The next big tech? It's on the floor at FOSE.
Connecting state and local government leaders
The show floor will feature the latest technology from nearly 200 vendors displaying products aimed at government computing.
The FOSE 2012 Conference and Exhibition, April 3-5 at the Washington Convention Center, is a great place to find technologies aimed squarely at the government market.
There are nearly 200 vendors scheduled to show off their products and services at this year’s show, which is staged by 1105 Government Information Group, parent of GCN.
Here is a brief sampling of some of the kind of products you can check out and experiment with at the show this year.
Boxlight will be showing off their very cool ProjectoWrite3 LCD projector, which is so much more than just a projector. It’s an entire interactive experience. The projector senses movement and transforms, along with a digital pen, any surface into an interactive white board. Combined with a short-throw lens and 2,500 lumens of raw light power, it’s a presentation powerhouse in any lighting condition. The ProjectoWrite3 will be shown in Booth 1313, but Boxlight is also a FOSE tech partner, so if you sit in on a cool presentation anywhere during the show, chances are you are experiencing a ProjectoWrite3.
The Kanguru booth over at 307 is the place to go if you’re an avid telecommuter, or would like to become one. The Kanguru Defender 3000 looks like a key drive, but is actually able to create a secure workspace linked between your home office (or anywhere really) and your government network. The Defender is automatically upgraded and updated as needed, and allows administrators to locate individual units anywhere in the world. And of course Kanguru will be demonstrating some of the most secure hard drives in the world as well, just in case you need to lock down your important files for transport.
FOSE might not be in the middle of summer this year, but there’s a good chance it will still be a bit warm inside the convention center. For a blast of cool air, check out TrippLite at Booth 614, where they will be showing off their SRCOOL12k, an amazing little spot chiller that’s as useful as it is cool. And be sure to check out the B002-DUA4, a secure KVM switch that sacrificed itself in GCN lab testing, dying before it gave up its secrets.
Griffin Technology in Booth 500 will remind you that your user experience with a product doesn’t end with your purchase. It’s only just beginning. The company will be showing off an entire line of armor designed to protect iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and smart phones of all kinds. And, just for fun, they will also have their smart phone-controlled helicopter buzzing around their booth. Hmm, a spy camera mounted on a tiny, silent chopper? What agencies might be interested in something like that?
Over at Booth 716 you will find the natural evolution of a great product for the federal market that builds upon an award-winning release last year. With so many federal agencies moving to the cloud, the problem of how to manage virtual networks is becoming apparent. Last year NetOptics introduced a hardware solution to do just that, giving just as much control to admins as when working in the physical world. This year, the Indigo Pro software takes even that idea and moves it to the cloud, thus moving the device that’s managing the cloud into the cloud. Indigo Pro gathers data in real time, archives it in a database for historical trend analysis, and then presents it in rich graphical formats through a Web browser interface. Watch their demo and be amazed.
And in Booth 601, Research in Motion will be showing the BlackBerry Playbook equipped with the brand new 2.0 operating system. This new OS is more responsive than before and adds some killer apps like a unified messaging feature that could well make the Playbook the best tablet for government workers, and a Blackberry phone is no longer required. Come and test drive one for yourself.
As we said, that’s just a taste, an appetizer. Check out the show floor for the full course.
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