February 21, 2013
Josh Knauer, Rhiza’s CEO, will be the keynote speaker at a Carnegie Mellon University event that is intended to help inspire students and alumni to build their careers by featuring alumni “who have successfully and interestingly navigated their way forward.” The event is titled Under Construction: Building Your Future and happens this Saturday, February 23rd. Read more about the event.
April 16, 2012
So we still have some unpacking to do, but we’re hard at work!
Jeff and Alison at work in our new office
April 6, 2012
For those of you who have been following Rhiza for a while, you know that we’ve been growing quite a bit. We opened a new office in Seattle late last year, and now we are proud to announce that we are moving our Pittsburgh office to a new location to accomodate for our growth. The Pittsburgh Business Times got the scoop on the story today and helped us spread the word that we are the anchor tenant in the newly formed Revv Oakland co-working space.
Our new offices are in the heart of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which contains both Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). This will allow us easier access to CMU and Pitt researchers and students, access to over 20 public transportation routes and provide a tremendous number of food/shopping options for our team.
More than just location, as an anchor tenant for Revv Oakland, we are helping to support not just our own growth, but that of other tech startups in our community. Rhiza will be working closely with Revv Oakland to provide greater networking and skills sharing opportunities, so that tech startups will learn from Rhiza’s experience and we can learn from them.
With a growing list of new clients like Comcast, PepsiCo, Dun & Bradstreet and more, we’re going to need the new space and look forward to expanding our footprint and creating new jobs in the community.
February 2, 2012
For years, Rhiza has produced one of the best online mapping applications on the market. Rhiza Insight is used by our customers to bring location intelligence to their operations and sales departments.
Our customers challenged us to meet more of their needs and we listened. We’ve produced a new version that is still incredibly easy to use and now offers a greater range of tools:
To celebrate, we are relaunching our flagship product with a new name: Rhiza Upshot
Why Upshot, you ask? After talking to our customers about what they love most about our product, we learned that Rhiza Insight helps them get to the upshot of complex scenarios quickly. We invite you to join Rhiza’s growing list of customers like Comcast and the U.S. Department of Energy who turn to Rhiza when they need online tools for data analysis and vibrant presentations.
Visit our new website where you can watch our latest video, download a brochure or request a live demonstration. Let us know what you think!
December 5, 2011
West Coast office helps Rhiza support growing market demand for easy, online location intelligence tools for streamlined business decision-making.
Photo credit: Seattle Summer by .Bala via flickr
Pittsburgh, PA (December 5, 2012) – Rhiza Labs will celebrate the opening of operations in Seattle in January. While Rhiza’s headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh, PA, the addition of a West Coast office will help Rhiza provide better service to its existing and prospective clients in the West.
“We are excited to engage more directly with innovators on the West Coast who support Rhiza’s mission of moving business analysis solely from the control of analysts and geeks into the hands of executives, salespeople and project managers.” said Josh Knauer, Rhiza CEO.
Rhiza’s cloud-based tools help clients like Comcast, the U.S. Department of Energy and Dunn & Bradstreet embrace data-driven decision-making. Rhiza’s clients sell more effectively through micro-targeting, evaluate key performance indicators faster and discover new business opportunities.
Rhiza also announced it has named Maryl Widdows as Vice-President of Sales and Marketing to help lead the West Coast expansion. “Maryl has been a member of the Rhiza management team from the beginning. She brings a deep understanding of the business intelligence challenges our customers face and will be able to provide a high level of personalized service to our West Coast customers.” said Knauer.
About Rhiza
Winner of InfoWorld Magazine’s Top 10 IT Project Award, Rhiza is an acknowledged innovator in the design and deployment of online tools for decision-makers. Rhiza’s location intelligence applications integrate and illuminate data from a variety of sources, providing meaningful ways for businesses to better understand their customers, assets, operations and stakeholders. For more information about Rhiza, visit www.rhiza.com
*UPDATE* Coverage of this story in: Pittsburgh Business Times, Puget Sound Business Journal and Directions Magazine
September 12, 2011
Rhiza’s parent company, MAYA, announced that it was moving all of the MAYA Companies to downtown Pittsburgh. I didn’t think this was a big news story, but apparently Marketwatch decided to publish the news. The expansion of the MAYA Companies into a downtown skyscraper is just one indicator for how well the companies (including Rhiza) are doing and how much growth we’ve all experienced. Feel free to read the full article to get all of the details.
July 28, 2011
For over a year, I’ve been serving on a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Our working group was comprised of leaders from educational and non-profit institutions, as well as corporations large and small, who all had expertise in matters of ecosystem preservation, environmental economics and information systems. During this time I’ve had the privilege of working with these people to draft a set of policy recommendations that were recently presented to President Obama.
The result of our work, titled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy, has now been published and is available online. While the details in the report are quite dense, the content is quite important for several reasons.
