16 hot companies to watch

The to-do list seemingly never stops growing for federal IT managers. They must keep up with developments in mobile technology, comb through data for key information nuggets, and evaluate cloud computing options — to name just a few challenges.

On top of that, they also need to find tools to help their agencies better manage technology assets and human resources in a time of budget constraints.

FCW's annual list of companies to watch emphasizes products and services that address the government's key challenges. We chose the 16 companies based on a number of factors, including how well they were represented on contract vehicles, their ability to make strategic alliances with other companies and their efforts to reach out to the federal market.

Big data and analytics

Read more at http://fcw.com/articles/2013/09/20/16-companies-to-watch.aspx

New chip promises iPhone encryption

Anika Torruella - IHS Jane's International Defence Review

Light Point Security CEO To Moderate CyberMaryland 2013 Panel On Cybersecurity Innovation And Trends

We’re looking forward to the CyberMaryland 2013 Conference being held Oct 8 – 9 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD. CyberMaryland is a unique conference spanning two days during Cybersecurity Awareness Month that will address the biggest challenges facing America, including future innovation to meet the security challenges facing our country; collaboration across industry, government and educational institutions; and the development of a generation of cyber-warriors.

Not only will it be an opportunity for us to catch up with old friends, but our CEO, Beau Adkins, will be moderating an excellent panel on cybersecurity innovation and future trends. The idea for the panel stemmed from the fact that we wanted to get some of the best minds in security together to have a candid discussion on the current issues facing the industry and how they see innovation and trends evolving over time to combat the threat.

Panel Title

What’s Here, What’s Coming and What to do About it

Panel Abstract

Listen in on a lively discussion of today’s and tomorrow’s trends in cyber security led by a panel of the area’s top minds in the field. The panel will include CISOs, founders of cyber security contracting companies and creators of next generation cyber security products from the healthcare, finance, government and commercial sectors. Learn what these individuals see every day and what they do to protect against them. Find out what they expect to encounter in the months and years ahead, and what they are doing to prepare.

Each panelist will take a deep dive into today’s threat landscape for their industry and share the tactics they employ to protect against them. They will discuss the current trends and innovations occurring within the industry and share their predictions of what’s to come in the next few years.

Panelists

• Moderator – Beau Adkins, Co-founder and CEO at Light Point Security
• Panelist #1 – Jason Taule, Chief Security and Privacy Officer at FEi Systems
• Panelist #2 – John Harmon, Partner at Tactical Network Solutions
• Panelist #3 – Jeff Huegel, Executive Director, Cloud, Hosting and Applications Security at ATT
• Panelist #4 – Dana Pickett, CISO and CPO at Allegis Group

Panel Format

• Introduction: What is cybersecurity? (3 – 5 minutes)
• Panelist introductions (5 minutes)
• Panelist discussion
• Questions from audience (10 – 15 minutes)
• Closing remarks (5 – 10 minutes)

Panel Time

Wednesday October 9, 2013 11:15am – 12:00pm

Do you have a specific question or particular topic you would like to hear the panelists discuss? Submit your questions and topic suggestions to us via Twitter or email. Looking forward to our panel? Let us know on Twitter using hashtag #CyberMD2013.

Register for the conference here. If you are a full-time college student you can attend the conference for free if you register by Oct 1 and use discount code UMstudent.

Encryption startup KoolSpan raises $9.4 million

Bill Flook
Staff Reporter - Washington Business Journal

Mobile security startup KoolSpan Inc. has pulled in a total $9.4 million in two separate raises led by Security Growth Partners and TWJ Capital, CEO Gregg Smith confirmed on Tuesday.

In an email, Smith (currently overseas) said the funding will go toward enhancing sales and marketing and engineering, as well as providing general operating capital. The company first disclosed the raises this morning in two separate SEC filings.

Bethesda-based KoolSpan's flagship product is the TrustChip, a microSD card that enables voice, text and data encryption for mobile devices. The company in May landed a deal with Samsung's security arm to use TrustChip as the hardware backbone to a new smartphone security product.

The dual raises add to KoolSpan's roughly $20 million in prior venture funding, according to CrunchBase. The larger of the two, $7.4 million, is described in the filing as straight equity. The second $2 million raise is a mix of debt, options, warrants and/or other securities.

Both Security Growth Partners and TWJ Capital are previous KoolSpan investors.

