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State Department Sending Toki Wright to Sierra Leone in the Only Cultural Exchange in That African Country This Year; Trek for Head of McNally Smith College of Music Hip-Hop Program to Dispel Myths and Educate About Globally Popular Music Genre

Web Inquirer Staff — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:09:14 +0000

ST. PAUL , MINN., — April 30, 2013 — A leading ambassador for American Hip-Hop culture will travel to the land of Hip-Hop’s ancient roots in Africa when the United States Department of State sends Rhymesayers Entertainment Hip-Hop Recording Artist, writer and educator Toki Wright to Sierra Leone May 6-18. Wright, who heads the nation’s First Fully Accredited Hip-Hop Studies Program in the U.S. at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, will work with aspiring young artists in the cities of Kenema and Freetown and perform in concert with the country’s leading Afro-Pop/Reggae star, Emerson Bockarie. Wright’s trip, organized by the state department’s Arts Envoy Program, is the only one arranged for that African country in 2013.

“I am honored to participate in The U.S. State Department’s Cultural Exchange program which each year sends artist from the U.S. around the world to show global audiences the breadth of US culture,” Wrights says. “The main objective is to share Hip-Hop and its origins while also educating about and changing the many negative perceptions of Hip-Hop by developing young artists and encouraging expression.””

While in country, Wright will also do radio and television interviews as well as meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone, Michael Owen; members of civil society organizations; the education sector; and government leaders. He will be working primarily with two groups of young artists between the ages of 13-25 in Kenema and Freetown, followed by recording sessions and concerts in two large venues in both cities.

Educational And Cultural Affairs Bureau, Embassy, Impressed with Wright’s Many Credentials

According to Boa Lee, the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Freetown, Wright was an “outstanding choice” for the exchange, based on his many experiences, the Hip-Hop program he helped launch at McNally Smith, and a similar trip to Shenyang Conservatory in Shenyang, China, in early 2011.

“The Embassy, through and in collaboration with the Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau (ECA) invited Toki Wright to participate in the Sierra Leone program because of Toki’s background as an award-winning hip-hop artist,” noted Lee. “His prior experience working with a similar Department of State exchanges, his role as an educator in Hip-Hop studies at McNally Smith, and past involvement in programming for youth in Uganda, made him an ideal choice.”

“The ECU was also very impressed with Toki’s close work with the youth population and on issues related to youth empowerment in the Yo! The Movement, Lee continued. “We also heard about Toki because of his reputation in the Hip-Hop community. And finally, there is a growing population of Sierra Leoneans now living, working, or attending school in the Twin Cities, and Toki lives and works in Minnesota”

About the Arts Envoy Program

Toki Wright is coming to Sierra Leone in early May to do a two-week program through the Department’s Arts Envoy Program, managed and funded through the Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau (ECA). The Arts Envoy Program is an arts-based exchange program that sends American arts professionals abroad with the goal of shared cultural appreciation, including sharing the best of the American arts community with the world to foster cross-cultural understanding and collaboration, and to demonstrate shared values and aspirations. Artists – performing artists, musicians, visual artists, etc. – from the U.S. go abroad and conduct workshops on the art form, mentor young people, and give performances.

About McNally Smith College of Music — www.mcnallysmith.edu

McNally Smith College of Music offers a variety of degree programs in Music Performance, Recording Technology, Music Composition, Music Business and other areas. It also offers a Masters of Performance degree. Its alumni are working all over the world performing, recording, producing, being covered by media and leading successful lives in the music industry.

The music college’s diverse faculty includes:

Grammy® Award nominees
Hollywood film composers
Broadway veterans
Players in Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion”
Assorted Nashville Cats
Best-selling Jazz artists
Authors, major label rockers, Billboard chart toppers, commissioned composers, accomplished producers and engineers who have worked with everyone from Atmosphere, Prince, Phil Collins and Aretha Franklin to Yanni, Paula Abdul, Dick Dale and countless other rockers, combos, orchestra musicians, recording label figures, and industry executives who care deeply about their art and the next generation of music makers.
With more than 600 students and a 125-member faculty and the only Hip-Hop diploma program in the country, McNally Smith students get a personalized music education that combines musical artistry and wide access to current music technology, research tools and performance facilities.

For more information — or to interview Toki Wright about his cultural exchange trip to Africa — please contact Martin Keller, Media Savant Communications Co., 612-729-8585, mkeller@mediasavantcom.com

Report Shows SharePoint is Clear Choice of Enterprises but Has ‘Gaps’ That Information Professionals are Looking to Shore Up Using Bolt-On Applications

Web Inquirer Staff — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:18:14 +0000

San Jose, CA (April, 2013) – Microsoft SharePoint is becoming the information management platform of choice amongst information-intensive organizations but there are areas, particularly metadata management and automatic classification, where bolt-on specialist applications could radically improve its performance, according to a new whitepaper from content intelligence software firm Smartlogic that examines independent evidence from MindMetre Research and Gartner.

