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Showing the names of people and setups that helped build a new school, erect a new monument, or fund a program is a vital way to recognize and thank individuals for their contribution. During the past, these displays often involved plaques or framed photographs on the wall. Changes in donor status or the addition of new donors meant extra expense for new engravings, rearrangement of wall mountings, or the purchase of new plaques. With an electronic donor wall, changes can be made on-the-fly, and the display can be made more creative and interactive.

An interactive donor wall can involve a few computer monitors. These slim monitors can be hung on a wall or inserted within the display itself. Info, graphics, and photos can be added to the display from a remote computer. New donors can be added into existing displays and photographs can be included in slide shows on the screen. People will be drawn to view the display, and contributors to deserving causes will get more notice than they do when masses of names are shown on matching gold engravings.

A great thing about using an interactive donor wall is that the organization can be imaginative in their approach. If a fundraiser event is in process, graphics showing how much has been raised can be included. Photographs taken across the development of a building can be used to make a slide show, permitting viewers to see the history of a project. Hand-written thank you notes can be scanned and displayed, giving details on how contributions managed to help individuals.

An electronic donor wall displayed in an area with lots of traffic may become part of the scenery after time. Individuals will be less likely to notice it after the initial few times they go by. In order to keep awareness of projects fresh, organizations can make seasonal or regular changes to these walls. Adding engaging facts, holiday themed backgrounds, and additional pictures may catch the eye of someone that has seen the wall before. Drawing people to read about impending events, and fund-raising success can create greater contributions and collaboration.

An electronic donor wall can supply interactive and entertaining information to the public while recognizing people who gave their money or time to an organization. These displays take up less space, are less difficult to maintain, and can be cheaper than standard donor walls.

Give your member the recognition they deserve with a donor wall. Rise Display also offers an interactive donor wall.

Four months after grounding its entire force of F-22 Raptors, the Air Force has cleared the 170 stealth fighters to fly. Just one little problem: The brass still doesn’t know why a dozen Raptor pilots blacked out and one fatally crashed.

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The U.S. Air Force’s most advanced stealth fighters have been grounded for so long that pilots of the F-22 Raptors are starting to run the risk of being disqualified from flying.

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Attention webscale aficionados, Twitter says it is planning to open source Storm, its Hadoop-like real-time data processing tool. In a blog post Thursday, the microblogging network said it plans to release the Storm code on Sept. 19 at the Strange Loop event in St. Louis, Mo.

The question is — does the world need another real-time data processing tool? After all there are many tools like HStreaming (using Hadoop), the open source S4 and StreamBase, but the overall analytics market (if you can call it a market) is already fragmented. The Storm code comes from Twitter’s acquisition of BackType last month and seems to be an effort to get folks comfortable parsing data on Twitter.

The post does an excellent job laying out use cases for Storm and hints at more to come. While the code can deal with distributed nodes and huge amounts of data a la Hadoop or Map Reduce, Storm handles jobs that are “infinite.” It’s not for a data processing job with an end point, it’s good for streams of data and continual processing. From the post by Nathan Marz:

Here’s a recap of the three broad use cases for Storm:

• Stream processing: Storm can be used to process a stream of new data and update databases in realtime. Unlike the standard approach of doing stream processing with a network of queues and workers, Storm is fault-tolerant and scalable.
• Continuous computation: Storm can do a continuous query and stream the results to clients in realtime. An example is streaming trending topics on Twitter into browsers. The browsers will have a realtime view on what the trending topics are as they happen.
• Distributed RPC: Storm can be used to parallelize an intense query on the fly. The idea is that your Storm topology is a distributed function that waits for invocation messages. When it receives an invocation, it computes the query and sends back the results. Examples of Distributed RPC are parallelizing search queries or doing set operations on large numbers of large sets.

But wait! There’s more! At the end of the post we are assured that there’s more to Storm than the blog post has even defined, which we can learn more about next month at the Strange Loop event. From the post:

I’ve only scratched the surface on Storm. The “stream” concept at the core of Storm can be taken so much further than what I’ve shown here — I didn’t talk about things like multi-streams, implicit streams, or direct groupings. I showed two of Storm’s main abstractions, spouts and bolts, but I didn’t talk about Storm’s third, and possibly most powerful abstraction, the “state spout”. I didn’t show how you do distributed RPC over Storm, and I didn’t discuss Storm’s awesome automated deploy that lets you create a Storm cluster on EC2 with just the click of a button.

So for those anxious to test out a new method of crunching terabytes of real-time data on the fly, get thee to GitHub! And wait.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010
• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns

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