Those are just two of the visions being that have been pursued over the past four years by small companies in the Maryland Clean Energy Technology Incubator (CETI)  at bwtech@UMBC Research & Technology Park.

As the youngest of three business incubators housed within the research park, CETI has had its share of growing pains.  When the incubator was founded in 2009, the clean-energy sector was awash in federal stimulus money. Today, companies must scrap for every bit of private investment and public research support they can muster.

Fledgling clean-energy companies in the CETI get inexpensive office space, ample laboratory facilities, and a host of less-tangible benefits – including proximity to UMBC faculty members and students and membership in a statewide network of energy companies – to help grow their businesses.

“You can meet people here who you’d never meet if you rented offices in a random building in Columbia,” says Bjorn Frogner, who serves as the incubator’s “entrepreneur-in-residence.” With more than three decades of experience in energy and software companies, Frogner gives CETI companies informal advice and troubleshoots problems related to grant proposals, patenting, and human resources.

“Having an entrepreneur-in-residence is a real value,” says George Oyler, the founder of Clean Green Chesapeake, a start-up company piloting systems for converting algae to cattle feed and liquid transportation fuels. “My background was as an M.D./Ph.D. Many academics dream about transitioning into some sort of start-up, but there’s not a lot of appreciation for what it means to be in business as opposed to research. It is really helpful to have people like Bjorn who have a history in this kind of work.”

Perhaps the best-known clean-energy company at BWTECH is Fiberight, which will soon break ground on a large-scale plant in Iowa that will convert municipal waste into ethanol fuels. (The company has begun the planning-and-permitting process for constructing similar plants in Maryland.) Fiberight was already two years old when the CETI was founded, company CEO Craig Stuart-Paul leapt at the chance to move the company’s headquarters there when he learned about its creation.

“There’s no question that you get better access to academic expertise if you’re located in a center like this,” Stuart-Paul says. His company has hired three UMBC graduates as full-time staff members and regularly brings UMBC students aboard as summer interns.

Bryan Kim ’13, chemical engineering, worked as an intern at Fiberight in 2012 and accepted a full-time job this past May after graduation. “I’ve mostly been creating process-and-instrumentation diagrams for our small pilot plant in Virginia,” Kim says. “But I’ve met everyone, and I’ve gotten to do a little bit of everything. That’s the great thing about working for a start-up. This is the best introduction I can imagine to the post-college work world.”

Frogner also hopes that some of the collective expertise of companies at CETI can pay off for the UMBC campus itself, including the possibility of applying “smart grid” technology developed at the incubator to future campus construction projects.

Other companies in the clean-energy incubator include Plant Sensory Systems, which has large federal grants to support the development of genetically-engineered plants with high oil yields and low requirements for nitrate fertilizers; Innovative Bios, which converts animal wastes into cell culture broths for the biotechnology industry; and Agira Energy, a solar-cell manufacturer.

David J. Fink, director of entrepreneurial services at bwtech@UMBC, says that he believes that even more companies at CETI will be helping create a greener future in the marketplace – and maybe sooner than anyone thinks.

“We have today a very strong and diverse set of companies,” Fink says, “and they’re all geared toward bringing products and services to market very rapidly.”

– David Glenn

UMBC cyber incubator expansion attracts regional entrepreneurs

Executive director Ellen Hemmerly leading the cyber charge at Baltimore County tech park

Joanna Sullivan

Editor-in-Chief- Baltimore Business Journal

How can you tell Maryland is becoming a hotbed for cyber security business?

Ellen J. Hemmerly said it’s obvious from the companies looking into University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s technology incubator.

“We’re attracting not only local and regional entrepreneurs,” Hemmerly said. “We’re getting more and more inquiries and tenants from out of state.”

Hemmerly, executive director of bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park, is busy overseeing a 3,500-square-foot expansion of the CyberHive incubator. The $300,000 addition gets christened on Sept. 27, the same day the incubator celebrates three graduates of its Cync program, AccelerEyes, Five Directions and Oculis Labs. The Cync program is a partnership between UMBC and Northrop Grumman Corp.

The 10,000-square-foot CyberHive currently has 26 companies that lease dedicated space. The addition will enable another five companies that can lease space and about 20 more affiliate companies that can use shared space, Hemmerly said. The new space includes conference rooms, a coffee lounge, a public co-working space and five dedicated incubator lab spaces.

She said many incubator companies wanted space to meet and greet UMBC students and professors.

“We wanted to have a place where it was conducive to those kinds of introductions so they can do more active collaboration,” Hemmerly said.