Smartlogic found that results from MindMetre’s ‘Information Performance Survey’ and a recent Gartner report outlining ‘Six Gaps in SharePoint’ indicate that the Microsoft program remains the leading general application for workflow and content management, but also demonstrate that the platform needs to be augmented by specialist software to realize its full potential.

MindMetre surveyed more than 500 information professionals throughout the US and Europe and found that more than half – 53% – use Microsoft SharePoint to access internal information within their organization. However, the study also revealed that ‘findability’ could be an issue with the platform. MindMetre found that 80% of SharePoint users consider that, as an enterprise search platform, the application is falling short of their and their colleagues’ original expectations, with 34% saying it is doing so by a considerable margin. As a result, 62% of SharePoint users report some degree of disillusionment with the return on investment the system has brought, due to the fact that important content is still difficult to find and search results are not sufficiently relevant.

The study also reveals:

· enterprise search is primarily needed to support the elimination of work duplication, with 76% of information professionals using SharePoint listing this as a major priority;

· 25% of these respondents believe that SharePoint’s native internal search facility enables them to access less than half of their own organization’s internal information;

· 89% of information professionals believe that SharePoint is falling short of expectations in organizations other than their own.

These findings come in the wake of the report by Gartner which identified six significant functional gaps in the Microsoft platform that can be addressed with the installation of additional tools. Gartner specifies Taxonomy/Classification, which impacts search performance, as a key gap in SharePoint ‘out of the box’. Specific functions flagged up in the Gartner report as areas in which SharePoint’s performance could be enhanced include the “mass-tagging of content and ingestion of existing content” and the “management of taxonomies and structures”. Both of these are essential to quick and efficient information retrieval.

Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic’s Chief Executive, comments: “At a time when organizations across the globe face continued economic uncertainty, improving returns on investment by better leveraging information assets is essential. The big challenge for the vast majority of enterprises is harnessing the information they have available and making it findable for staff, partners, clients, investors, regulators and other stakeholders.

“While SharePoint supports many crucial information applications, this report demonstrates that enhancing its functionality in the area of ‘findability’ can be of vital benefit to enterprises. Solutions are available that can be implemented alongside SharePoint to infuse it with ‘content intelligence’, enabling more precise and rapid retrieval of information. By providing accurate and consistent auto-classification and visualization capabilities, as well as enterprise grade taxonomy and ontology management, these applications filter out extraneous documents and ensure that content is placed in context, enabling organizations to access, describe and control unstructured enterprise information.”

For more information, contact Eleanor Caine at eleanor@lindsellmarketing.com or Hugh Filman at hugh@lindsellmarketing.com, or call +44 20 7402 0510.

About Smartlogic

We believe that organizations can outperform others if they fully utilize the huge business value contained in unstructured content. To realize this value, we know you must understand your content, the information and knowledge it contains and how it can be applied in the context of your operations. We focus all our energy on creating value from unstructured content – something we call ‘Content Intelligence’. Semaphore is our Content Intelligence Platform and it captures the context of your business and then analyzes unstructured content to identify and present its value for any context.

Smartlogic Content Intelligence solutions enable better access to corporate knowledge, improved risk management and compliance, superior customer relationship management, enhanced information ‘findability’ for key audiences, and an improved ability to monetize information. Hundreds of companies, including NASA, Bank of America, AutoDesk, Oxy, UBS, Ford Foundation, Pitney Bowes, the UK’s National Health Service, The UK National Archive, RBS, and Yell.com, use Semaphore. For more information, please go to www.smartlogic.com.

Touchrate Releases Several New Tablet Based In-Store Shopper Marketing Solutions in Walmart and Major Supermarkets

Web Inquirer Staff — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:03:32 +0000

Touchrate, based in Orlando with offices throughout the US and Europe, is the market leader in tablet based touchscreen interactive technology for on-location and retail marketing, lifting sales by double digits. The company recently released several solutions for major marketers such as MetLife Insurance, Pacific Cycle; maker of Schwinn, Roadmaster, and Mongoose brands, among others, autoinsurance.com, representing Esurance, Progressive, Travelers and other top auto insurance companies, as well as Shopper Events and Promoworks CPG Demo Sampling Programs in Walmart and Major Supermarket Chains throughout the U.S.

Using an interactive tablet display, the shopper is prompted by a marketing message in-aisle. With a few touches, the shopper can select and learn the reason to buy with a call-to-action. Marketers can also gain consumer insights, increased brand loyalty and the ability to provide coupons or recipes instantly to shopper’s smartphones through Touchrate’s NFC technology.

Touchrate turnkey solutions sell more products through the interactive experience. Touchrate’s recent releases mark a major shift in the in-store digital space with many more solutions from the company in the pipeline for other major marketers in the top U.S. retailers. Touchrate works with Fortune 500 companies, their ad agencies and retailers as they continue their bid to dominate this new channel in retail marketing.

