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Joe Tricarico joined Azavea in August as a Software Developer Intern working on the Cicero team. He is currently pursuing his Bachelors of Science degree in Environmental Planning and Design at Rutgers University.

Before joining Azavea, Joe worked for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority at the Middlesex County Office of Planning.  There, he performed GIS analysis and wrote portions of the Route 9 Corridor sub- regional study.  He has also helped develop a data feed for Middlesex County Area Transit that can now be used by several online transit trip planners.  As a student, Joe has also become interested in urban design, sustainable energy, and enabling the public to participate more fully in the planning process.

Over the past year, Joe has helped build with Habitat for Humanity in Warren County, NJ, and hopes to continue serving the community after moving to Philadelphia.  In his free time, he enjoys traveling around the country, hosting strangers from out-of-town, and paddling or biking along the river.

The title is a seemingly innocuous question at first – what purpose do our desks have but to be a repository for our current projects and their supporting materials? Paper clips, envelopes, contracts, notes, magazines and other paraphernalia all pile up depending on what we’re working on that day. Look a bit closer at many desks though, including many of the 20-odd ones dotting the Azavea office (plus our two remote “Davids” off in Boston and Minneapolis), and you can find much more peculiar personal decorations, objects, knick-knacks, and “tchochkies”, each with their own story. We spend 40 hours a week or more at our desks, and after a while they accumulate bits of ourselves and become reflections of our personalities.

Here are the trinkets decorating some of the desks of Azavea HQ:

Amy received her Associates of Science degree in Business Administration & Marketing from Peirce College this year, and is currently pursuing her Bachelors of Science degree at Peirce as well.  Before coming to Azavea, she was an Executive and Marketing Assistant at a GPS fleet tracking company.

Outside of Azavea, Amy likes to attend sporting events in South Philadelphia where she lives.  She also enjoys trips to the beach and walking around exploring the Old City and Rittenhouse areas in downtown Philly.

Adam Hinz joins Azavea as a software developer on the DecisionTree and Sajara teams.  He has over 7 years of programming experience programming applications from Rails apps to enterprise Java.  He graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Before joining the team at Azavea, Adam worked at the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit designing enterprise-level project management software, as well as working on new interfaces for the iPhone and iPad.

When you can tear him away from his computer, you can find this Wisconsin native skiing in the Poconos in the winter and running down the Schuylkill trails.  He also loves living down in Center City and the amazing food scene.

This is pretty cool, and we are totally excited, but this isn’t just a listing in a magazine – there is a way for you to get involved as well! Businessweek is asking readers to pick their favorite choice.  So if you like what we do and what we stand for, let them know.  You can cast your vote on slide #27.  No login is necessary.  Your vote is just one click away.  Thank you!

Drew Griffin of CNN and his crew paid us a visit to interview Robert Cheetham, Abby Fretz and our development team about our work on redistricting and District Builder, the open source web-based redistricting application we built in collaboration with George Mason University’s Public Mapping Project.

That same week, we participated in several events organized by Technically Philly as part of Philly Tech Week. Tamara Manik-Perlman was our ambassador for the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org, a first-of-a-kind catalog of Philly-centric datasets, while Deb Boyer announced the rollout of PhillyTreeMap, a citizen-driven application for the inventory of Philadelphia’s urban forest based on the OpenTreeMap framework.  Tamara was interviewed by WHYY‘s Shai Ben-Yaacov and the project received accolades from NewsWorks.

Meanwhile, intrigued by our use of Animoto, an easy-to-use video slideshow product, the company contacted Jeremy Heffner to understand how we had been using their software for our marketing purposes, which ended up as a “Business Spotlight” on their website.

And in May, Technically Philly was in our office to interview Deb, Robert and Tamara after the publication of our white paper on  “Implementing Mobile Augmented reality Technology for Viewing Historic Images” (download here at the bottom of the page).

How do we keep track of everything that’s happening in the office, you might ask?  Jeremy and Brian Jacobs have been experimenting with an internal company dashboard that lists our company’s metrics as varied as web traffic on all of our web domains, our tweets, blogs and google alerts, conference room schedules. Most recently, we’ve even beta tested their map widget with our CiceroAPI‘s calls. Very handy to visualize where Cicero’s users are the most active nationwide!

