Management Information Systems - Departmental News

All-Woman Team Takes First Place in a Backcountry.com “Hackathon”

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 MST

By Steve Eaton

A team made up of three students and a graduate from the Huntsman School of Business took first place in a competition sponsored by Backcountry.com recently that pitted them against industry professionals in a 24-hour contest that drove programmers to work through the night.

It was called a “hackathon” and they excelled in a category that pitted all-women teams against each other. A hackathon has nothing to do with illegal computer hacking but is instead a term that has evolved to describe a gathering where teams or individuals tackle extreme programming challenges.

Ani Aghababyan, left, Gina Baldazzi, Britney Johnson, and Meghan Lewis took first place in Backcountry.com's Hackathon competition.

Photo by Tracii Haynes

Backcountry.com’s website described its hackathon this way, challenging teams to: “Collaborate and build something awesome in 24-hours – at the end of the event the best, most inspiring hacks will receive prizes. It doesn't have to be helpful to anyone, or even remotely sane. Just something you are excited as hell about doing. Hackathons are meant to be fun.”

The team included Huntsman students Ani Aghababyan, Gina Baldazzi, and Meghan Lewis. Britney Johnson, a Huntsman graduate, was a critical part of the winning effort, according to team members. Britney is part of a start-up company, Politicit, that is made up of current and former Huntsman students. She brought some unique programing experience to the table.

“Britney stayed up nearly all night programing,” Meghan said. “Her focus was amazing.”

Britney said that she went to the event not searching for a job but networking so that she’ll be better aware of the programmers who might be available were she to want to hire someone. She said people often come to her looking for help but her work at PoliticIt keeps her very busy. She said she likes to be able to refer people to talented programmers.

She said she learned, for example, of the strong work ethic that Gina, Meghan, and Ani have as she watched them push their limits all night long working on the project. She said at the Huntsman School she learned programing basics more importantly, learned how to work with a team and tap individual strengths of each member to make accelerated progress. The hackathon gave her the ability to see how others work in a taxing, intense team setting.

“What you go to school for is to develop the ability to work hard, and learn to work as a team,” she said. “You learn that each person has strengths. You value those who have focused on specific skills and developed an expertise in those areas. You also learn how to motivate those who aren’t performing well to do better.”

The contest drew about a dozen teams and most of them were employees of Backcountry.com. The Huntsman team built what it called a “gift-able application” in Facebook that, once fully developed, would help people buy gifts for their Facebook friends who have an interest in outdoor recreation. Each member of the team won a $100 gift certificate to Backcountry.com but Meghan said the certificates were not the incentive to compete.

“It was definitely for the experience,” Meghan said. “We also hoped it would prove a good addition to our resumes.”

Gina believes the company created an all-women category because firms want to encourage more women to go into management information systems and to increase exposure to their own outdoor product offerings to women. The contest was not a way to get some fast low-cost programing but it was held in hopes it would spark new ideas for the company, she said.

“They didn’t take any of our code,” Gina said. “They were just looking for ideas.”

Two Huntsman Teams Take Top Honors at Walmart IT Summit

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 MST

By Steve Eaton

Two teams from the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business recently placed first and second in an information systems competition in Bentonville, Ark., that pitted 82 teams from top universities around the world against each other, testing their IT skills and their ability to find innovative solutions.

The Utah State University students took the top honors at the 2013 Walmart IT Summit and AIS Student Chapter Leadership Conference. The Association of Information Systems (AIS), the organization that hosted the competition, is a professional group for individuals and organizations that lead the research, teaching, practice and study of information systems worldwide. Teams from 17 universities entered the contest and just six teams in each of four different categories made it to the finals.

(From left) Vishal Patel, Eric Schnell and Dannaea Ward took first place in the IT risk identification category.

