Our Experience with Highrise

Over the years, we’ve attempted to use Customer Relationship Management systems such as Salesforce and Sugar CRM internally as a way of tracking our own sales process.  Our needs on this front are pretty straightforward, so both Salesforce and Sugar CRM seemed like way more functionality than we needed and fell into disuse pretty quickly. ...

Best Practices for Mass Emailing

Here at The Bivings Group, we’ve dealt with a myriad of requests for mass emailing services, tools and strategies to help our clients make the most of what is the most powerful weapon in online advocacy. Based on our research and testing, here are some best practice tips for making your email campaigns as effective as possible....

Robots Ready for Their Own Operating System

Efforts to boost robot-to-robot cooperation took a giant step during July’s International Joint Conference in Artificial Intelligence, when roboticists around the world decided to start with human-to-human cooperation.

The science of developing robots, though narrow, was surprisingly fractured until the development of the Robot Operating System (ROS).

“Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation,”...

A Partial Answer to How Stimulus Funds Were Distributed.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, there’s a good article by Alec McGillis about the power of senators from sparsely populated states.

Toward’s the end there’s this: “And then there’s the Senate’s age-old distortion of distributive politics, in which goodies are doled out on anything but a per-capita basis. California,...

So How Did They Decide to Allocate the Recovery Funds to the States?

 This post is a bit different from the usual on The Bivings Report.  But I’m a big believer in transparency in government, and watch with interest what ProPublica, a new non-profit investigative newsroom, is up to.  It’s an important experiment in contemporary journalism.  ProPublica has been keeping tabs on the stimulus funds;...