“The silver lining to all of this is how all the players benefit from the technology. The consumer, the marketer, the retailer and the ad agency.”, says company spokesperson, Brennan Dailey

Velox Insurance Opens its 20th Location in Georgia

Web Inquirer Staff — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:48:12 +0000

Atlanta, Georgia, April 25, 2013 – Velox Insurance is pleased to announce that we will be opening our 20th location in Georgia on May 1, 2013. The increase in demand for affordable insurance coverage and superior customer service in Georgia, along with the support of our satisfied customers has propelled our expansion into the Cartersville area.

The Cartersville office, located at 8 South Tennessee Street Cartersville, GA 30120, will be open for business on May 1, 2013 and it will be managed and operated by one of Velox Insurance’s most distinguished agents, Thiago Reis. “Mr. Reis has a proven track record of saving our customers money and providing excellent customer service,” notes Velox Insurance’s President and CEO, Leo Robayo. “We are thrilled to have him represent Velox Insurance in Cartersville.”

In addition to providing affordable auto insurance coverage for as little as $45 monthly, Velox Insurance works with dozens of major carriers to also offer great rates on a complete line of products including, Home, Boat, RV, Motorcycle, ATV, and Renters insurance for individuals.

Velox Insurance has 19 additional office locations in Georgia:

Buford		Mableton
Calhoun		Marietta
Carrollton		Norcross
Cedartown		Riverdale
Doraville		Sandy Springs
Douglasville		Smyrna
Hiram		Stockbridge
Jonesboro		Stone Mountain
Kennesaw		Tucker
		Woodstock

About Velox Insurance

Velox Insurance is one of Georgia’s premier insurance agencies specializing in providing quality, affordable insurance coverage to Georgians for over a decade. At Velox Insurance, we take pride in our ability to deliver value and convenience to our customers by leveraging our relationship with dozens of insurance providers to find the best rates, and by making the purchasing process convenient with options to purchase a policy online, through a smartphone, or at one of our 20 locations in Georgia.

Contact Information:

Thiago Reis

Phone: 770-386-8661

E-mail: cartersville@veloxinsurance.com

Address: 8 South Tennessee Street Cartersville, GA 30120

WWW.VELOXINSURANCE.COM

Source: Velox Insurance, Inc.

AZEK Column Wrap Features a Better, Easier Way to Wrap Columns

Web Inquirer Staff — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:40:35 +0000

AZEK Building Products Introduces AZEK Column Wrap for Custom Looks With Time and Labor Savings

Scranton, PA – Building and remodeling trends show a return to traditional and vintage home styles, with columns standing out as one of the hallmarks of the front porch. To add elegance and distinction to any porch installation without additional time and labor, AZEK Building Products introduces AZEK Column Wrap to its trim product line-up.

Research also indicates that the ability to create custom looks without additional labor and costs is a high priority for contractors installing porches and columns. Low-maintenance AZEK Column Wrap, made of durable cellular PVC, is easy to install – even by just one person. It features three connected panels with press fit lock seams that, when folded together, wrap easily around the structural support. The fourth panel then locks into place and creates a tight and secure enclosure around the structural post. When completed, the AZEK Column Wrap provides a nicely finished smooth exterior surface. Interior corner details provide additional surface area to enhance the bonding between panels.

Available in white matte, smooth Traditional finish, AZEK Column Wrap comes in sizes that fit around structural 4 X 4, 6 X 6 and 8 X 8 posts. It is available in 10ft. lengths so it can be customized to fit any application up to that height. AZEK Column Wrap does not require additional milling or painting, although it has excellent paint adhesion if a color is desired. It resists cupping, swelling and chipping for lasting good looks.

AZEK Column Wrap can be easily embellished with AZEK Trim or AZEK Moulding profiles to provide a custom look. Like all AZEK Trim products, AZEK Column Wrap is designed to last beautifully, impervious to moisture and insects and covered by a 25-year Limited Warranty.

To learn more about AZEK Column Wrap, call 1-877-ASK-AZEK (275-2935) or visit the AZEK website at www.azek.com.

About AZEK Building Products:

With more than 25 years of cellular pvc manufacturing experience, AZEK Building Products makes and markets premium, low maintenance exterior building products under the AZEK Brand such as AZEK Deck, the leading brand of low-maintenance decking, and AZEK Trim, the leading brand of low-maintenance trim. Other AZEK products include AZEK Mouldings, AZEK Porch, AZEK Rail and AZEK Pavers. All of these products offer tangible benefits as ideal replacements for traditional products in myriad outdoor uses. For more information about AZEK Building Products, call 1-877-ASK-AZEK (275-2935) or visit the AZEK website at www.azek.com. For the latest updates, follow AZEK on Facebook at facebook.com/azekbuildingproducts and Twitter at @AZEKProducts.