Riding what appears to be a growing groundswell of federal government innovation competitions, the Small Business Administration has awarded a first-place prize of $5,000 to a Silicon Valley software developer for a smartphone or tablet application that lets users quickly find loans, grants, permits and other useful resources for small businesses.
The winner of SBA’s “Apps for Entrepreneurs Challenge,” Somesh Kumar, is the founder of Mobispectra Technologies LLC, a Fremont, Calif., firm that creates applications for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The company’s aim is “to embrace innovation and take challenges to solve human problems with simplest technology,” according to its Web site. (The winning SBA app can be downloaded at “SBA Gems” at entrepreneurs.challenge.gov/submissions/5458. Keep reading →
What do the Green Bay Packers and the Army Installation Management Command have in common? They both use the same computer software to make critical decisions.
Otavio Good, leader of the San Francisco-based team that won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Shredder Challenge earlier this month, doesn’t just do computer programming.
New analytics software and cloud-based services from IBM will let companies and their researchers more easily mine the Mt. Everest of documents contained in U.S. government and other worldwide patent and scientific databases, IBM officials said Thursday.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Shredder Challenge” could be called the world’s ultimate jigsaw puzzle contest. But it was serious business for the nearly 9,000 teams of problem solvers from all over the world who entered the competition after DARPA officials launched it in late October.
One day early last year, Veterans Affairs Department chief technology officer Peter Levin happened to run into VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.
When scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) were tasked with creating a way to stop a fleeing vehicle moving at high speed, they turned to crowd-sourcing for a solution. What they got was an ingenious idea from a retired, 66-year-old South American engineer, Dante Barbis (pictured above).
When is a small business not a small business? When it’s a large business. Confused? So is Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
When a government senior executive once showed up for a new job, he had to ask where his office was. “There was a name tag on my door but the office had an antiquated computer and no Blackberry,” the executive said. Not exactly a propitious start.
When it comes to moving apps to the cloud, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a distinct advantage over most other civilian agencies-in-house technology expertise.