Novel Products Featured at NJTC Telecom & Mobile Innovation Competition

NJTechWeekly.com is catching up on some stories that were delayed because of our Sandy coverage.

A varied group of innovative companies presented at the New Jersey Technology Council’s IT, Telecom & Mobile Innovation Competition on Oct. 4, 2012, which took place at the New York Internet colocation data center (Bridgewater).

Eight companies presented their most novel products to an audience made up of other innovators, VCs and angels. NJ TechWeekly.com discussed two of these companies, a two part article on YouGiveGoods.com here and here, and another on FieldView Systems. The rest are profiled below.

First to present was Khaled Nassoura, general manager for data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software at Raritan. The company’s intelligent asset management solution keeps track of data center servers and other devices and their locations.

“With the amount of assets in a large data center, and the amount of change going on at all times, management can lose track,” Nassoura said. Companies have tried to solve this problem through central management software and asset management software, but what is needed is a deeper layer of accountability, he added. Bar codes and bar code readers aren’t enough.

Raritan’s solution is the intelligent rack. Each server in the rack gets both an identifying number and a chip that matches it to a place on the rack, also equipped with a chip and the same number.

When a technician puts that server in a port, it mates with the place on the rack where it is supposed to be, Nassoura explained. “If the job is done incorrectly — for example, the tech put the server in the wrong position on the rack — we can prevent that problem on the spot by programming an LED indicator to blink red to indicate there is a problem. If the technician doesn’t pay attention to that, that system can communicate with software and we can institute a trap or alarm to tell the operator something was executed incorrectly,” he added.

The next presentation was made by Stephen Papa, vice president of sales in the financial services department at Sidera Networks (New York). Sidera was showing off its Xtreme Ultra-Low Latency Network, a high-capacity fiber-optic network for carriers, service providers, enterprises and financial exchanges. For years Sidera has been creating custom fiber networks for clients who need mission-critical data. They design, build and maintain them and so become a “partner to that client throughout the life cycle of whatever it is they do. We recognize the network is what differentiates them from their competition; it is something unique, so we design it in a way to make it competitive,” said Papa.

The new product, Xtreme, is a first of its kind, he said. Sidera has partnered with fiber designers and had them build custom devices for low latency. Then the company came out with a network using these products in the New York/New Jersey area. It connected the major exchanges, data centers, client locations, cloud environments and the company’s own data centers, so there could be complete visibility into the system.

The network, Papa said, is very fast and resilient, supports disaster recovery and has the lowest latency around. Recently, links were added to Toronto and London to provide customers access to international exchanges.

Speaking for Inspirity, a startup operating from the NJIT Enterprise Development Center (Newark), was founder Atiq Hashmi. Inspirity has developed a cloud-based mobile content management system platform that lets companies create mobile websites very quickly and market their brands via mobile devices. The company offers firms templates to convert their website content to mobile-ready content. The product also helps them maintain and manage their mobile sites. “Companies need content that performs well on a mobile phone and integrates well with a desktop. The technology we employ is a patent-pending software as a service (SaaS) solution. The system is easy to use by nontechnical users,” Hashmi added.

The RantNetwork (Bloomsburg, Pa.) Communilator is a mobile phone-based language translation application. CEO Kenneth Volet said the product, 95 percent of which runs on a cloud server, can process 3,000 language pairs. Five percent of the application is on the handset, including the user interface, authentication and graphics. The system uses voice synthesizers to mimic the human voice.

“We can also translate text in images. We take a picture of the text, turn it into intelligent text and then translate it into English. The product can read a sign or menu in six different languages. We are also integrated with all the personal communications tools like SMS; you can write an email or text and send it and we can translate it into another language. You can carry on a conversation in any language you want. We are integrated with Siri for Apple, and also with Google voice recognition,” he said.

Carriers are a large part of the RantNetwork strategy. One of its greatest achievements so far, Volet said, is that the Saudi carrier Mobily is incorporating the company’s Arabic interface into its product line.

ATC Labs, a Newark startup that employs about 20 people, discussed the company’s new technology that lets broadcasters — terrestrial, satellite or Internet — enhance program quality before final transmission. Broadcasters can also run from one to 24 programs simultaneously.

According to CEO Deepen Sinha, the company is assembling the building blocks for a product that will let anyone become a quality Internet broadcaster able to put out a variety of channels simultaneously.

Users can take content from anywhere in the world — be it a sporting event, community event or anything in between — and broadcast it in a very high-quality fashion, using the Internet from their studios, Sinha said.

While there are now tools to let people broadcast from their computers, they are not good enough, he noted. “You have to sound good and you have to have interesting content. Lots of colleges wish they could put soccer games, swimming and other events on the air, but they can’t do it because the equipment is too expensive. They don’t want to pay $20,000 per broadcast stream to go live,” Sinha said.

The bundle presented by ATC lets broadcasters make available content through the software, and “in a matter of minutes you can start pulling high-quality content through your studio. … All that goes through Soundmax, a simple platform that integrates our 24-band audio process with audio coding,” Sinha said.

Speaking for paSafeShare (Colts Neck), Kedar Padke, CTO, discussed his company’s innovative enterprise-level system for sending secure documents between government agencies and contractors, for example. The applications prevent the unauthorized distribution, printing and copying of business data sent to external recipients. While there are many solutions out there for this, Padke says his is the only one that lets the recipient receive the document the way it was sent — as a Word file, for example — via email. “We wanted to retain the end-user experience,” he noted.

Recipients can make changes, comment on the item and easily work with it. What they can’t do is forward it to anyone else. Documents are encrypted before being emailed to recipients, who request authorization to open them. Once the key is provided, the recipient is the only user who can access the document. “This solution does not require persistent Internet. People can work on the documents completely offline,” Padke said.