctly aligning automation, operations, marketing and the right product mix to support the small and medium-sized business (SMB) and enterprise markets."I look forward to providing the leadership, strategic planning and tactical implementation necessary to take the operations and customer support teams to the next level ensuring we deliver exceptional service to every customer, in every interaction," he said.Codero offers various dedicated, cloud and managed hosting solutions. To learn more about the company's solutions, please visit the company's website.
Presagis Upgrades M&S Software with Suite 13
October 1, 2013Montreal-based Presagis has introduced the latest update of its software portfolio, Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Suite 13. The new version includes “hundreds of enhancements” to help with training, operations and simulation analysis. Among the features of M&S Suite 13 are the Creator 3D modeling program, Terra Vista terrain generation database, STAGE to create various scenarios, and Vega Prime, which is a visualization program that supports distributed interactive simulation (DIS) and high-level architecture (HLA) communication protocols.According to Presagis, Creator allows the creation of 3D helicopter models. A content gallery is the starting point where users choose from a number of "highly detailed" models (for example, helicopters, jets, buildings, etc.) that are "optimized for simulation." Terra Vista is a terrain modeling software tool that helps developers generate correlated databases, including the New Project Wizard as part of Terra Vista 13. With STAGE and HeliSIM, interactive helicopter training scenarios can be generated along with a methodology for building, calibrating and testing helicopter models for use in simulators, the company says. A total of 50 new civil and military platforms are available in the latest version. Vega Prime is a toolkit that "enables developers to bring their helicopter simulations to life," Presagis notes, using realistic renderings of environmental and other specific scenarios, weather states and rotor effects.
9 Ways to Find More Energy
ENERGY DRAIN 5
Your feeling of exhaustion may be all in your head. In a recent Welsh study, cyclists who felt mentally fatigued stopped pushing themselves sooner than those who felt refreshed did, even though both groups' cardiovascular and muscular responses to exercise were the same. Brain drain may increase activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of your brain in which motivation, emotion, and perception of physical effort converge, the researchers say.FIGHT IT: Cue up your iPodCranking LMFAO does more than just motivate you; it can also boost your exercise performance. "People listening to music can run about 15 percent longer," Dr. Edlund says. The benefit extends beyond endurance: A recent study from California State University at Fullerton found that people who listened to tunes they liked performed squat jumps more quickly and forcefully. Use the PaceDJ app ($2, pacedj.com) to create a cardio mix of songs with tempos that range from 125 to 140 beats a minute. Then, when you lift, switch to a motivating playlist.
A New Way to Outsource Bank Jobs: To the Cloud
By Penny CrosmanSeptember 4, 2013
In a slowly emerging labor trend, full-time employees are being replaced with freelance workers connected via the web.New York University professor Clay Shirky says this is due to "cognitive surplus" — the ability of the world's population to collaborate on large, sometimes global projects. "The world has over one trillion hours of free time to commit to shared projects," Shirky said in a Ted talk. This is how Wikipedia got built. It's also how cat memes are made, Shirky notes.While Max Yankelevich was a researcher at MIT, he and his colleagues deemed this trend a major shift in the global workforce."In 2008, when we were losing jobs, we were gaining about a million jobs in freelance economy," he says.Yankelevich has parlayed this idea into a business called CrowdComputing Systems, which Wednesday announced a solution for financial information providers and financial institutions called WorkFusion. The platform combines crowdsourcing and automation tools with machine learning to increase productivity."The big problem with leveraging this labor, because these people are so distributed — millions of people available around the world, people in Asia, stay at home moms and retired people in the U.S. — is being able to aggregate the labor and bring it to the enterprise in a manner they can use for their business processes," says Yankelevich, CrowdComputing's CEO. "And being able to distribute this work to that labor and validate that these workers are producing output the company can use."Yankelevich says his company is disrupting the business process outsourcing market, which is worth $200 billion a year."Banks are huge users of BPOs and captive labor," he notes. "They have a lot of human intensive processes like Know Your Customer compliance and transaction reconciliation in the call center." However, Yankelevich points out that the cost of labor in traditional business process outsourcing meccas like India is rising and that outsourcing arrangements often aren't flexible enough to accommodate slow periods and spikes in work.CrowdComputing uses Amazon Web Services to make its software accessible to its database of 20 million freelancers. About 10% are in the U.S. Some are part of existing large communities like Facebook and Zynga, or from freelance labor pools like Elance, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or oDesk.The software breaks up work processes, such as vetting a new business customer for KYC purposes, into