Just as consumers are wrapping their heads around 4G, the wireless industry is thinking ahead to 5G. Soaring smartphone and tablet sales mean networks are growing clogged with cellular data traffic. For the time being, 4G technology can help relieve the congestion. Modern networks are able to cram more data into their airwaves than older technologies can. But soon, even 4G’s efficiencies won’t be enough.
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When Susan Lawrence quit her waitressing job in her hometown of Ida Grove, Iowa, to enlist in the Army, smart phones and network-centric warfare were not part of the common vernacular.
Lawrence enlisted in what was then the Women’s Army Corps one week after her 18th birthday, specializing in home economics, typing and shorthand. Today, Lawrence is a lieutenant general and chief information officer of the Army overseeing a $10 billion information technology budget. Keep reading →
A free web chat program, a few laptops and a whole lot of motivation for harnessing the power of mobile technology to provide citizen services came together inside a Starbucks in the heart of the nation’s Capitol this week.
In all, 18 participants from 11 federal agencies, private companies and non-profits spent time Wednesday on various tasks associated with building a Mobile Gov Wiki to further the mobile government movement. In two hours, they had five new articles created and 15 articles edited on the wiki, a living web site that allows users to easily create, edit, and organize web pages. Keep reading →
In the 1980s, Edward Amoroso was a member of the security design team for then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the program that sought to build a space-based shield to protect Americans from a nuclear ballistic missile attack.
Now, as chief security officer at AT&T, Amoroso oversees a strategic defense initiative of a different nature – securing billions of bytes of information as they travel over the airwaves and wires. Keep reading →
AOL Government Editorial Director Wyatt Kash recently caught up with McClure, and his principal deputy, 
When it comes to keeping abreast of government IT innovation, few individuals enjoy a better perspective than Dave McClure, associate administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. McClure spent 14 years with the Government Accountability Office leading IT reviews — and five more years with Gartner, heading government research, before joining the General Services Administration in 2009. In addition to supporting a number of major federal IT initiatives, McClure also makes time to meet with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to keep his finger on the technology pulse.
The General Services Administration has done the equivalent of expanding from a busy brick-and-mortar book store to a burgeoning e-reader business akin to a mini-Amazon that has already saved the government tens of thousands of dollars.
Until recently, the public used the mail to request printed documents from the GSA’s distribution site in Pueblo, Colo., where government’s printed copies are stored. The site continues to operate, handling millions of print requests. Keep reading →
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will save thousands of dollars by trading its fleet of BlackBerries for iPhones and iPads in the next few months.
CIO Joseph Klimavicz told Breaking Gov the change, expected to take place by June 1, would save substantial costs associated with managing BlackBerry devices. He declined to specify savings other than to say it would be “thousands of dollars” now spent on managing close to 3,000 devices. Keep reading →
The State Department’s public diplomacy mission is constantly evolving, seeking to reach foreign audiences in new and more creative ways. And for a variety of reasons, that has increasingly meant going mobile.
Recognizing the potential of the mobile Web to reach vast audiences that are not otherwise connected to the Internet, the department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) launched m.usembassy.gov that is finding a growing following with entirely new constituencies after a little more than a year. Keep reading →