Photo by Steve Eaton

A team of three Huntsman MIS students, which included Vishal Patel, Dannaea Ward and Eric Schnell, entered the “IT risk identification category” and took first place. They were asked to do a case study for a fictional health care company that was trying to decide if it should store private patient data in an online secure cloud storage system or on a more traditional protected system. The team took first place on a regional level to qualify for nationals where it was further tested and asked to come up with a more detailed plan to mitigate the risks of its recommendation.

“In the IT risk identification competition we were up against students from Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Alabama, and Temple University, all of which are ranked among the top 20 MIS programs in the United States,” Dannaea said. “By placing in both categories we competed in, we were able to gain great recognition for our MIS program. We as Huntsman Students take great pride in the education we are receiving and this was the perfect opportunity to show off the skills we have learned.”

The other team of three Huntsman management information systems (MIS) students, which included Gina Baldazzi, Kristen Tenney and Kyle Bell, submitted a training video they created and the team took second place in the “interactive learning module” category. The video, which a former student, Marielle Sanchez, helped them create before she graduated in 2012, is aimed at helping people learn how to create an “entity relationship diagram,” which Gina described as “the blue prints for a database.” She said they wanted to create something that was not too technical so that even those who are not MIS students could understand it.

David Olsen, who heads the Management Information Systems Department, said it is impressive that the Huntsman students competed so well in this premiere international MIS competition.

“The hallmark of a great MIS student at USU is hard work, productivity and camaraderie,” Dr. Olsen said. “Our students were just so determined to bring home awards and I am so proud of them. To see them excel like this when competing against some of the brightest students in the country is gratifying.”

One competition broke students up into new teams made up of a mix of students from various schools. The team Gina was on took second place in that competition.

Two Huntsman MIS Teams Make it to Finals in Global Competition

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 MST

By Steve Eaton

Two teams of Huntsman students have made it to the finals of a systems information contest that drew 82 teams from some of the best universities in the world.

The Utah State University students will be going to Bentonville, Ark., to participate in the 2013 Walmart IT Summit and AIS Student Chapter Leadership Conference April 18 – 20. The Association of Information Systems, the organization that is hosting the competition, is a professional group for individuals and organizations that lead the research, teaching, practice, and study of information systems worldwide.

(From left to right) Kyle Bell, Kristen Tenney, and Gina Baldazzi, submitted a training video to the competition.

(From left to right) Vishal Patel, Eric Schnell, and Dannaea Ward, submitted their recommendations after reading a case study.

Above photos by Steve Eaton

There were 82 teams from 17 universities that entered the contest and just six teams in each of four different categories made it to the finals. Only five universities, counting USU, managed to get more than one team to the championships. Some of the universities that still have teams in the running include Carnegie Mellon University, University of Alabama, Brigham Young University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all schools known for their MIS programs.

One team of three Huntsman management information systems (MIS) students, which included Gina Baldazzi, Kristen Tenney, and Kyle Bell, submitted a training video they created and became finalists in the “interactive learning module” category. The video, which a former student, Marielle Sanchez, helped them create before she graduated in 2012, is aimed at helping people learn how to create an “entity relationship diagram,” which Gina described as “the blue prints for a data base.” She said they wanted to create something that was not too technical so that even those who are not MIS students could understand it.

“We think all business students can learn from this video,” Gina said. “With this training business leaders will know how to better communicate their database needs with the IT professionals who will be helping them.”

David Olsen, who heads the Management Information Systems Department, said that the students were able to hit a “sweet spot” because they identified a critical need which made their project stand out. He said both teams found innovative solutions that earned each of them a place in the finals.

The other team of three MIS students, which included Vishal Patel, Dannaea Ward, and Eric Schnell, entered the “IT risk identification category” and were asked to do a case study for a fictional health care company that was trying to decide if it should store private patient data in an online secure cloud storage system or on a more traditional protected system.

The team recommended that the company choose an approach where it would use on-demand software that is hosted and maintained online by a third-party vendor.

“With the boom in such cloud offerings, the enterprise world is rapidly moving toward these types of solutions for the benefits they offer and the cost savings they can deliver,” Eric said.

