Sentel Corp., Alexandria, Va., has won a $100,000 contract from the Office of Naval Research to develop advanced antennas and supporting systems. The company hopes its work will enable the military to use frequency-hopping transmission systems to thwart eavesdropping.
TippingPoint Technologies Inc., Austin, Texas, has added a peer-to-peer blocking feature to its intrusion prevention appliances. The capability can control unauthorized swapping of audio recordings, movies or pornography on work computers. Administrators set the policy on what peer-to-peer traffic they want blocked, and they can filter by client computer, server, Internet protocol address and application.
Bruce Barney envisions a day when police and emergency personnel responding to a major disaster in the Washington region will immediately share information electronically as they arrive at the incident. The first officer on the scene, he said, will create a file on his of her mobile laptop for the emergency. As other responders arrive, they will communicate through instant messaging, using icons identifying them as police, fire, emergency personnel or highway safety.
Antar-Com Inc.'s integrated physical security monitoring system got its first test shortly after it was installed in the Westchester County, N.Y., courthouse.
Military commanders want to see where their troops and equipment are at all times. Tax bureaus want to flag suspicious returns when they are filed. The Homeland Security Department wants to assemble data from numerous sources to pinpoint where terrorists might strike.
CommuniTech Inc., Elk Grove Village, Ill., offers a telephone that uses a computer's universal serial bus, or USB, port to make phone calls over the Internet.
	The National Cancer Institute is using software from the Lindon, Utah-based Corda Technologies Inc. to help its visually impaired Web users review maps of cancer mortality rates. An agency Web site (http://www3.cancer.gov/atlasplus/) allows visitors to view customized maps visually portraying cancer statistics across all 50 states, sorted by age, gender, time period and race. Corda's OptiMap dynamically generates text files from the maps, making them complaint with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
	During a recent security conference in Washington, Todd Waskelis, director of security consulting for managed security services provider Guardent Inc., Waltham, Mass., drove through the city to show how many wireless networks remain unsecured. One 30-minute drive, using only freeware sniffer software and off-the-shelf hardware, revealed 124 wireless access points sending out beacon, or identification, signals, including apparently two from prominent government agencies.
Federal agencies have done an admirable job posting hundreds of millions of pages on intranets and public Web sites. But finding the right information can be an adventure. That's why agencies need powerful search engines.
Wireless users will enjoy faster connection speeds, thanks to a new standard for wireless data network technologies ratified June 12 by the IEEE Standards Board.
Integrator McDonald Bradley Inc. is focusing its efforts on web applications, including the emerging field of the Semantic Web, its president said in a Washington Technology interview.
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., is developing an appliance that provides multiple wireless fidelity, or WiFi, connections from a single third-generation, mobile phone connection. Lucent spokesman Roger Derringer said the company had first assembled a unit using off-the-shelf parts to show off the possible uses of 3G at a trade show. But the reaction was so positive, the company is now building a prototype.
On May 21, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., demonstrated in Washington some of the technologies it is funding for possible use in its software. Among them were a desktop feature that automatically minimizes clusters of documents when dragged to an edge of the screen, a spam-foiling function that requires the sender's computer to sacrifice a small number of computational cycles before dispatching each e-mail, and software that allows someone to interact with a computer using hand-gestures.
Embedded encryption hardware provider Transcrypt International Inc. has introduced a box that allows first responders to communicate using different types of two-way radios. The Tactical Interoperability Kit operates as a repeater. Up to three different types of radios can be attached to the unit, including those operating in the UHF, VHF and 800-megahertz ranges most heavily used by police, medical and fire units.
Big, name-brand companies are seen as more credible than small firms, so getting government customers to accept newfangled solutions from a small company can be hard, Ray Muslimani said. His firm, 4-year-old Global Computer Enterprises Inc., employs about 100 people.
When the Army last month awarded a $14.9 billion contract to Boeing Co. and Science Applications International Corp. for its Future Combat Systems program, the service stipulated that these cutting-edge systems be built using a cutting-edge methodology known as spiral development.
Web services are heralded as a revolutionary new concept in computing that will gain huge competitive advantages for their users and reinvent the Internet as we know it.
