FourthWave News

From Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly (May 4, 2007, p. 3)

Expo highlights Fort Wayne

by Doug LeDuc

   The national scope of the Killer App Conference & Expo provided an opportunity to showcase high-speed broadband in the area and the ways northeast Indiana businesses and organizations are developing to take advantage of the greater bandwidth that has become available here.

    The event took place April 30 to May 2 at the Grand Wayne Center. Many of the 40 exhibits and more than 600 registrants and presenters at the conference came from across the country.

    At a Killer App Community Workshop kicking off the conference, Clifford Clark, the city’s chief information officer outlined the history of high-speed broadband in Fort Wayne and provided a preview of some bandwidth uses visitors to the city could observe.

    Verizon’s investment two years ago in a fiber-to-the-premises network for the area was preceded in 2000, Clark said, by a public-private partnership with Indiana Data Center, which established Wi-Fi hotspots around the city to provide high-speed broadband access to public-safety vehicles.

    Without leaving the field, police who once relied mainly on information they could get over the radio now can receive a digital image of a suspect. Emergency responders can receive a floorplan of a building before entering it.

    Indiana Data Center, eventually offered wireless broadband to businesses and residents in the area, along with data co-location facilities, hosting and design, e-commerce and about any other broadband-related service a business could need.

    Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard highlighted what the city has been doing with broadband during a keynote address at the conference.

    In addition to touching on its use for public safety, he described the use of broadband in Fort Wayne for education, medicine, real estate development and emergency preparedness.

    Several businesses with exhibits at the conference, from TriPractix to Zoom Information Systems, said they were impressed with the quality of exhibits and participants.

    For example, within a few hours “we’ve met a director of a data center, a marketing research director and several small business owners who have ideas (for application development),” said James Scott, a Forward Engineering director, early in the event.

    At an exhibit on SentryPoints, command and control software developed in Fort Wayne for emergency responders, executives said they met potential partners as well as potential customers.

    The conference may have helped raise the national profile of FourthWave, which owns SentryPoints, when it became the only business from the city to receive a Killer App award presented there.

    Four awards were conferred on products displayed there making the best use of high speed broadband. Richard presented the Killer App Critical Information Award to Don Willis, founder and chief executive officer of FourthWave.