PAGO PAGO, American Samoa (The Samoa News, May 8, 2012) – The American Samoa Legislature is raising the bar in the Pacific region by integrating technology into its lawfonomaking process. On Monday, May 7th, Texas-based and Samoan-owned, Petaia Media is installing and training Fono staff on a revolutionary new information management system.

This initiative will generate substantial savings annually with the implementation of a new wireless and paperless system. The new initiative will implement a digital archiving program that is in compliance with the American Disabilities Act (ADA) digital design standards.

Fonomatai, a project management system designed specifically for the American Samoa Legislature by Petaia Media, is the first of its kind in the South Pacific.

"There are a handful of governments that use this type of wireless system and American Samoa will join their ranks. This initiative shows that American Samoa is not just talking about decreasing their carbon footprint, they’re making it happen. It’s cost effective without constant use of paper for multiple drafts in the review process. It’s efficient with instant access to updated documents. Moreover, it’s making our government more accessible to the community they serve by digitizing public records", says Sa’u Stephen Petaia, Managing Partner of Petaia Media.

The public will have access to a website containing years of documentation and public digital records. The site also allows access to the legislative branch and promotes transparency between the general public and legislative process. Collegiate American Samoan students on-island and in the diaspora will be able to comb through more than 50 years of documentation.

"Imagine high school and collegiate Samoan students, not just on-island but in the diaspora, researching our lawmaking process from a historical perspective. They’ll soon be able to access these public documents like never before. The digital archiving serves as a time capsule or sorts. It’s going to give them the ability to gauge the political climate back when my mother was a teenager in American Samoa to the present time. I believe we’re laying a quality foundation for future lawmakers." says Pita Taase, Senior Analyst for Petaia Media.

In addition to the FonoMatai software upgrade, the installation will also feature hardware upgrades that include a new server setup, iPad 2s, desktop computers, laptops, and digital screens, Dell Projectors with wireless features, Apple TVs, and HD webcams. The integration of new hardware and software will be housed in an encrypted secure wireless network environment to ensure that American Samoan government documents continue to be preserved for future generations of lawmakers. "We anticipate that Fonomatai will have a significant impact on the workflow in the Fono. This system will change the way we conduct business many years to come. The collaboration with Petaia Media has been important," says Manny Lagafuaina, Head of Fono Management Information Systems.

Petaia Media will oversee the initiative while providing training and support to legislative members. Funding has been provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Petaia Media is the first Samoan owned digital agency providing website design, mobile applications, and software development. Our goal is to bring web technology ingenuity to the South Pacific.

Walked into office today and I had 50 iPads waiting for me. iPads are a part of the first Legislative paperless system in the Pacific being developed by Petaia Media for American Samoa Fono.

Four years ago, Stephen Petaia created a business networking website called Pac Biz to cater to the Pacific Islander community. A group of P.I. Professionals from Southern California found the site and approached Stephen to discuss the development of a merger with a developing organization and the website and the rest was history. Last week the relaunch of PacBiz.org at the Pac Biz Networking Mixer was a success. Visit the website for more information.

Petaia Media already has established a strong relationship with many local entities including the American Samoa Visitors Bureau, the Department of Human and Social Services – Child Care Division, American Samoa Economic Stimulus and Recovery Office, Tisa’s Barefoot Bar, and Savali News.  The team is currently in the process of developing an internship program with undergraduate students in American Samoa.  The internship will focus on multi-media programs such as website design, mobile application development, and gaming.  PM will also unveil a project in cooperation with the American Samoan Legislature and Fono MIS paperless system soon.

Petaia Media is a member of several Pacific Island organizations including Aiga Foundation, Pacific Arts Alliance, PacBiz: Association, and Pacific Islander Business Owners and Professionals.

Petaia Media is managed by Sa'u Stephen Petaia, a Bill Gates Millennium Scholar and graduate of Leone High School, ASCC, as well as Texas A&M University in Commerce.

Examples of Petaia Media's work here, in the United States and abroad can be found at www.petaiamedia.com. For more information or to set up a free consultation, contact Sa'u Stephen Petaia at connect@petaiamedia.com or call 684-256-7215.

• Corporate Film Campaigns
• Documentaries
• Commercials
• Music Videos

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.