Based on the risks involved with choosing this approach, the team also cautioned the company to set high security standards, to plan a clear exit strategy in case of vendor conflict, and to implement a strict policy to guard against fraud.

“We are happy to represent the MIS department here at USU,” Kristen said. “Getting the Huntsman name out there, especially with two different teams is a big deal to us. It shows that we are getting a quality education, even when compared to other top schools across the nation.”

Dr. Olsen said MIS students at the Huntsman School of Business are prepared to enter the job market when they graduate.

“We have very talented students here and many companies are recognizing that,” Dr. Olsen said. “They now seek out our students because of what they can offer.”

Both teams said they are excited for the opportunity to go to the convention hoping it will open up job opportunities for them.

“The end of the game is to get a good job,” Dannaea said. “When you add to our formal education competitions like this that offer excellent networking opportunities, it can lead to a very good job.”

Vishal said he wants people to see that Huntsman MIS students can compete with the best.

“We just want to tell people that we are Aggies and we can deliver,” Vishal said. “It’s school pride. We want people to know that are not just famous for our ice cream.”

Huntsman Professor John Johnson Teaches at Wharton

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 MST

Huntsman Professor John Johnson (left) with Wharton Professor David Bell.

By Allie Jeppson

Huntsman Professor John Johnson can now start a sentence by saying, “When I taught at Wharton… .”

That’s because he was invited to speak to students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania twice within the last six months.

In the last year, three professors from the Wharton School have come to speak to Huntsman students. One of them, David Bell, took a special interest in the company PoliticIt, a firm founded by current and former Huntsman students and Dr. Johnson.

Dr. Bell, Wharton’s Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor, invited Dr. Johnson to come and talk about PoliticIt. The company uses a web-based neural-network technology that evaluates the online buzz about political candidates and has been used to predict election outcomes.

“Mr. Bell was intrigued with what we did, so he and I started communicating a lot,” Dr. Johnson said. “After a while I got an email from him asking me if I’d be interested in coming to talk to his students about PoliticIt and the intersection of big data and politics.”

Dr. Johnson said he gladly accepted the invitation and first visited Wharton’s new full-time MBA program, located in San Francisco, in November 2012. After a successful visit, Dr. Bell asked Dr. Johnson to talk to his students again in January, this time in Philadelphia.

“It was cool to learn that we have students who are just as smart as students at Wharton,” he said. “This example can show Huntsman students that we are doing things that are so impressive that professors at Wharton want their students to see it.”

Company With Huntsman Roots Predicts 91% of Political Races Correctly

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 MST

By Steve Eaton

After traveling by bus for three months to 48 states logging 18,000 miles, contacting more than 3,000 politicians, participating in a drag race with a pig bus and a “slow walk” with a presidential candidate, the leaders of PoliticIt decided to take a break this week.

While many of us felt battered, worn, and exhausted by the long presidential campaign, with its gaffes, attack ads, and debates, few have become as immersed in an election cycle as the PoliticIt crew. Four members of the Logan-based, start-up company, which monitors online buzz and predicts political races, traveled the country in a customized mobile home looking for politicians to interview, reporters to interest, and the credibility they will need to take their entrepreneurial efforts to the next level.

It looks as if they have earned some of that credibility already. On election night KUTV and KSL in Salt Lake City asked to have PoliticIt people available for interviews as the results came in. They were asking about the company’s “IT Scores,” indicators PoliticIt uses to predict which candidates will come out on top.

PoliticIt uses “machine-learning algorithms” to analyze massive amounts of data, taking into account what people do or say on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia, along with several other factors to come up with a number that they say is indicative of a candidate’s digital influence. The more positive buzz the candidates are generating, the higher their IT Scores. PoliticIt predicted 477 federal races along with most of the gubernatorial contests. In 91 percent of the races they followed the candidates with the highest IT Scores won.

Four members of the PoliticIt crew show off their bus. They are, from left to right, Josh Light, Lauren Johnson. Sterling Morris, and Shai McDonald.

