When I think Camden, NJ I usually think garbage-filled crack houses (I interned with an affordable housing agency there one summer in college), but here lo and behold, there's a homeland security startup....
Someone should do a study of the geography of these homeland security / post 9/11 startups ------ Posted on Wed, Dec. 14, 2005 SECURITY in HAND By Akweli Parker Inquirer Staff Writer Situational awareness - knowing where you are and how you stand in relation to your surroundings - has helped armies win battles since before the time of Sun Tzu. A Camden firm said yesterday that it was taking that old concept high-tech by outfitting security forces, ranging from campus police to the U.S. military, with handheld, digital GPS locators. "It's helping people understand what's going on, where your friends are," said Brian Regli, chief executive officer of Camden-based Drakontas L.L.C. Their system, called DragonForce, puts high-powered personal digital assistants in the hands of field personnel - security officers, police or soldiers - and allows them to track one another on a digital map. Further, a central dispatcher can view the same map, draw instructions in "whiteboard" mode, John Madden-style, and have the X's, O's and arrows show up instantly on the officers' PDA screens. "We can quite literally tell them, graphically, exactly where to go and what to do," Drakontas president James Sims said yesterday during a demonstration of the technology on the Drexel campus in West Philadelphia. The technology was developed at Drexel, which licensed it to Drakontas. Drexel will be the first university to use the system. Regli said the firm had planned an aggressive marketing campaign starting next year for college campuses and public-safety agencies. "We have commitments for approximately $600,000 of delivered product in the first three quarters of 2006," Regli said. "Our goal is to grow the business and achieve profitability in the next two years." The plans also include improvements to the technology. For now, officers must continue to rely on separate, walkie-talkie-like cell phones for oral messages. But the next generation of PDAs used by Drexel will double as wireless phones employing Voice over Internet Protocol. They will use the campus wireless network, DragonFly, rather than a commercial cellular provider, to transmit voice messages. Starting next week, Drexel's campus security force plans to use a dozen of the units in its patrols, said Bernard D. Gollotti, senior associate vice president with Drexel's public safety department. It could add an extra measure of security at a time when Drexel and nearby University of Pennsylvania students are on edge because of a recent rash of assaults. Drexel has "had conversations" with Penn and Philadelphia police about sharing the system beyond Drexel's 65-acre border, Gollotti said, and both are interested. "You'll be able to look on a screen, and say, 'I want Officers 1 & 2' to go there" to respond to an incident - rather than have every officer on duty swarm to the same spot after hearing about it over police radio, Gollotti said. Future versions will let officers send text messages, file reports from the scene, and view photos of suspects and surveillance videos minutes after they are made. With any system so complex, there is a lot that can go wrong. So the Department of Justice has given $333,000 to Drexel and Atlantic County, N.J., to test it next summer in an exercise simulating a high school hostage-rescue situation. The handheld PDAs are what the government calls "COTS," or commercial-off-the-shelf hardware, which helps keep procurement costs down. They range from civilian HP-brand PDAs you can buy at Radio Shack to more exotic "mil-spec" versions with built-in GPS satellite tracking and the strength to withstand getting run over by a tank. One thing about the devices that is customized is their software. Regli said his firm stripped them of their Windows operating systems, installed more versatile Linux operating systems, and built its own applications and features. Ideas for what to include came after extensive interviews in 2004 with soldiers, police, and other "first responders," Regli said. The implications could be big. DARPA - the once-shadowy Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose funding spawned the Internet - wants the features for the U.S. military. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. will use Drakontas' and other companies' technologies in a project to give soldiers better battlefield intelligence. The resulting product will get a true trial by fire in mid-2006, when Lockheed expects the Army's 10th Mountain Division and the First Marine Division to take its system to war with them in Afghanistan and Iraq. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "telecom-cities" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/telecom-cities -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
