Federal CIOs face many challenges processing petabytes of knowledge. But progressively more analytic tools offer new insights to enhance agency services with constituents. Every minute of each day, enterprises are flooded with digital data from email, social media sites, websites, and mobile apps. As an enterprise, the government is not any different. Federal agencies and other large organizations are already confronting the necessity to handle petabytes of information. All this data will stress an already overwhelmed system, nevertheless it may even create opportunities for greater engagement — citizen engagement, primarily. So as to require the government to rethink a number of its digital strategies. [ Putting big data on a ball: See NOAA’s Unique 3D Weather Tool. ] Many federal agencies have began to use mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services to create channels of communication, but these tools is probably not implemented in a method that meets the goal of effective interaction with citizens. By treating constituents more like consumers and customers, the... Read More »

Government agencies, universities, and some private companies won authorization to make use of drones within the US. Take a peek on the drones at the job. (Source: Trimble) The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that as many as 7,500 commercial drones — ranging in size from the massive wingspan of a Boeing 737 to a small radio-controlled model airplane — may be hovering inside the US airspace by 2018. Beyond the army, there are lots of potential uses for drones, or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), reminiscent of law enforcement, storm tracking, search and rescue, and aerial surveying. But managing drones domestically comes with its own challenges, which still have to be addressed by america government and the non-public companies involved. The FAA in December deploy six sites to check drone operations across the country. The congressionally mandated sites are tasked with conducting research into the certification and operational requirements for safely integrating commercial drones into the national airspace. The six sites include the University of... Read More »

The Department of Energy’s Hanford site conquers a large area with a versatile cloud environment and skinny clients to enhance performance and lower costs. Top 10 Government IT Innovators Of 2013 (click image for larger view) Imagine having the responsibility for upgrading network operations for dozens of organizations located in 600 buildings over 586 square miles, about half the scale of Rhode Island — and which happens to be the biggest environmental clean-up site within the country.  That was the challenge for Department of Energy contractor Mission Support Alliance (MSA), the corporate mounted by Lockheed Martin, Jacobs, and WSI to support the clean-up of the government’s Hanford site within the state of Washington, that included nine nuclear reactors, five reprocessing plants, hundreds of labs and support buildings, and greater than 150 underground waste tanks. The task called for making improvements to the computing environment around the sprawling complex, increasing network security and adaptableness, and concurrently, reducing operating costs. MSA’s approach ended in what would become... Read More »

Apple sold 51 million iPhones last quarter, but investors expected sales to top 56 million. Apple Mac Pro: 9 Ways It Wows (Click image for larger view.) Investors punished Apple’s stock in after-hours trading on Monday after the corporate reported record – but less than expected – iPhone sales. Shares were down about 8% about an hour after the corporate issued its earnings statement. Apple reported record quarterly revenue of $57.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion, or $14.50 per diluted share, for its fiscal Q1 2014. While Apple sold 51 million iPhones, a quarterly record, expectations were higher still, at about 56 to 57 million. The corporate sold 47.8 million iPhones within the same quarter a year earlier. “We’re really pleased with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the ongoing growth of iTunes, Software, and Services,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in an announcement. “We like having the foremost... Read More »

Red Hat tries to catch Cloud Foundry by adding .Net and SQL Server capabilities to its open source PaaS project. VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) Red Hat, in a move to lay its OpenShift platform-as-a-service on a more equal footing with Cloud Foundry, now works with Microsoft C#, Microsoft .Net applications, and the Microsoft SQL Server database. One of the compelling aspects of Cloud Foundry, started by VMware as an open source PaaS platform, is its ability to supply development and deployment services to both Linux and Windows applications. Some wary open source users have suggested in online comments that this must mean there are Microsoft moles inside Red Hat, guiding development efforts. But Uhuru Software executives say that isn’t the case. The compatibility is achieved by utilizing code developed by Uhuru that enables an OpenShift server to acknowledge .Net applications and SQL Server dependencies and launch them on a Windows Server. The code might... Read More »