Josh Light, the CEO of the company, compared it to the number-crunching story behind the baseball movie “Moneyball” where statistical analysis of batting records helped the Oakland Athletics create a winning season.

“It’s crazy,” Josh said. “We were predicting races we knew nothing about with our machine-learning algorithm. It just blows my mind. It’s like the Moneyball of politics.”

The PoliticIt crew found itself in Kansas on Sunday, Nov. 4, with last-minute numbers to crunch and thousands of miles to travel if they were going to end up back in Utah by Nov. 6. Josh said he spent all Sunday night working on the PoliticIt data, making sure the final data they would have on election eve would be accurate and reliable. The next day they had to drive 21 hours straight to make it to Utah so they’d be ready for election night in Salt Lake City. They arrived in Cache Valley at 5:30 a.m. the day before the elections, Josh said. He said they went to bed for a few hours and then went to work crunching data all night long again to get ready.

“You have to understand that all these intense days happened after three months of being in a bus, and in the bus we would be getting up at 8 or 9 in the morning and going to bed about 2 a.m.,” Josh said. “It was constant work.”

Sleep deprived, Josh ended up on camera, along with Sterling Morris, chief marketing officer, giving their analysis of the election until after the time that President Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech--a race they predicted he would win. John Johnson, a Huntsman professor who has supported the group financially and in many other ways, is the chairman of the company.

He and the company’s chief technology officer, Britney Johnson, and John David Johnson, a programmer, were the go-to experts for KSL TV. Britney is John Johnson’s daughter, and John David is his son. Josh said Britney and John David stayed up all night on Nov. 7 to compile the election results.

Josh said it was rewarding to see their strategy pay off.

“It feels good,” Josh said of the credibility they were accorded on election eve. “It feels like our marketing has worked correctly. That was part of our marketing plan, to create relationships with media.”

That marketing plan now includes selling software the company has developed to the politicians and political operatives they met on the road. With the new software, each campaign can do its own detailed analysis of its online presence.

They wanted to interview as many of the candidates for national office and governor as they could, but discovered that incumbents who felt confident they would win were not as interested in being interviewed for an online video. Candidates who faced steep odds, however, were often happy to get additional exposure.

They struck out trying to interview President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. They did get an interview with the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, and they got him to help them make their own “slow walking” dramatic video. You can see that by clicking here.

Sterling, an accomplished videographer, documented the trip and made a number of other unusual videos with politicians as PoliticIt tried to create its own online buzz. Here are some of the other videos that are posted on their website:

They challenged Pennsylvania Senate candidate Gene Stilp, a Democrat, to a slow-moving drag race in front of the Pennsylvania state capital buildings with a pink bus that had been modified to look like a pig. Candidate Stilp drives the bus around Pennsylvania to spread the message that he wants to ferret out government waste. You can see the race by clicking here.
They filmed Barry Hinkley, a candidate for the Senate from Rhode Island, doing pushups with a voice-over that says, “When Barry Hinkley does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up; he’s pushing the earth down.” Watch the video by clicking here.
One video features Josh in a bench-press competition with Missouri Senate candidate Jonathan Dine, a Libertarian. Click here to see who won.
They got Tennessee Congressional candidate Pat Riley to run through downtown Nashville to a Rocky soundtrack, demonstrating his fighting spirit. You can see that video by clicking here.

Josh and Sterling were joined by Huntsman intern McCade Child, and Shelby Sonnentag, marketing and communications director. Lauren Johnson and Shai McDonald, creative designers, are still in school and did not go on the trip. Miles English, a PoliticIt programmer, who is working on his degree in computer science, also stayed in Logan.

The trip was hard work, Josh said. The vehicle had to be maintained, washed and prepared. Josh said that most politicians dream of traveling around in their own campaign bus, so when they saw that PoliticIt had a bus it gave the company added credibility.

The bus almost became a convertible on the New York Parkway, however.