Michael Tedeschi joined Azavea in May as a Web and Graphic Designer after graduating with honors from the University of the Arts with a bachelor’s in Graphic Design.  He works with the marketing team to create promotional collateral for conferences, and advertising, as well as the software development teams to design, implement, and enhance user interfaces for our projects and client applications.

He previously worked with Night Kitchen Interactive on digital projects for cultural and educational institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Art and Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.  In addition, he works as a freelance designer on projects for local and national organizations, including the National Association of Federal Credit Unions and Rope-a-Dope, a Philadelphia-based music and culture organization.

A fan of everything design, Mike is always exploring new ways to grow as a designer.  In his spare time, he spends many sleepless nights on personal design projects, enjoying a good meal (with a great beer), and learning new technology.

Andrew Thompson also joined Azavea in May as a Marketing Intern.  He works with the marketing and business development teams by writing website copy, blog entries and other marketing materials, as well as helping out with whatever else needs to get done.  A native of Massachusetts, in past summers he worked as a software testing intern for Axeda Corporation, where he performed user interface accessibility testing on Axeda’s internet applications.

Andrew is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College in Growth and Structure of Cities, with a minor in Computer Science.  At Haverford, he has worked as reporter, editor, and webmaster for his college newspaper, The Bi-College News, where he deftly tackled every systems administrator’s nightmare: a sudden and irrecoverable failure of the newspaper’s main server.

Outside of Azavea, you might find Andrew writing for fun, working with his beloved newspaper and college computing club, exploring Philadelphia (or any other city close at hand), fantasizing about travel, or virtually experiencing it through ham radio.

Daniel McGlone joined Azavea at the beginning of June as a GIS Analyst Intern.  He works with both the spatial analysis and the Cicero teams, supporting cartography and analysis projects as well as Cicero research and data entry.

Daniel graduated from Harrisburg University with a bachelor’s in GIS last year, and is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Urban Spatial Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Particularly interested in transportation planning, for his graduate research Daniel  is looking into demographic and economic changes near public transit stations in the Philadelphia area.

Before coming to Azavea, he was a GIS intern at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, where he scooped up as many transit related tasks as possible and participated in the DVRPC’s Regional Student Forum.

In his free time you can find Daniel boasting and bragging about Philadelphia, biking the Schuylkill River Trail, exploring the city’s up-and-coming neighborhoods, or absorbing city life at Rittenhouse Square.

As computing power continues to grow, Azavea has become increasingly committed to making substantial improvements in the performance of GIS data computation (sometimes referred to as “geoprocessing”) over the web.  Ultimately, what we are seeking to make possible web-based GIS modeling that are so fast that you might think you’re playing a video game.  That’s no small endeavor, but the possibilities are mind-blowing.  Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant in 2010, we made significant progress on testing the feasibility of using graphics processing units (GPUs) to do just that.  If you’re interested in how we can hijack GPUs for GIS, check out our blog series on the research.

In that context, we have been working on some really exciting projects that are all, in one way or another, pushing the boundaries of geographic data-processing over the web.  We will describe them in more detail in upcoming newsletters, but in the meantime, we thought we would give you a sneak peek.

Model My Watershed

WikiWatershed – Model My Watershed
WikiWatershed, a project of the Stroud Water Research Center,  is a suite of web-based tools to assist the public in managing water resources.  When launched, it will enable students and the public to share geographically-tagged data, photos, videos, comments, educational curricula, simulation models and other tools on streams and rivers.   Model My Watershed is the first component of the WikiWatershed project and will be a web-based stormwater modeling tool targeted at students.  This game-like simulaton will enable students to modify underlying environmental conditions and simulate how these changes to the ecosystem affect the hydrologic cycle in their local watersheds.  We will use the latest version of Azavea’s DecisionTree geoprocessing framework to provide high performance, scalable modeling capabilities.

Equity and Government Accountability and Performance (EGAP) application
EGAP, developed for OMB Watch, an advocacy organization focused on federal spending oversight, aims to enable policy decision-makers and the public to visualize the relationship between federal spending and economic need.  The application will enable users to select and weight a variety of population characteristics to display in real-time how their personal definition of need relates to federal spending.  Data can be visualized on an interactive map at the level of states, counties or Congressional districts.  The project brings together Azavea’s DecisionTree geoprocessing framework with ArcGIS Server and the Esri Flex API to create an attractive and responsive user experience.