First, there is a clear focus on explaining the measurable economic value of ecosystem preservation which goes far beyond the traditional arguments for protection that focus on nature’s intrinsic values. The report explains that the deterioration of “natural capital” (or ecosystems) has led to large scale economic impacts on society. Some examples include the degradation of wetlands leading to massive flooding and damage to the built environment, depletion of fisheries from coastal wetland destruction and rising healthcare costs due to increased exposure to toxins. These are all issues that many of us who have worked on ecological issues know, but bringing them to the forefront of national policy debate at the Presidential level is very important.
Another important point that is made in this report is that the solutions to these problems need to involve federal government action. In my opinion, far too many short-sighted people rush to the conclusion that because there may be waste in some government budgets, that government’s role in solving some of humankind’s largest problems must be reduced. Waiting for industries to self-regulate to adequately protect the public commons that ecosystems represent is not a prudent path forward. The report makes several recommendations for specific improvements to government agencies that oversee ecosystem protection and reporting, while also outlining multiple ways that corporations and non-profits need to be involved.
The area of the report that I had the most influence on has to do with the collection, analysis and reporting of ecological data. Many of our recommendations in this area are focused on how to make ecological data more accessible, published in a timely manner and flow among federal agencies as well as the private sector. I am especially proud of the inclusion of many of the tenets of open and transparent data that were promoted to the top-level recommendations the report makes. Agencies can save tremendous amounts of money by pooling technical resources, conducting data collection and publishing in an open and transparent manner. For example, the report included detailed recommendations that included publishing data in machine-readable, interoperable formats and promoting best practices in data interoperability such as the use of universally unique identifiers for data records. Further, the report points out that many agencies that deal with ecosystem data are not making use of existing open data initiatives such as Data.gov. Further recommendations are included for improving Data.gov so that it is more widely adopted and useful. I never expected these type of “in the weeds” recommendations to be included, but am very happy to see how seriously they are being taken.
While publishing a report itself is not going to change the world, I was very heartened throughout my interactions with White House staff, policy makers and agency leaders, at how open they were to new approaches to solving these problems. There is a deep level of scientific knowledge and curiosity that exists at the highest levels of our government, which gives me hope that we may soon get on the right track towards triple bottom line policies that equally value preserving ecosystems, human health and our economy.
I would also like to thank the many staffers at the White House and the Office of Science and Technology Policy that helped our working group at every step of the way. The interactions with my fellow working group members, as well as the PCAST members who helped guide us, made this experience a truly rewarding one.
April 28, 2011
Today is Take Your Child to Work Day, but that’s every day for me! Rhiza has a great “Babies to Work” program which means that our employees can take their infants to work with them up until they are six months old. Ada is nine weeks old and she has been coming to work with me since her third week. I have paid maternity leave, but rather than take it all at once, I chose to taper up my time at work, going from very part time to nearly full time. I’ve managed to keep up with work projects, but keep my schedule to infant-sized portions.
Ada eats, naps, and plays at the office. Most of my programming work and testing gets done when she’s sleeping or eating, but I also spend plenty of time rocking her or taking her for walks. She spends a lot of time strapped to me in her baby Bjorn so she can be as close as possible and I can still have two hands for typing.
Thanks to flex time I don’t worry too much about squeezing 100% productivity out of my workday. I can always save work time for evenings when I have my husband to take over care.
However, I would say that this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (I’ve stopped to feed her twice just in the time it’s taken to write a few paragraphs). Software Engineering is certainly challenging and combining it with something even more difficult like, say, parenting a tiny child is kind of nuts. Ada has done her best to be an accommodating baby, she sleeps at night and isn’t much of a crier, but I’m still thankful that there is a private nap room that I can hide in for the worst stuff.
Still, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. I get to spend all day with my baby and I get to do my awesome job.
Is there anyone else out there who mixes babytime with work? How does it work for you?
March 21, 2011
We’re very proud to announce a new partnership with Onix Networking, who will now be reselling our Rhiza Insight software, with a focus on government sales. Rhiza’s a software should appear on the GSA Schedule and several other government contracts very soon. The official release is below:
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September 15, 2010
Data Integration & Visualization Experts, Rhiza Labs, Selected by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to Develop Website for Evaluating Energy Efficient Products for Commercial Building Operators
PITTSBURGH – Rhiza Labs, which makes software for collecting and visualizing data, announced today that it was awarded a $498,000 Federal Subcontract from the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop energy conservation tools for commercial building operators. The tools will include a website with a comprehensive database for evaluating energy efficient building materials and fixtures. The website will include performance metrics, along with detailed laboratory and field test plans that building operators can use to independently evaluate new technologies and products that aim to increase the energy efficiency of commercial buildings. Then website, along with building energy simulation tools, will be available to the general public in 2011.
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