Parkways are designed for cars, and Josh said they didn’t know that. When the PoliticIt bus became packed-in, surrounded by cars, and heading toward a tunnel that only had 8-feet-11-inches of overhead clearance distance in the outside lanes, Sterling, who was driving, found himself swerving to the middle of the road in the hope of not tearing off the top of the vehicle, which is 12 feet tall.

“All the cars basically gave us tons of room because they were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this guy is in trouble,” Josh said. “So, he swerved to the middle of the tunnel, and we barely cleared it. We came out the other side and saw that another RV had just gone into the tunnel in the other direction, and the low ceiling had ripped off the top of their RV.”

They were immediately pulled over by police who said, “What were you guys thinking, driving on a parkway?” Josh said, and we said, “We don’t know what a parkway is! We’re not from New York.”

Huntsman School's Social Media Efforts Outrank Hundreds of Schools

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:00:00 MST

When it comes to social media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business has vaulted into the ranks of the top 30 AACSB accredited business schools in the United States, thanks to the efforts of one graduate student. In April 2012, the Huntsman School ranked 8th in Twitter followers, 15th in Facebook followers, and 29th in YouTube views. This puts it ahead of all other Utah business schools combined.

This all comes thanks to a single student, Sterling Morris, who recently graduated in May of 2012 with a master's in management information systems (MIS). Sterling said he has little interest in his own personal social media presence. And yet, thanks to his efforts, his school can boast that its Facebook and Twitter communities are outdoing some major business schools.

“Creating a social media community can be rewarding because, to some extent, you can keep score,” Sterling said. “It’s nice that we can say that our Facebook site has more followers than business schools from universities like University of Southern California, Duke, Cornell, Georgetown, and Northwestern.”

Sterling Morris expanded the reach of the Huntsman School's social media efforts

It wasn’t long after Sterling was hired to help out with the photography needs of the Huntsman School of Business in 2010 that he took an interest in the school’s Facebook and Twitter presence. While he neglected his own personal Facebook page, he was fascinated to see the impact things like Twitter and Facebook were having on businesses and organizations.

In April of 2012, just two years after he started, Sterling did his own study to find out how the Huntsman School of Business Facebook site compared to other business schools. At that point it had more than 5,000 Facebook followers making it number 15 in the nation among the nearly 500 business schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). That was a 967 percent increase from when he started helping out.

He found the school’s new Twitter account had 280 followers in 2010 and now has more than 9,000 followers, ranking it number eight in the country among accredited business schools in April of 2012. The school has more followers than all other Utah business schools combined. He launched a YouTube account that has drawn more than 40,000 views, which ranked it at #29 in the nation.

Sterling said he started by studying what other business schools and major companies were doing to make their social media efforts successful. He said he discovered three core things they were all doing well.

“I discovered a well-managed social media presence is consistent, is responsive, and it’s engaging,” he said.

He said he doesn’t measure success just by how many people have “liked” the Huntsman Facebook site. He said real reach is better identified by the type of content that generates responses and discussions. He began to experiment and to tailor his messaging to meet the needs of his audience. He said such experimentation is necessary because what works for one company may not work for another organization.

He said that while a serious Seahawks fan, for example, may be thirsty for every tweet that comes out about his team, a loyal Goodyear customer may not want to hear from a tire company every day. By experimenting and paying attention to his numbers, he made progress.

“Look at the numbers and you can discover interesting facts and trends that aren’t intuitive,” he said.

He said he discovered that the Huntsman community was interested in positive news about the school and photos of events happening on the Logan campus.

“Our business community makes a huge investment in the business school, from tuition dollars to the time people invest in the business school,” he said. “Through their career they carry their degree with them. The Huntsman School community is heavily invested and very proud of the business school, and people want to hear about what’s going on here.”

Sterling has a knack for identifying needs of his audience and finding ways to meet them, according to the Huntsman staffer who was his supervisor, Steve Eaton.

“The key to unleashing Sterling’s success was to get out of his way,” Steve said. “He gave our social media a voice, and it became a resource to students who wanted to know what was going on and who was in the middle of it. If someone tweeted a question, Sterling always found the answer.”