EGAP

District Builder
Azavea has been working with Dr. Michael P. McDonald (Associate Professor at George Mason University) and Dr. Micah Altman (Senior Research Scientist at Harvard and Non Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution) to create District Builder as an open source, web-based redistricting application designed to give the public access to online redistricting tools.  Part of the Public Mapping Project, District Builder is designed to enable greater public participation where redistricting authorities solicit public input or for open government advocacy groups to enable the public to generate redistricting plans for their state and localities.  Through a set of map tools, users can select various types of geographies such as blocks, tracts, or counties and assign them to districts.  As districts are edited, users can view demographic information, population count and other statistics in real time.  Read more about District Builder and watch a demo. Oh! and we’re building a local version of the software, so stay tuned!

Azavea’s Spatial Analysis and Cartography team has worked with nonprofits across many domains to help them use mapping to answer a variety of research questions.

In health and human services, the Utility Emergency Services Fund (UESF) approached us to help them demonstrate to each member of City Council the magnitude of the organization’s work assisting low-income families in their district.  We also worked with the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC) to develop maps visualizing the availability of quality childcare relative to need.

To support the economic development efforts of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Azavea conducted an impact assessment using spatial statistical techniques like Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to explore the relationship between property values and cleaning and greening efforts on vacant lots.

Arts organizations have also found value in our spatial analysis services to help them communicate more effectively with their supporters.  The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s advocacy efforts rely on our Cicero legislative information service, while The Wilma Theater turned to us when they wanted to analyze their patron data to identify promising markets they may have been missing.

At the national scale, we worked with the political transparency organization MAPLight.org to automate the generation of more than 400 maps to visualize the extent contributions to members of the U.S. Congress had originated outside of each legislator’s home district.

While these organizations have recognized the ability of maps to help them achieve their institutional goals, there are many more nonprofit organizations that possess a wealth of spatial data without even realizing it.  Azavea has partnered with NPower Pennsylania to offer a half-day workshop that will get you started thinking spatially and will illustrate how maps can be powerful tools for planning programs, demonstrating outcomes, and communicating strategically.

Covered topics include:

• Best practices for collecting, managing and sharing geodata
• An introduction to geocoding
• An overview of key map types
• Pointers to free and low-cost resources to get you started with mapping and GIS

This is more a conceptual than a technical workshop so no experience with mapping is necessary, but the content will best suited to people familiar with their organization’s data.

“Putting Maps to Work: Using your data for planning, reporting and advocacy” will take place on March 14th and March 17th from 9am to 1pm at NPower PA’s Center City location and will cost is $20 (includes a boxed lunch).  WARNING: Both dates are now sold out.  Interested in another mapping for nonprofits seminar? Let us know!

Want to learn more about HunchLab?  Register for our upcoming webinar on March 16th from 1:00pm-2:00pm EDT entitled:

Crime Analysis & Early Warning Made Easy for Officers with HunchLab

Public Safety IT – article featuring how Hunchlab is used by the Philadelphia Police Department and the Tacoma Police Department.

Next American City – article on planning 2.0 and collaborative platforms for actionable intelligence, featuring the City of Asheville’s Priority Places application, powered by DecisionTree

Priority Places, is an example of empowering the public to make decisions about finding the best places to live and work  — Ahmed Abukhater, Esri Global Industry Manager for Community Development,  Next American City

Reading Eagle – article on legislative redistricting featuring Azavea’s research on gerrymandering in Pennsylvania.

The Enterprise Blog – article on redistricting featuring GMU’s Public Mapping Project and Azavea’s open-source mapping software, District Builder.

WHYY RadioTimes - interview with Robert Cheetham about census data and redistricting.

A lifelong musician, Claire currently plays drums in an indie rock/post-punk band called The Daylight Savings and Loan, and loves being part of the Philadelphia music scene.  She’s a local (sustainable) food advocate and enjoys keeping up on all the latest restaurants – especially establishments specializing in craft beer.  She’s a proud resident of West Philly, where she lives with her sometimes crazy, but always adorable rescued beagle.

