Risk Technology of the Week | The Rio Operations Center

Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with 600 employees working with 30 agencies, the location of the largest Control Room screen in South America is ahead of its time when it comes to disaster readiness technology in Rio De Janeiro. 

"Integration of information in real-time is the main function of the Operations Center, allowing decisions to be based on the best data, and carried out across all City departments. In this way, highly-skilled operators are able to anticipate natural disasters such as landslides, and alert affected communities; as well as to improve the response time to any sudden occurrence in the city, such as accidents and fires."

An impressive georeference system compiled from extensive imaging and radar across the system maps the daily occurrences of everything from traffic to landslides across the city - an impressive feat considering the expanse of the city incorporates over 6 million inhabitants. This operations center will be crucial to the logistical planning of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, both to be held in Rio.

Click here to learn more about Rio's disaster readiness technology 

Risk Technology of the Week | Capstone RBMI Rotating Equipment

An advanced predictive software developed by Lloyd's Register Energy Americas is being described as "the first reliability-based mechanical integrity software for strategizing the maintenance of rotating equipment." A very useful tool for industries such as manufacturing and construction, with heavy machinery and currently no optimal way of measuring the expected life and utility of rotating equipment. 

"The software uses equipment-specific risk models, adding variables such as environment, use and other factors, to make base mean-time-to-failure predictions, says Reeves. It also factors in the manufacturer and model "to predict how often a component will fail," he says."

The combination of data from both the piece of equipment itself and the comprehensive data from its predecessors, creates a valuable predicitve model for the software to help companies avoid equipment failure and risk claims.

Click here to learn more about this equipment risk analysis technology  

Tech of the Week | Tap-To-Pay Smartphones

Despite credit card companies' inability to popularize 'tap-to-pay' technology built into credit cards, Caribou Honig wrote an article for Forbes predicting that smartphones have an opportunity to employ tap-to-pay technologies and do it successfully.

"Apple will include Near Field Communication (NFC) in the next iPhone, embed a digital wallet as part of iOS, and enable Tap to Pay. 3rd party developers will create innovative, value-added “spokes“ to plug into the mobile wallet “hub.” This will be the watershed event that prompts merchants, motivated by a mix of fear and greed, to upgrade their point-of-sale terminals to support NFC, and as a consequence even competing mobile wallet platforms will benefit," Honig predicts. 

What this could mean for consumer purchases, expense tracking, money transfers, account management, and guided purchase decisions is not to be taken lightly. Not to mention the waterfall of data security concerns that will be on every users' minds. But if the value propisition is done right, in ten years, your smartphone will be that much more useful, but that much more terrifying to lose. 

Click here to read more about Tap-to-Pay technology in smartphones

Tech of the Week: Google Drive

In-browser access to files, automatic syncing to your desktop and mobile devices, third party application authorized access to your files - Google has joined the cloud game and their premier is nothing short of impressive. Not that we expected anything less. 

How will your Google applications in the cloud enhance collaboration and sharing in the workplace? How can services like Drive essentially be an enterprise application all on their own? I think we're going to find out. 

Click here to learn more about Google Drive  

Tech of the Week | Canadian Virtual Cash

No, not like the cash in the account you check online every day. This is simply cash, with no personal information or bank account data linked to it, but in virtual form. 

"The government just launched the MintChip Challenge — which was apparently so popular it’s already fully registered — to seek new digital payment apps for this new virtual currency. The idea is sort of a hybrid, combining the convenience of electronic transactions and the anonymity of cash. It will work via SD cards...It’s sort of like BitCoin but with actual, government-backed value."

The 500 registered developers have four months to develop applications that will make this MintChip virtual money a functional part of the Canadian economy. Looking at a prize of about $50,000 in solid gold, they should come up with something good enough that other countries take a second look. And whether this will have an affect on corporate as much as individual/personal cash, I guess we'll see. 

Click here to read more about this virtual cash concept in Canada 

Tech of the Week | Project Glass

Anything we try to write or summarize about this technology won't do it justice. So we'll just direct you straight to the source.