Sterling also went out and followed others and engaged online with other people who were interested in business news in Utah, even if they were not necessarily interested in the Huntsman School of Business. He cultivated a network of people and shared through social media information helpful to their careers, whether they were students or alumni in the workplace.

USU Student Chapter of AIS Recognized as Best New Student Chapter of 2011

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 MST

By Paul Lewis Siddoway

A new student club at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business has been recognized by a global organization as its Best New Student Chapter in 2011.

In the fall of 2010, students at Utah State University founded a student chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), a global professional organization for research, teaching, practice, and study of information systems.

(From left to right) Ritu Bisht, careers ambassador; Nic Hartment, PR rep; Carolyn Coronado, VP of Activities; Dewey Denning, last year's AIS president; Clayton Fielding, President; Gabriel Figueiro, PR rep; Michael Morrey, activities coordinator.

Photo by Paul Lewis Siddoway

Kathy Chudoba, an associate professor in the Management Information Systems Department, accepted the award for the best new chapter on behalf of the USU AIS chapter and Robert Hayden, the chapter's faculty advisor, at the International Conference on Information Systems held in Shanghai, China, in December 2011.

Clayton Fielding, a senior in the MIS department and the current USU AIS president, said the USU AIS chapter submitted a report in the spring of 2011 of its activities for their first academic year, detailing the results of its plans to help students gain knowledge, get connected, and get employed. Among other events, Clayton said the USU AIS chapter has a special Partners In Business session with speakers brought in to talk to MIS students, which was one reason the chapter was selected for the award.

The organization is for all USU undergraduate or graduate students interested in technology, Clayton said. The USU AIS chapter has MIS students, as well as computer science and computer engineering majors. Clayton said their vision is to know about the next best technology and be a resource for students who are trying to stay up to date with the newest tools. The chapter meets every Thursday throughout the semester, and membership in the USU AIS chapter is $10 each academic year.

He said the chapter has also branched out to other student organizations, like the Society for Human Resource Management and the Huntsman School’s Business Council.

The Huntsman School of Business emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurial thinking and Clayton said that many of the club's activities, such as teaching students how to build their own business websites, have been centered on encouraging entrepreneurs.

Aside from assisting USU students, Clayton said the chapter is also helping the Brigham Young University chapter plan the global 2012 Leadership Conference and Student Competition, which will be held April 26 through 28 in Provo. Those interested in the conference may visit www.ais2012.com for more details.

Those interested in USU AIS, may visit its website at huntsman.usu.edu/ais for more information.

Business Analytics within Management Information Systems

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 MST

BY CHRISTINE ARRINGTON
A good example of cutting-edge analytics at the Huntsman School comes from the MIS department, where students Sterling Morris and Josh Light worked together with a team to create the entrepreneurial prizewinning Politicit.com website mentioned on page 7 in this magazine; it tracks keywords about politicians across the web through social media and key “influencers” to predict how public opinion is trending, even before polls have detected a change. Each candidate’s “IT” score is based on a neural network model that measures the buzz around that candidate.
The professor and student discussed the kinds of new skills and techniques needed to take full advantage of the information now available online.
“Barack Obama has 25 million Facebook friends, each of whom has, on average, 390 friends,” Professor John D. Johnson, team advisor, offered. “If he reaches out to his Facebook friends and they contact their friends, minus any duplication, he can get his message out to a vast number of people.”
“Currently we’re utilizing what we term ‘stat 2.0,’ or second generation statistics,” Josh said. “Traditional statistics was conceived in an era with limited data and computational power. That is no longer the problem. At Politicit.com, we download up to 20 megabytes of data every day from the internet, traditional media, and social media, including every Twitter hash-tag having to do with a presidential candidate. Then we mine the data, analyzing which tweets go viral, figuring out who the most important ‘influencers’ are and what they’re saying.”
The next stage is using tools smartly to get messages to “go viral” — be repeated and forwarded by huge numbers of people.
“We can identify, say, five key words that have been influential,” Josh said. “Then we can calculate how many times a message will be retweeted. Eventually it will be like a genetic algorithm that can be programmed to repair itself.”
One project the team is developing is an “advocate network” through which voter lists can be “socialized” in order to get messages to have a viral effect; the network could include giving members points for retweeting, for example, and could allow them to earn prizes over time.
“The question is, can I use data mining to understand the interactions of individuals and how they influence others well enough to construct influence networks?” Josh said. He’s working on that now.