This past June, Inc. Magazine and Winning Workplaces announced the winners and finalists of the 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition – the best small and mid-sized places to work in the country. We’re thrilled to announce that Azavea was a finalist in the national list of 40 winners and finalists.

And guess what?… one of our benefits even got noticed in the Inc.’s  “10 Perks we Love“.  Go to slide #6 to discover which one!

Over 500 completed applications were submitted by U.S. companies for the contest.  A national panel of experts in leadership and small to mid-sized business judged the finalists based on specific metrics and qualitative assessments of their success in creating the kind of workplaces that engage employees and deliver successful results.  The common characteristics of the Top Small Company Workplaces winners and finalists include a commitment to aligning their workforce with a clear vision, mission, and values; communicating with openness and trust; and investing in employees’ continuous learning and development.

These values align with Azavea’s recent B Corporation certification, which resulted from a comprehensive survey meant to verify the company’s social and environmental performance standards, as well as its commitment to creating benefit for all its stakeholders.

Inc. Magazine writes about Azavea, “This 24-person firm prides itself in its ability to hire smart people to engage in intellectually challenging work that has real social value. Their interdisciplinary approach in a relaxed work setting allows them to consistently create highly crafted, user-friendly web solutions solving tough geospatial problems. Leadership generously shares profits with employees and continually challenges them to pursue their own research projects to stretch their abilities and open up new avenues for the firm.”

So far in 2010, Azavea was also named a 2010 ESRI Business Partner of the Year and was in the 2010 Inner City 100 List of 100 Fastest-Growing Inner City Companies Nationwide

We are grateful for all these accolades. These would not have been possible without our dedicated staff, clients, and partners. Thank you all.

Rachel’s Volunteer Gig:  Generation Appreciation Philadelphia, a.k.a GenPhilly
Rachel spent a tremendous amount of time during her childhood with her paternal grandmother.  “Manou”, as she used to call her. They would go on vacation together, spend weekends together during the school year, go shopping, watch cheesy films, and when Rachel moved to the U.S. they would call each other every other week. When Manou passed away last year, she left a big hole in Rachel’s life. Soon afterward, Rachel met two terrific women, Kate Clark and Lauren Ring, both working at the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, who are also leading the development and activities of GenPhilly. GenPhilly’s mission is to inspire emerging professionals to make a connection with older adults in their personal and professional lives.  It is an alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting an age-friendly Philadelphia. Rachel decided to volunteer because she saw this as an opportunity to remain connected to her grandmother, better understand and connect to elderly’s issues, and participate in the promotion of Philadelphia as a place where growing older doesn’t have to be alienating. Rachel is currently volunteering on a GenPhilly event in conjunction with the Corzo Center/University of the Arts and the College of Art & Design. The event (Sept. 16 at UArts), entitled Women & Aging: Image (R)evolution, will feature Sarah Kagan, Professor of Gerontological Nursing at Penn and Valerie Temple Lange, Programming and Community Outreach Coordinator at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute.

Rachel is not the only member of the Azavea team actively volunteering in the Philadelphia region. We’ve polled everyone in the office about their volunteer involvements. Check it out!

]]> http://www.azavea.com/blogs/newsletter/v5i3/azavea-welcomes-three-new-employees/feed/ 0 http://www.azavea.com/blogs/newsletter/v5i2/azavea-makes-the-list-of-top-100-fastest-growing-companies-nationwide-again/ http://www.azavea.com/blogs/newsletter/v5i2/azavea-makes-the-list-of-top-100-fastest-growing-companies-nationwide-again/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 14:27:34 +0000 Rachel Cheetham-Richard http://www.azavea.com/blogs/newsletter/?p=1838 Thank you so much for your support and trust!

For the second consecutive year, Azavea made it to the ICIC Inner City 100 List of the fastest growing companies nationwide, at number 28.  And the Philadelphia Inquirer claims that “Azavea puts Philadelphia on the Map“.

The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful companies and their CEO’s as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities. The list is intended to demonstrate the idea that doing business in an urban environment holds a distinct competitive advantage. ICIC (Initiative for Competitive Inner City) has been studying the economic condition of the largest 100 American cities for more than a decade and is working to revitalize inner cities across the country by promoting entrepreneurship.

