February 15, 2011 -- Announcing the official launch of the Savali newspaper website. The website will provide daily updated news, images, video streams and public forums creating a bridge between the Samoan people and international community.

“It’s a service we should have provided a long time ago,” said newspaper editor Tupuola Terry Tavita. “We have had a page link with the official government website for some years now but that is no longer viable. We need our own website to present government’s views on the issues, national events and news of public interest.”

With the growth of web communities many Samoans overseas turn to the Internet for information about what's happening at home. The Savali site will provide a reliable view of Samoan current events and help keep people informed. The web site will be professional and easily accessible from anywhere in the world at any time.

Savalinews.com will deliver fair and balanced information in an interactive format providing access Samoans can't obtain anywhere else. Features include a Prime Minister’s forum – where you can ask questions directly to the Prime Minister, a subscription page including our Lands and Titles monthly publication online – the largest circulation in the country - and links and features for other government ministries and corporations. This website will be the front door for news and information about Samoa.

“We’re also setting up a small camera unit where videos of national events – openings and such – will be streamed online. Radio streams from 2AP is also another option we’re considering at the moment.”

Visit the new site at http://www.savalinews.com.

Savali News

Contact: Terry Tavita (Acting Editor)
Website: http://www.savalinews.com
Email: info(at)savalinews(dot)com
Phone: (0685) 26938 or 63222
Fax: (0685) 21339

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The web will continue to generate data at an explosive rate. It will generate even more now that mobile devices have created yet another path to reach that data. For example, mobile traffic alone is predictedto exceed more than two exabytes per month by 2013. There are more than 90 million tweets per day and more than 60 billion images on Facebook. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Out of this bounty of data emerged “data science” and a plethora of new tools to deal with the size and speed of information. Hadoop, Hbase, Cassandra, MongoDB, NodeJS, Hive, R, and Pig are just a few of the tools and techniques that have emerged to wrestle the growing juggernaut of data. The explosion in new tools and the demand to implement them has far exceeded the number of data scientists available.

When we look at the insight and intelligence that companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have been able to mine about the preferences and behaviors of their users, it is no surprise that data scientists are in high demand. It is not just social media data either — financial, CPG, marketers and even governments are turning to the new skills and techniques to answer new business questions.

The rapid rise in demand and the shortage of trained experts has led to the emergence of tools to democratizeaccess to big data. Innovative startups like Datameer and Factual have simple spreadsheet interfaces for doing basic slicing and dicing. Larger players like Google have launched FusionTables to allow slicing and visualization of medium (100MB) data sets.
The Challenges of Big Data

This sprawling mass of emerging data brings with it a host of challenges. As we slice and dice data, how do we keep track of the many permutations that it creates? What bits are meaningful and validated? How do we move beyond just counting and binning the data and answer more meaningful questions for businesses?

As a technology community, we’ve done a brilliant job of crowdsourcing data, making its creation and curation a social enterprise. We’ve even made the creation of code social through the open source movement and tools like Github. Yet for all our innovation, we’ve done little to harness the collective Internet community to analyze the data we create. While our analyses and visualizations are elegant and often beautiful, they are too often built in isolation.

If we were to peer into the not too distant future, how could we use the collective to analyze data and archive its evolution to let others further examine particular pieces of data and run in new directions? Let’s watch an analysis evolve socially as many hands look for patterns across a large data stream.

We’ll start with a chunk of data comprised of all tweets mentioning “Walmart” during Black Friday, November 26, 2010, using hypotheticals. “John” examines the data and extracts all the tweets that came from mobile devices and plots them on a map:

He posts the results and data on his blog so others can extend or tweak the analysis. “Kate,” one of his readers, checks out the data and thinks it looks cool, but finds it too hard to see a pattern with so many dots on the map. Kate then takes John’s data and forks it with her own analysis, counting all the tweets about Walmart in each county:

Seeing Kate’s analysis, another reader, “Bill,” wonders what the relationship is between tweets about Walmart and their store location. How often are Walmart stores nearby when someone is tweeting about Walmart? He finds that 67% of the variation of tweets is explained by the number of Walmarts located in each county.

Leveraging these dynamic results, Lauren can query into the inventory analytics and immediately push out a promotion for kiddie pools and squirt guns. She can automate this algorithm to generate new promotions based on the streaming data and adjust to inventory levels in real time.
Answers Included

One of the early premises of Web 2.0 was that data would be “the Intel inside” and firms like NAVTEQ that provide data would be the big winners. Today we are seeing crowdsourcing increasingly commoditize data, and projects like OpenStreetMap replacing the NAVTEQs of the world. As the market moves up the chain, the future value will be the meaningful questions we can answer with data. This will mean more focus on the “science” side of “data science.” The more social and collaborative we make the science, the better the answers we’ll create at a scale that is needed for an explosive market.

We were fortunate  enough to help some new friends of ours in the Long Beach area with their website recently.The Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum (PIEAM) was not able to continue a relationship with their previous web partner and so we gladly stepped in to help. Collaborating with Pac Biz Executive Director Rita Scanlan, the site was able to go launch as of yesterday May 20th. For more information about PIEAM, visit www.pieam.org or email the Museum Director at BBarrett@pieam.org.

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The Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum is the first museum dedicated to Pacific Island art and culture in the US. Our mission is to incorporate the diverse cultures of the Pacific Islands, with a focus on Micronesia, into a permanent collection, educational programs, rotating exhibits, and living arts.

PIEAM is situated on a triangular piece of land bordered by 7th Street, Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, and Alamitos Avenue in Downtown Long Beach, CA; it is, appropriately, an island. The mural design on the exterior of the PieAM building, created by Long Beach native and famed muralist Art Mortimer, recreates a traditional Men’s House from the Island of Yap, one of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia. Mortimer’s impressive resume and long history in painting murals throughout Southern California made him the obvious choice for this project.

PIEAM will feature rotating exhibits that will explore a multitude of themes across the Pacific Island regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.