In-Q-Tel Completes Strategic Investment and Technology Advancement
Agreement With Forterra Systems to Accelerate Collaborative Virtual
World Solutions
Strategic Investment Firm for the U.S. Intelligence Community Adds
Forterra Systems to Prestigious Portfolio of Leading-Edge Innovation
Companies
SAN MATEO, Calif. (Business Wire EON/PRWEB ) September 27, 2007 --
Forterra Systems, the market and technology leader in private virtual
worlds, today announced a strategic investment and technology
advancement agreement with In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic
investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to
support the mission of the broader U.S. Intelligence Community.
Following this agreement, Forterra will further develop a set of
additional capabilities that can be deployed on Forterra’s
core OLIVE™ (On-Line
Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform for the purposes of
enhancing OLIVE’s utility for collaboration
and training applications. OLIVE™
will provide a capability for users to leverage collaborative, 3D
Internet solutions to accelerate time-to-insight.
“We are honored to enter into a strategic
investment and technology advancement agreement with In-Q-Tel that will
serve to enhance the already extensive capabilities of our OLIVE™
Platform,” said David Rolston, CEO for
Forterra Systems. “This agreement with
In-Q-Tel is testimony to the fact that OLIVE has the potential to
deliver high impact, transformational technologies that support the
mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
The effort to extend the capabilities of Forterra’s
OLIVE™ Platform will
include: the ability to import SketchUp models into OLIVE™;
a network proxy that will enable OLIVE™
applications to run seamlessly through a wider range of firewall
configurations, a 3-D conferencing and document sharing application; and
additional 3-D content including scenery, avatars, buildings and other
objects needed to support the new applications. Forterra will also
integrate external instant messaging products with OLIVE to provide a
common conferencing and document sharing facility for its virtual world
users. Through this integration, users will be able to schedule meetings
that enable participants to view and annotate documents. The white
boarding of ideas will also be possible such that the board can be
viewed simultaneously and securely by geographically distributed
participants.
“Forterra has developed a technology platform
and business model for virtual worlds that we believe is capable of
supporting analytic transformation and the critical needs of the U.S.
Intelligence Community as well as related applications in the private
sector,” said Steve Bowsher, Executive Vice
President of Investments at In-Q-Tel. “Agreements
like this with Forterra represent the best of public and private sector
business models, designed to deliver innovative technologies to the U.S.
Intelligence Community, linking them to new and emerging technologies in
the commercial market and providing strategic incentives for companies
like Forterra to develop and enhance technology solutions that benefit
the federal government market as well as a broader commercial market.”
Forterra’s OLIVE Platform is uniquely suited
to support both private sector and government customer collaboration
needs. Government solutions built on Forterra’s
OLIVE™ Platform will
allow users to quickly construct realistic scenarios, modify or augment
the environment, conduct training and mission-rehearsal exercises, and
review outcomes using integrated After Action Review (AAR). OLIVE’s
distributed simulation technology makes it an ideal platform for quickly
transferring lessons learned between geographically dispersed units in
rapidly changing operational conditions and for developing joint,
interagency and multinational teams.
About In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel is a strategic, not-for-profit investment firm that works to
identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support
the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Launched by the CIA in
1999 as a private, independent organization, In-Q-Tel’s
mission is to identify and partner with companies developing
cutting-edge technologies that serve the national security interests of
the United States. Working from an evolving strategic blueprint defining
the Intelligence Community’s critical
technology needs, In-Q-Tel engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies,
researchers, and investors to deliver technologies that provide superior
capabilities for the CIA and the larger Intelligence Community. In-Q-Tel
concentrates on several broad commercial technology areas, including
application software and analytics; communications and infrastructure;
embedded systems and power; and bio, chemical, and nanotechnology. To
date, In-Q-Tel has engaged with more than 100 companies and delivered
more than 140 technology solutions to the Intelligence Community. To
learn more about In-Q-Tel, visit www.iqt.org.
About Forterra Systems
Forterra Systems is a leader in providing online distributed virtual
world technology for the corporate, healthcare, government, and
education industries. Forterra’s software and
services enable organizations to build their own virtual worlds to
train, plan, rehearse, and collaborate in ways previously considered
impossible or impractical. Using the OLIVE ™
(On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) platform and industry standard
PC hardware, customers can rapidly generate realistic, collaborative,
3-D Internet solutions that easily scale from single user applications
to large scale simulated environments supporting many thousands of
concurrent users. www.forterrainc.com
MULTIMEDIA GALLERY http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5503774
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