We want to dedicate this award to all of clients, our partners and our talented staff.  Thank you.

We look forward to working with you on more thought-provoking projects and software that continue to bring together the best aspects of geography and the web.

We have joined over 280 other leading companies who are setting a new corporate standard for social and environmental performance, by becoming a Certified B Corporation, a.k.a B Corp.

What is this?  The B Lab organization was created to promote the designation of a new corporate form, the “B Corporation”.  Under current IRS regulations, there are several types of private for-profit businesses including C Corporations, S Corporations, LLC’s, LLP’s, partnerships and sole proprietors.  B Corporations are a new type of for-profit companies that use the power of businesses operating in a market-based economy to solve social and ecosystem problems, while committing to creating benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.  B Lab is working with state legislatures to try to have the B Corporation status added as a new corporate form.

To become certified, B Corporations must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards, and amend their corporate by-laws to incorporate the interests of employees, community, and the environment. They also agree to undergo an audit of their business practices once every 2 years to ensure that their business practices continue to align with the B Corporation’s principles.

You might now wonder why Azavea would qualify. While terms such as ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)’,  ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘sustainable development’ are increasingly being used to describe the behavior of for-profit corporations, whether or not we live up to those aspirations boils down to the choices we make as businesses and the values we actually apply in our day-to-day operations. The B Corporation status emphasizes the triple bottom line of social responsibility, sustainability and profitability (people, planet, profit).  At Azavea, many of our business decisions stem from these three principles.

We were founded in 2000 with the vision to build innovative location-based web and mobile solutions and perform spatial analysis for clients committed to making positive and enduring impacts in the communities they serve. We have worked with numerous non-profit, academic and government clients to answer complex geospatial questions in a wide variety of domains including natural resource planning, neighborhood revitalization, economic development, crime analysis, real estate property analysis, redistricting, political advocacy, and cultural resources.

Our 10% personal research and pro bono programs have enabled staff members to spend some time working on projects that are not focused on the immediate needs of a particular client, while at the same time enabling the company to expand its skill sets and broaden its business opportunities in areas and domains not explored before. These programs have been at the source of projects such as Walkshed (to calculate and map walkability), BusMinder (a real-time bus notification application), a white paper on Gerrymandering, geographic service maps for MANNA, and the Haitian Earthquake Registry, to name a few.

The same service-oriented attitude extends to Azavea’s commitment to redistributing a minimum of 2% of our annual profits to charitable organizations selected by staff through the company’s “Time to Give Back” program.

We also try to treat our staff as if they were family members. In addition to our nifty benefit package, we also believe in financial and corporate transparency and hold at least two meetings per year to report on company performance.

But we’re not resting on our laurels! In addition to the business benefits, the B Lab also highlighted some areas where we can improve.  Here are some of the ideas:

• Establish a Board of Advisers made up people independent of the company
• Give customers representation on a Board of Advisers
• Develop an environmental policy
• Conduct environmental review / audit and share with staff and customers
• Measure our annual energy consumption and use it to develop metrics by which we can reduce it

We are proud of our new corporate status and look forward to implementing some of the above ideas in our business practices.

John’s current read: On Language, by William Safire

Tamara Manik-Perlman, GIS Analyst & Project Manager, has often been called a materialist, and she can’t really dispute the label since it captures both her tactile and academic obsessions. Although she’s fascinated by all aspects of material culture, Tamara is particularly taken with textiles and the various techniques for knitting, weaving, dyeing, printing and manipulating fabric. The anthropologist and economic geographer in her is also fascinated by how the desire for and trade in commodities has shaped the course of human history around the globe. (If you’re also curious about supply chains, check out developer David Zwarg’s recent research project Sourcemap.org)

Tamara’s current read: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz

John and Tamara are not the only avid readers at Azavea.  We’ve polled everyone in the office on their latest reads which resulted in a pretty stellar list.  Check it out!

Dear Friends,

Welcome to a new edition of the Azavea Journal.  Did I say Azavea?  Yes.  Some of you might have already heard the news from the letter we sent out last Wednesday, but Avencia will now be known as Azavea – pronounced like ‘azalea’. There is no particularly good reason for this, and this was not a change that we sought – we liked our name just fine.  So what happened?