Tenants pay about $750 a month for dedicated space. Affiliates pay about $325 a month. Included in the price — free coffee, water and maybe some snacks.

“We’re going to bring more to the table for affiliates,” she said.

Encryption Goes Mainstream

SEATTLE — Encryption is on the verge of going mainstream.

In this age of corporate cyberspies and government snoops, the ancient art of encoding messages is something ordinary citizens will soon come to view as an essential service.

At least that's what several tech start-ups are anticipating. On Monday, Wickr, a free app that encrypts text, voice and video messages, became available on the Android platform.

Read full article at http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/09/17/encryption-goes-mainstream/2822467/

Pictures Make Sense of Big Data

Visualization technology can turn data into pictures that are far more comprehensible

That's the dilemma so many companies face, thanks to technology advances that make it easier to routinely collect enormous amounts of data.

The answer is pictures.

Read more at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324769704579010722742987170.html?mod=wsj_streaming_stream

www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/catonsville/ph-ca-light-point-0911-20130910,0,6466705.story

baltimoresun.com

Local company competes in Wall Street Journal's 'Startup of the Year' program

By Julie Bagman, jbaughman@tribune.com

Little did they know that as of Aug. 28, their company would be among the 10 finalists vying for the title of Wall Street Journal Startup of the Year.

"It's very validating that everybody else sees us as being on the same level as companies who have lots of funding and tons of employees," Gonzalez said of Light Point Security, for which the total staff is herself and Adkins, her fiancé.

"There have been companies that have millions of dollars of funding already and they've been cut," Adkins said. "It's says [Wall Street Journal is] choosing based on substance versus flash.

"That's what encourages us to think we can stay in it longer," he said.

After receiving more than 500 applications, the newspaper launched the five-month program June 24. Of the 24 startups selected to compete, four were eliminated July 24, and 10 more were cut Aug. 28. The next elimination round, scheduled for Oct. 16, will narrow the field to three.

"It's not really a contest," said Wall Street Journal Deputy Digital Editor Gabriella Stern. "It's not like there's a prize. It's not like they're going to get money or anything."

This is the first year for the program and Stern said the idea stemmed from the organization's desire to expand video on its website and increase its coverage of entrepreneurship.

"[It] is what we call an episodic video documentary," Stern said. "Until early November, the startups get mentored by the mentors and build their businesses. And our viewers get to see the mentoring happening."

Pairing startups with mentors — such as Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and fashion designer Tory Burch — and filming the companies as they perform assigned tasks provides the startups with opportunities for growth, even though there is no prize for winning.

"The startups benefit greatly," Stern said. "They get the mentoring from these great, great business people and venture capitalists."

Tasks thus far have included creating a video introduction for the company, explaining how the company name and logo were chosen and identifying a team or culture problem and coming up with a solution.

Gonzalez and Adkins said Light Point Security has seen a number of benefits from the program. The pair is working with Kate Mitchell and Sharon Wienbar, co-founders of California-based Scale Venture Partners, and said their guidance has been invaluable.

"We've got people coming to us," she said. "We've had not just customers, but investors have approached us and people looking for employment. In that sense, being in the program has been very helpful."

Light Point Security created software that allows users to browse the Web from a remote server, storing any and all information accessed on a virtual machine.

"We are really targeting businesses that deal with confidential or sensitive proprietary information," she said, listing the financial, banking and defense industries as primary customers.

"A virtual machine is a fake machine," Gonzalez said. "It's software but it acts like a real computer."

Their software provides two layers of virtual machines and an external server for extra security against viruses and malware.

The nice thing about virtual machines, she said, is that they are easy to create and just as easy to destroy.

"Any time the user is done browsing, when they close that browser, we take that virtual machine and we destroy it. We wipe it like it never existed," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said the couple wouldn't have known about the Wall Street Journal program had they not moved out of their basement and become members of UMBC's Cyber Incubator.

"Ever since we moved into the incubator, we've just been exposed to this community of folks who have experience, who want to help us out and we just find out about opportunities that we wouldn't have found out about otherwise," Gonzalez said.

As the couple approaches the third elimination round, they are confident that their tiny company has potential to advance.

"We're dealing with companies who have a superstar founder and they show up day one with $5 million of funding and they have 30 employees," Adkins said. "And then there's us two and we're on the same level as them."

To follow Light Point Security's progress, go to http://projects.wsj.com/soty/startup/light-point-security.