13 Nov 03. The Times reported today that the £1bn, driver training contract being bid by consortia headed by Thales and Lockheed Martin has been sent back again for rebid. The paper suggests that lack of UK job content has deterred the MoD from choosing the favourite, Thales for the job. BATTLESPACE believes that for some time the Mod may have been wary of a number of Thales bids where jobs are exported to France, an area where the UK has no contract penetration and a t a time when the UK Unions are lobbying against industrial job decline.
12 Nov 03. AEA Technology, the parent company of AEA Battery Systems – announced the launch of a £2 million facility in Scotland to develop technology for the recycling of Lithium-ion batteries. The project, which will be based in Golspie in the North East of Scotland, will be 55 per cent funded by The Scottish Executive and the remainder by AEAT. The facility will be the first of its kind in the UK, and extends further the complete portable power solutions capability, which AEA Battery Systems offers to its customers. Offering customers a unique cradle to grave service through the management of entire portable power fleets could lead to reduced costs and effort in battery management and logistics, ultimately resulting in risk reduction for the customers.
06 Nov 03. Premier Electronics to offer Real time 3D Facial Recognition Systems. The New A4 Door Access Control Face Reader (FR) system moves this technology to new levels. The unit combines standard digital photography with 3D facial recognition generation providing a very powerful recognition and identification system with the ability to produce a standard digital photograph for identity cards. Developed by A4 Vision this system is now available from Premier Electronics. There are two versions of this product either an enrolment or identification/verification or an identification/verification unit. The enrolment unit provides both a colour digital picture of the subject and a 3D facial template, it is possible to combine these two formats to provide a 3D-face mask. The digital picture can also be used to generate identity cards and with a special printer holographic prints.
13 Nov 03. Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has successfully conducted the first communication between the U.S. Air Force’s Global Hawk unmanned aerialreconnaissance system and a manned airborne battle management platform. The company-funded event demonstrated a new architectural concept called the Advanced Information Architecture (AIA), which would allow Global Hawk imagery and other mission-critical data to be rapidly disseminated in theater among battle managers, ground troops and other tactical users. Northrop Grumman used the AIA concept to share imagery among Global Hawk, a test bed E-8C Air Force Joint STARS, and several ground users equipped with tactical man-pack radios and laptop computers.
07 Nov 03. Boeing Company and L-3 Communications signed a licensing agreement allowing a division of L-3 to market one of Boeing’s advanced network systems technologies across multiple industries. Called IntelliBus, the patented technology was originally developed by Boeing to provide a higher performance yet simpler, lighter, more functional and more affordable on-board network system for advanced military aircraft.
11 NoV 03. Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) reported results for its fiscal 2004 second quarter, ended October 3, 2003. Revenues were $3.59bn, up 32% over last year’s second quarter. Net earnings per share (diluted) were 57 cents after the approximately 3 cents per-share impact of an after-tax special charge of $5.7m ($9.2m pre-tax) related to the March 7, 2003, DynCorp
acquisition. The quarter’s strong revenue growth was again led by CSC’s U.S. federal government activities. Revenues derived from the U.S. federal government nearly doubled from the comparable year-ago quarter to $1.52bn, an increase of 97%. The March 7, 2