Huntsman Students and Graduates Create One-Stop Shopping for Political Junkies

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 MST

By Steve Eaton

The world of presidential politics can be very unpredictable, with hourly changes dropping or boosting a candidate’s fortunes.

And yet a handful of students and alumni from the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business have come up with something they believe will make the short-term future a little more predictable. They have launched a new non-partisan website called politicit.com that automatically pulls data from a number of traditional press outlets and social media sources like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia and gives readers a snapshot of what’s happening in the minute-by-minute online world. It analyzes a number of factors including online activity, traditional polls, and other breaking news to calculate an "It Score." The "It Scores" can predict poll numbers in advance, creating real-time polling daily, according to the company. Those scores are displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the home page next to each candidate's picture.

(From left to right) Britney Johnson, Josh Light, Lauren Johnson, Shai McDonald, John Johnson and Sterling Morris developers of Politicit.com.

Photo by Steve Eaton

The entrepreneurs running the site see it as a groundbreaking idea, and apparently, they aren’t the only ones who see potential for the website. They submitted their idea to an online business-pitch competition called Intel Innovators, and it ended up being selected as one of the 20 finalists in the running for prizes that could total as much as $100,000. The top five ideas from the semi-final round will be selected to compete in a final round where each team is given the opportunity to pitch in front of top investors and entrepreneurs. The winner will be selected by online votes. Instructions for those interested in giving the team a boost can be found here. The deadline for voting is Dec. 19, and interested people can vote daily.

Josh Light is the CEO of the new company.

“Traditional polls reflect what people felt weeks ago,” Light said. “Politicit uses sophisticated software to provide real-time political polling.”

The site, which can be viewed here, is sort of one-stop shopping for the political junkie. It includes breaking media stories from mainstream news sites, blog postings from key websites on both sides of the political spectrum, and a collection of campaign-related videos making the news.

“The ‘IT’ score is real-time political polling,” Light said. “We are now preparing to expand this service to a state and local level, starting in Utah.”

Huntsman students Sterling Morris, a graduate management information systems (MIS) student, Lauren Johnson, an MIS major, and Shai Mcdonald, a MIS major, are founders of the company along with Josh Light and Britney Johnson. Light graduated in 2010 with degrees in economics, finance, and entrepreneurship, and Britney Johnson graduated in 2010 with a degree in MIS. John Johnson, head of the MIS Department, is an investor and key supporter of the new company. A video explaining the philosophy behind the website, that features the founders, can be viewed here.

Josh Light and Sterling Morris were interviewed on Utah Public Radio's "Access Utah." To hear that interview click here.

PoliticIt

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 MST

In November 2011, students at the Huntsman School noticed that the political discussion surrounding the presidential race was evolving from previous elections, as politics shifted from exclusively mainstream media to include blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. But traditional political polling does not capture real-time activity; it is weeks behind what is actually happening. With backgrounds in Management Information Systems, Finance, and Entrepreneurship, these students utilized their Huntsman School education to create a new website called “Politicit”. Using neural network technology, the site gathers information about political candidates from social networks and mainstream media and uses it to give each candidate an “It” score, indicating how people feel about the candidate in real time. So far, the site predicts the poll results remarkably well long before they are published. In December, Politicit entered the Intel Innovators competition, and placed in the top 5. In the future, the team plans to expand the site to also cover state and local politics. At the Huntsman School, we eagerly await the future of political polling, delivered the Politicit way.