Wired News: Battlefield Tech for Aid Workers

Wired News: Battlefield Tech for Aid Workers "In a bid to improve coordination in humanitarian efforts, a group of civilian and military technologists met in Hawaii this week to demonstrate several newly integrated systems, including a machine translator that can record Arabic television programs and translate the audio on the fly.
Representatives from nearly 20 military and civilian organizations gathered on a lava flow near Kona, Hawaii, to demonstrate the e-TAP translator and other communication and collaboration technologies that could be used in chaotic conditions.
The event, known as Strong Angel II, was intended to provide a platform for testing a broad collection of communications, collaboration and translation tools that can help smooth the flow of data in austere disaster zones.
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In another demonstration, radio traffic from the local fire department was recorded to a date-stamped MP3 file and placed into a shared Groove work space. The demonstration showed that such broadcasts could be monitored from anywhere in the world and plotted on a digital map.
Rasmussen said the Groove collaboration software -- which would run on laptops and communicate with other workstations through a peer-to-peer network -- could help the military and civilian organizations trust each other better by providing transparency."

Very cool application of Groove v3.