Network: Technology Organizations

Manas Technology Solutions

The company: Manas is an IT company committed to the development of innovative, high-end business systems. They specialize in technical and scientific software solutions with special emphasis on data mining, information retrieval and visualization, GIS and signals/images processing.

The relationship:InSTEDD has a two-way partnership with Manas, who provides technology staff to work on InSTEDD’s platform products, provides training in the Innovation Labs, and performs both frontline and back-reach technical support for critical events such as the Haiti earthquake.

In April of 2011, InSTEDD launched an innovation laboratory or iLab in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the goal of building technological capacity for addressing health, safety and sustainable development issues in the Latin American region.

The iLab Latin America is the result of a partnership between InSTEDD and Manas, a Buenos Aires-based software development and consulting firm. Through this collaboration, the iLab Latin America is helping NGOs, governments, social entrepreneurs and other organizations in Latin America design and use collaboration technology tools to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations, while building and optimizing their technological capacities to support their humanitarian work.

The organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also known as MIT, is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.

The relationship: Working alongside MIT, UNICEF and the Brazilian NGO CEDAPS, the iLab Latin America is helping develop the Environmental Youth-led Risk Mapping Project in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This cutting-edge mapping platform enables real-time data collection through web and mobile applications.

The main goal of this project is to highlight the environmental risk factors that threaten the community in a way that gains visibility in order to encourage the government and local authorities to deal with those threats.

InSTEDD iLab Latin America has contributed to solving technical issues on the platform, simplify the interface of the application as well as increasing the usability of the tool.

Learn more about this project here: instedd.org/map/favela-digital-mapping/

Website: http://web.mit.edu/

Thoughtworks

The company: Thoughtworks is a leading technology organization that provides coaching for architecture, design and agile methodologies.

The relationship: We are working with Thoughtworks in creating reference architecture materials to help low-income countries make better decisions based on proven, appropriate practices when planning, implementing, and evolving country-wide health systems — including aspects such as deployment of low-cost patient identifier mechanisms, setting up national data warehouses, and the integration of facility and central-level data.

Amazon Web Services

The company: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform “in the cloud”.

The relationship: We use Amazon Web Services for the subset of our tools that run in the cloud. Amazon Web Services provides low-cost and high-reliability hosting of cloud applications without locking technologies in to their platform, and, most importantly, it provides a responsive and professional support staff that has worked closely with us in support of the Haiti crisis and other rapidly unfolding events.

New Relic

The company: New Relic’s mission is to improve the performance and scalability of Web applications, making applications better, customers happier, business more successful, and life easier. RPM enables developers and operations teams to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their web applications.

The relationship: Since we operate mission-critical systems for governments and NGOs worldwide, application scalability, performance and availability are all key, and New Relic RPM is a key part of our toolkit to fulfill our promise to these organizations.

Balsamiq Mockups

The company: Launched in June 2008, Balsamiq Mockups helps software designers and developers build great software by letting them easily sketch out their ideas, then quickly collaborate and iterate over them.

The relationship: Our field staff use this innovative tool to create simple sketch diagrams that are used to suggest application designs and rapidly iterate them while working directly with the users of our technologies. Balsamiq has provided us with licenses for use by our field team.

SimpleDiagrams

The company: SimpleDiagrams is a desktop tool that helps you create simple diagrams quickly.

The relationship: SimpleDiagrams is used by our engineers, product managers, and field staff to document people’s workflows, find gaps in information flow, suggest alternatives, and design new systems that take advantage of the benefits of the ‘sketch’ look and feel of its diagrams. We thank SimpleDiagrams for their donation of licenses to InSTEDD!

The company: VPN-Cubed® is the first commercial solution that enables customer controlled networking in a cloud, across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds.

The relationship: We operate multiple services in the cloud, increasing availability and security while decreasing costs. These services include applications for multiple governments in Asia; and direct link to the production datacenters of large mobile operators worldwide. We use VPN Cubed by CohesiveFT to keep these multiple application topologies in a controlled and secure global network spanning multiple policies and protocols, including SSL, VPN, IPSec.

Website: http://www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed/

Adapx

The company: Adapx helps a range of businesses and agencies speed up data collection and streamline operations with Capturx software. Adapx began as a natural user interface research firm supplying technology to the Department of Defense through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The relationship: Adapx, Inc. provides us with Capturx software so that we can demonstrate how digital pen solutions can empower NGOs and governments to digitize data currently written on paper. A broad range of industries and agencies use Capturx software solutions as mobile and natural interfaces into their systems through digital pens without the delay and cost of transcribing paper or deploying mobile computers.

The company: A team of artists and engineers, Exygy builds world-class technology. We do custom web, mobile, APIs, WordPress, and much much more. We work with startups, social-venture, and corporate clients around the world.

The relationship: Exygy was responsible for building our website.

Website: http://exygy.com/

The company: Cisco Systems, Inc is a multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services.

The relationship: In October of 2010, Cisco awarded a seed grant to InSTEDD for the development of technology designed to improve the resilience of community-level disaster response. This grant was for the development of a program to support shared safety, selfreliance and situational awareness during a public crisis in the Bay Area. InSTEDD designed, developed, and pilot tested a tool, called Watchfire, to help the American Red Cross improve their communitylevel disaster response in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Website: http://www.cisco.com/