Click here to watch the video about Project Glass that will quite literally change your view of the future

Tech of the Week | The Big Data Initiative

As information technology professionals struggle to saddle up Big Data and tame it into their systems, the White House's Office of Science and Technology is launching an initiative to help out. 

"A media advisory indicates that the initiative is focused on addressing the issue of big data in scientific research across multiple fields. 'To capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to extract insights and make new connections across disciplines we need better tools and programs to access, store, search, visualize and analyze these data,' according to the advisory."

The government hopes to use the resources at their disposal to help professionals across industries analyze and sort through universal sets of data and make them available in the most useful format to all. They've already launched a Data.gov website with their efforts so far. 

"The idea is to create data sets in common formats which allow consumers to access information and let software developers create custom applications."

This could have very positive results for service providers and end-users alike. 

Click here to read more about the government's big data initiative

SmartCompliance Certificate of Insurance Management Software to Exhibit at RIMS 2012 Annual Conference in Philadelphia

On April 15th, more than 4,000 risk management professionals and 392 exhibiting companies with more than 3,600 exhibitors from 50 countries will meet at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia for the Risk & Insurance Management Society's (RIMS) Annual Conference. And we're excited to be among them.

Four days of over 120 educational sessions means lots of opportunities for CE/CEU/CPE Credits made possible by a partnership with the CEU Institute. And 392 exhibiting companies means lots of solutions and services strutting their stuff in front of the largest number of industry professionals and leaders gathering annually worldwide. 

We'll have our certificate of insurance management solution, SmartCompliance, on display at booth #308 along with some other cool tech that, let's just say, might involve life-size Angry Birds. Along with some free SmartCompliance swag (that may come with added benefits throughout the conference) RIMS Conference attendees will have the opportunity to see a live demo of our paperless certificate of insurance collection, analysis, renewal, and issuance capabilities and talk with the co-founders of our product, James Benham and Kyle Brechtel. Already an integral part of the IT suite of one of America's most prominent Third Party Adminstrators (TPA), SmartCompliance has been built by and for the fast paced, data and compliance driven environment all RIMS attendees operate in on a daily basis. We look forward to showing it off to more of the risk community. 

Come visit us at Booth #308 to hear about the exclusive discount we are offering RIMS members on their first year of using our software. If you need more convincing, click here. 

Tech of the Week | Nimble, Business Relationship Management Across Platforms

We already have a plethora of options when it comes to social media brand monitoring tools. But what about in depth contact and customer monitoring across all communication platforms - from social media to personal email? 

Nimble allows you to import your contacts from email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn and connect contact information for individual people in your network, creating unique profile pages for those contacts. So, if you follow a particular client on Google+ and Twitter, that information will be all be accessible from the same profile page.

The Nimble platform allows you to see all interactions with an individual, no matter who in your company is interacting and no matter the medium. 

“Business is social, and people buy from people they like and people who known them,” Nimble CEO Joe Ferrera told Mashable. “CRM systems treat their customers like cows they’re going to process. We want to promote engagement.” 

Click here to read more about this new era of CRM that should prove beneficial to all industries

Risk Technology of the Week | SmartCompliance | Apple's New iPad

Apple's done it again: Left us to contemplate why we can't just turn in our old versions for the latest one when it comes out...

As tablet technology is relevant to all industries, especially risk and insurance, we thought this week we'd sum up how the new iPad aims to set the standard in tablet technology yet again:

• A screen with 2048 x 1536 pixels - more than your smartphone, more than your HD TV, in fact, there are so many pixels in the new iPad that they are choosing to call it a "Retina Display" as opposed to merely a 'screen'
• To power such a retinal display of awesomeness, a A5x quad core graphic processor
• 4G LTE antennae for AT&T or Verizon service
• 10 hour battery life for WiFi, 9 hour life for 4G
• 1080p video recording
• Voice operation/dictation capabilties with enhanced microphone
• iPhoto for iPad

Unfortunately no variation in colors from black and white yet...

Click here to read more about the new iPad from one of PopSci's wittiest