UNC

For the Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail (RATOM) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we were tasked with deploying to a Microsoft Azure environment. More details about the project are in our first blog post in this Learn With Us blog series. Caktus has experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, but we hadn't had the opportunity to use Azure yet, so we looked forward to the opportunity to use that environment and document our experience. The entire deployment process is available on GitHub as a reference under the StateArchivesOfNorthCarolina/ratom-deploy repository.

In my previous line of work as an archivist, the question of what to do about email archives was an ongoing and deeply-considered topic. Email is everywhere. Yes, even Gen Z and millennials use it, despite thousands of think pieces that would have you believe that the old ways are giving way to business meetings conducted on fixed-gear bicycles, over avocado toast and Instagram.

At this year’s mHealth at Duke 2015 Conference, Dr. Lisa Hightow-Weidman discussed her current mHealth projects for HIV prevention. Chief among these projects is her work with Caktus Group on Epic Allies, a mobile gaming app that utilizes social media and mini-games to increase adherence to prescribed medication amongst HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM).

The Art of Cool festival is a staple of spring happenings in the Triangle. A three-day festival to present, promote, and preserve jazz and jazz-influenced music, The Art of Cool always promises to be a great time for those interested in music, art, and delicious food from Durham’s many food trucks. But what does music have to do with programming and app development? This year, Caktus Group is helping to sponsor a new portion of the festival called Innovate Your Cool. Innovate Your Cool celebrates the power of cool ideas, advancing innovative thinking by bringing together intelligent people with radically new ideas.

Our own Caleb Smith, Astro Code School lead instructor, is teaching this semester at UNC’s School of Journalism, one of the nation’s leading journalism schools. He’s sharing his enthusiasm for Django application development with undergraduate and graduate media students in a 500-level course, Advanced Interactive Development.

Caktus has always pursued projects that make a difference in the world, particularly around HIV/AIDs. Now we’re hoping to provide a technology solution to a population that’s notoriously difficult to treat: teens and young adults living with HIV. They’re disproportionately impacted by new infections and, in the South in particular, those with HIV/AIDs have the lowest survival rates of any group living with the disease.

The following is a press release posted in partnership with our team at UNC  and Duke.

The web application development company Caktus Group has teamed up with researchers at the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens.