geospatial

UPDATED. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced it plans to buy iPhone services for more than 17,600 employees.

According to an Oct. 17 solicitation notice posted on FedBizOpps, a government procurement site, the immigration and customs division of the Department of Homeland Security is planning to buy Apple iPhone devices that are bundled into monthly plans for cellular phone service, Internet access for domestic and international coverage, and text messaging capabilities. Keep reading →

The FBI has something new on its most wanted list: A way to monitor, map and analyze social media intelligence around the world in real time.

According to a request for information document issued Jan. 19 on a Federal Business Opportunities website, the FBI and its Strategic Information and Operations Center are looking for ideas from private industry on ways it might provide “a secure, lightweight web application portal, using mash-up technology” with the ability to “rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence.” Keep reading →

The combination of social media and transparency in federal spending adds up to boatloads of data. But what impact do these forces have on federal policy? Perhaps more to the point: Is policy driving change, or is change driving policy?

Social media experts John Crupi, chief technology officer for JackBe, and Gov20LA founder Alan Silberberg joined host Eric Kavanagh on the latest episode of Federal Spending — an online radio broadcast designed to follow the money, not the politics — to discuss how social media and the push for transparency are shaping government policy and process. Keep reading →

Joseph Klimavicz, CIO at NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration), spends his time trying to deliver as much technology as he can securely both to the agency and the public.

To deliver, he is focusing on how NOAA can take advantage of cloud solutions and cloud services. “We’ve got a whole host of things we are pushing to the cloud,” he said during a recent Federal Executive Forum on Emerging Technologies. Keep reading →

The Air Force Special Operations Command announced it plans to buy 2,861 iPad 2 tablets in a move to unload as much as 70 pounds of paper per flight.

The decision, announced in a Dec. 29, 2011, justification and approval notice, and first reported by Nextgov, followed a three-month product evaluation begun last July and completed in the fall on five aircraft. Command officials concluded that iPad not only meet but exceeded AFSOC mission specifications, the report said. Keep reading →

One the nation’s most authoritative sources for residential address data, the U.S. Census Bureau, may soon have to confront a costly legal constraint that prevents it from sharing basic street address information with thousands of county, state governments and other organizations.

The limitation not only means that state and local governments must spend more to validate address information, so must the Census Bureau and other federal agencies, according to a group of data specialists speaking at a conference on the use of geographic data. Keep reading →