mobile apps

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 you don’t know about your mobile technology can harm you–and your organization–warned a long-time federal intelligence executive now helping the U.S. Army’s leading logistics provider.

That was the impetus behind a new seven minute video developed for the 70,000 employees of the Army Materiel Command, but which offers a primer for virtually anyone using a mobile smart phone or laptop for work. Keep reading →

The government is moving rapidly into an austere financial environment, which will put enormous pressure against cost centers such as information technology and services. Perhaps as significant is the simultaneous pressure from users for more mobile devices, applications, and capabilities to work from anywhere, at anytime, which can often drive a disconnect between user expectations and service provider delivery.

Consequently, there is a pressing need for aggressive and innovative approaches to resolve this set of issues and demands. Chief information officers and chief technology officers must find empirical methods to map the right course for their agencies. Keep reading →

Although there are many drivers behind the recent explosion of small form factor computing devices in the typical government enterprise environment – including smartphones, tablets, slate and netbook devices, e-readers, and more – perhaps the single most important and under appreciated driver is Microsoft Exchange-based email.

(Full disclosure: Before joining my current employer, I spent nearly 12 years with Microsoft Corp. where I oversaw the company’s strategic and tactical mobile initiatives across the federal government.) Keep reading →

Federal managers like the idea of agencies providing mobile software applications, but only 15 percent of federal smartphone users have ever downloaded a government-built app, according to a recent survey.

Many federal managers, however, remain unfamiliar with what their own agencies are doing when it comes to deploying mobile apps, despite the growing number of mobile applications being made available by government agencies. Keep reading →


After five-plus years of smartphones saturating the market, it’s become clear that mobile device applications are an unqualified phenomenon, and a boon to application developers and app store vendors.

Apple recently reported that it is currently selling more than 1 billion mobile apps every month from the Apple Store; that’s an average rate of 23,148 apps per minute! The number of available apps is also increasing at an almost exponential rate. As the Apple marketing campaign goes, “there’s an app for that”, and not just on Apple’s app store: Google’s Andriod Marketplace, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile, RIM’s Blackberry App World, Symbian’s Horizon, and many others provide instant, downloadable applications and content that range from absolutely free, to thousands of dollars. Keep reading →

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s new mobile product, the OSHA Heat Safety Tool, allows workers and supervisors to calculate the heat index for their worksite, and, based on the heat index, display a risk level to outdoor workers.

The app, which is available on Android devices, pulls data from the National Weather Service for it’s calculations. Keep reading →

Which Android app is the real #FEMA Android app? bit.ly/oUISCL #mobile #opengov #android @AliceLipowicz


As Hurricane Irene threatens the East Coast, FEMA has introduced a new mobile app to get information about how to prepare for and recover from hurricanes and other disasters.

Administrator Craig Fugate, who’s been quite busy this week, demonstrates the new app in a video on the FEMA blog. The tool allows users to: Keep reading →

Craig Fugate has always been a man with a mission- and all the more so this week as the nation’s leading emergency responder, as the head of Federal Emergency Management Agency, tries to get 60 million people on the East Coast ready for Hurricane Irene. Keep reading →

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