tiny pieces or "microtasks" that can easily be handled in parallel by several people. One person might research a potential client on a government website; another might read an article about the company."Microtasks are doing for knowledge work what Henry Ford did for the car industry," says Yankelevich. Assembly lines make it possible for each person to handle a small component of the work without being an expert on the entire product. "That's how you get scale and efficiency," he says.The core of this platform is an artificial intelligence engine that finds workers, breaks processes into small tasks that can be done in a short time, evaluates the work, pays and motivates the workers, and aggregates the work in a form that's useful to the corporate customer.CrowdComputing trains workers and examines their output. If they do well, they get more work. If not, they're trained again. They're also paid for performance — if they do a job well, they're paid immediately. If they mess up, they might get nothing or half the pay of a properly completed task. And workers are only paid for the time they're productive, not during downtime."This is attractive to enterprises because they're not spending money on capital expenditures, office space, computers, and down time," says Yankelevich.The software gauges work quality in several ways. It uses probabilistic analysis, which means it looks at 60-90 data points of current and historical performance, to predict the quality of the work an individual can produce on a specific task with 99% accuracy. It uses plurality, in which it takes an answer from several workers and compares those answers. It uses moderation, in which another person in the crowd will review a piece of work. It uses gold testing, issuing work for which the true answer is known.Freelancers need to meet age requirements and need a bank account to receive payments. CrowdComputing learns what country they reside in because some processes can't be farmed outside of certain countries. "We know what every worker is good at — we do that with upfront and in-place testing, as well as watching how they perform in work," Yankelevich says.Sensitive data can be encrypted or obfuscated from workers. Also, the shredding of bigger tasks into small pieces protects against any one person seeing the big picture.For one customer, CrowdComputing created tear sheets — information that an analyst or investment banker uses to make a decision. Information is pulled from more than 1,000 publicly available sources. "Usually a company would outsource this — one company was using 3,000 people in India to create these tear sheets," says Yankelevich. "We were able to reduce the price per tear sheet from $3.50 to about 22 cents, and quality of output went up from 80% to 95%. Time to market was also shorter."
People on the Move: Adam Devine, CrowdComputing Systems
By Amy CorrAdam Devine was named vice president of marketing for CrowdComputing Systems.
Review: SmartPhoto Express
Snapping photos all day is part of my jobs -both as Mom and as a social media marketer and blogger – and I am always on the lookout for new photography apps. There are so many photo apps available, but usually you have to use a combo of apps in order to accomplish several tasks. Recently I had the opportunity to try out SmartPhoto Express, a brand new photo app that claims to be an all-in-one photo-printing app.How It WorksSmartPhoto Express combines the functionality of many other apps plus photo printing in one convenience spot.1. Snap a photo.2. Open the SmartPhoto Express app. Choose which photos you would like to print.3. Click on the individual photos to edit each photo.
4. In edit mode, you can crop, enhance & adjust items such as sharpness and saturation; add effects, text, frames, and even some preloaded “stickers” to your photos.
5. Choose the size of the prints you want — they are available in 4? x 6?, 5? x 7?, and 8? x 10? prints.6. Then choose your delivery method. You can opt to have the prints to be mailed to your home or, in some parts of the country, you can choose to pick up the prints at a local CVS store.CostSmartPhoto Express is a free app. You simply pay $0.27 for each print, plus shipping. 
Print Shipping Time & QualityThe prints I ordered arrived about 5 days before the estimated arrival date. Fabulous! The prints are of high quality, and are printed on Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper. Colors were rich and prints were clear. I only had an issue with one of the photos, which printed half of a photo. It was fine by me, since these were only 27 cents and I actually have a professional print system at home for images. If you ever have a problem with a print — or anything related to using the app, for that matter — the nice folks at SmartPhoto Express are more than happy to hear from you and want to help you work through the issue as soon as possible.Final ThoughtsOverall, I was impressed by how much was included in the SmartPhoto Express app. More than any other photo app I currently use, it really does offer you an all-in-one option for editing and printing photos from your phone. Because I do design work and have my own in-house print system that handles photos well, I personally wouldn’t likely use this app for printing unless I needed to send photos to friends and relatives quickly and easily, which is another great option that the app allows you to do. I think it is a fantastic photo app for those who aren’t set up to do high quality photo prints at home, which is most people. It’s easy to use, inexpensive, and offers a decent finished product. You can download the SmartPhoto Express app for yourself in the app store. Currently it is only available for iPhones.