Avencia became the target of a trademark dispute that sought to have our registered trademark canceled 3 years ago. While neither company has ever had any experience with a customer demonstrating confusion between the two names, the other party has persisted in their effort.  We have vigorously defended ourselves since then but now taking it to its conclusion in federal court will be even more distracting and expensive.  I have therefore decided to end the dispute in order to preserve the financial health of our firm and to focus on our company’s mission and commitment to impeccable service for our clients.

So what does Azavea mean? My brother-in-law is from Pakistan. While we were brainstorming for a new name, he mentioned that ‘zavea’ means ‘perspective’ in Urdu.  We liked the sound of it and its evident connection to geography. So after a few spelling tweaks to enable us to create a strong trademark, we adopted Azavea.

While we have a new name, the company’s mission remains the same. We will continue to perform research and create software that brings together the best aspects of geography and the web.  We remain committed to providing our clients access to advanced geospatial technologies through highly-crafted and easy-to-use web and mobile solutions, and personalized geospatial analysis services.   Our goal remains to combine our experience solving tough geospatial problems, commitment to tailored service, and a genuine desire to “do well by doing good” in order to help our clients create more dynamic, vibrant, and sustainable communities.

We are proud of our team for sticking through the ups and downs of this trademark dispute and have valued their input throughout this 3-year process.  We are grateful to work with smart people who get a kick out of working on projects with social value, and who are passionate about making a difference in the world around them.

Some of these projects are highlighted in the articles below.  Enjoy, and again, welcome to a new edition of the Azavea Journal.

Sincerely,
Robert Cheetham
President & CEO

PS:  Please note that none of our contact information has changed, except for our email addresses and website that now reflect the new name.  For instance, my new email address is cheetham@azavea.com .

Azavea has a clearly defined symbiosis with coffee. We have a designated Minister of Coffee, a world-class coffee grinder, and we get selections of coffee from around the world; some of it hand-delivered, and some of it hand-crafted.  However, one of the problems opportunities that I observed with our coffee system was that as coffee was brewed and consumed in the office (about 6 brews a day),  unlucky staffers would frequently pick up the (opaque) coffee pot to find it empty.  I don’t personally drink coffee, so I was unaware of how much anticipation one feels when approaching the pot and the extreme let down experienced upon encountering an empty pot.

I slowly set to work in my free time to solve this conundrum.  To me, it seemed like an individual would want to know if there was coffee in the pot before approaching the coffee maker (whom some of us address reverently as Zojirushi-san).  This could be 1) a web page, 2) a desktop app, or 3) an IRC (not IIRC) bot.  I drew up some schematics, took some measurements, and retreated to my home lab to build an Arduino based, web-enabled measurement system tailored for the coffee pot. I used an Arduino Diecimila, an Ethernet Shield, a couple piezoelectric sensors, a 3 color LED, a couple of buttons, and an awesome hand-crafted wooden base (thanks to Chip, our resident guitar maker).

A short while later, I had a working prototype ready for testing. The device now sits in Azavea’s kitchen, constantly measuring the weight of the coffee maker, and reporting the measurements to pachube.  After doing some internal evaluation, the name ‘Caféduino’ stuck, and I developed a couple methods of viewing the coffee pot status.

1. Direct Web Access

Using this method, it’s possible to directly address the Caféduino.  This gives the coffee addict aficionado direct access to the measurement values, but is more useful for other applications that are polling the data frequently.

2. Caféduino Notification

Using this second method, the Caféduino is polled continuously, and the tiny coffee mug in the system tray is updated as the coffee level changes.  This is the most aggressive method of monitoring the Caféduino which, mysteriously, is the most comforting for users.

When the coffee mug is clicked, the history of the Caféduino is charted in the window.  What you are seeing is a Google visualization applet that is consuming the historical data, stored on http://www.pachube.com/.

3. IRC Bot Integration

Lastly, the most interactive method of polling the Caféduino is through our internal IRC channel. The above screenshot is the conversation that I initiated with the IRC bot, and its response.  It has reassured me that there is indeed, 77.78% of a pot of coffee left.

Now our staff can check in on the coffee pot, to insure that their next visit to the kitchen will be without disappointment.  While this system works well for monitoring the coffee level, the next steps may be more involved – building a machine to automatically brew coffee.