Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 02/08/06 web stories

Nascent technologies show promise for government apps

By Brad Grimes, GCN Staff

PHOENIX, Ariz.—In a room full of venture capitalists—including representatives from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investing arm—technology start-ups have unleashed a bevy of new products. And while many will likely never find their way into government agencies (the conference kicked off with a high-tech ice cream machine), several show promise for addressing enterprise challenges.

The DEMO conferences, now in their 16th year, give start-ups an opportunity to debut their products in front of potential investors and the technology press. Companies get six minutes on stage to demonstrate their products’ capabilities. The Palm Pilot and TiVo are among the influential technologies to get their starts at DEMO.

PolyVision Corp. of Atlanta launched an electronic version of the large flipcharts used in conference rooms. The Thunder Virtual Flipchart System includes what is essentially a giant touch-screen computer and PolyVision’s own collaboration software for marking up images and taking electronic notes and then “peeling” them off the touch screen in order to project them onto a wall or screen via an LCD projector.

After the company’s on-stage presentation, PolyVision’s executive vice president of global sales Ira Hutchinson said the company was in talks with several government agencies about using the system. The setup that PolyVision demonstrated included several LCD projectors displaying electronic flipchart pages across a long screen. Participants in a meeting can be remote users, and throw their own charts or diagrams directly onto the screen in order to share information.

Hutchinson said that when meeting participants plug into the system to share information, actual data is not transmitted. The Thunder system simply takes the video-out signal from a notebook computer, for instance, and puts it onscreen.

Later today, IronPort Systems Inc. of San Bruno, Calif., will demonstrate its new S-Series of Web security appliances. The company has already been selling e-mail security products to government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. The e-mail appliances use unique reputation filters to help keep out spam and malicious code while minimizing false positives.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks



GCN Popup