Providence Technology Group

Governor Signs Bill by Senator Jerry Hill to Outlaw Drone Flights Over State Prisons SACRAMENTO – Starting in January, it will be illegal to fly a drone over or at a state prison under legislation by Senator Jerry Hill that Governor Brown signed today. Violating the new law, which also will apply to jails and juvenile facilities, will be an infraction punishable by a $500 fine. The restrictions do not apply to employees of the facilities who operate drones as part of their job and have specific permission to use them. Senator Hill, D-San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, introduced Senate Bill 1355 earlier this year amid a spate of incidents involving drones that smuggled drugs and other contraband into lockups. In February, near Kern Valley State Prison in Delano, a drone dropped a bag fill...[Read More]

GALT — If you have ever had a computer crash on you or lost what you were working on and what you had saved you know “crisis” may not be too strong a word. “You lose all your data, that’s a crisis. So in managing other crisis, whether it’s man-made or natural, my job is to make sure I’m the calmest guy in the room and just try to get the facts,” said Galt Police Chief Tod Sockman. On Aug. 7, the system that Galt police officers use to write and save reports crashed. “Systems crash. I mean, it happens,” Sockman said. “It happens in business, it happens in police departments, it happens at cities. I mean it just happens.” But when it happened at the Galt Police Department the city’s Information Technology staff realized a year and a half ...[Read More]

Officials with the Department of Human Assistance, or DHA, in Sacramento, California, have been using license plate readers since 2016 to investigate welfare fraud, the Sacramento Beereported last week. Police use of the readers, which match pictures of license plates taken from street poles and cop cars to a searchable database, have been on the rise over the past decade. According to the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, it is highly unusual for welfare departments to employ the technology. Moreover, the foundation alleges that the DHA violated California state laws dictating that any entity using a license plate database must institute a privacy-and-usage policy that includes regular audits and record keeping. The department reportedly did not have such a policy until t...[Read More]

As prices for drugs and procedures soar, and health insurance premiums for employer-based and individual policies inexorably climb, more than are few people are asking: Is the health care industry spiraling out of control? Liana Bailey-Crimmins, a top official with California’s public employee benefits and retirement system (CalPERS), offered a simple response. “Yeah,” she said. But Bailey-Crimmins is in the driver’s seat at one of health care’s most powerful vehicles — and she has some ideas about how to slow costs down. The decisions she makes ripple far beyond the state workers and retirees she represents, affecting the cost of health care for the entire state, if not the nation. “To me, I think you can either sit in the passenger seat … or you can go into the driver’s seat and effect c...[Read More]

American FinTech company Monarch Blockchain Corporation announces that LinkedIn Co-Founder Eric Ly joined its advisory board. “Monarch’s solution to facilitating crypto payments for merchants is the kind of mainstream business need that will be critical to making blockchain more relevant. We look forward to collaborating with Monarch to deliver greater trust between merchants and consumers and support mass adoption.” American FinTech company Monarch Blockchain Corporation announces that LinkedIn Co-Founder Eric Ly joined its advisory board. Eric Ly is the co-founder and CTO mastermind behind the career-focused social networking behemoth LinkedIn. He has extensive blockchain experience, degrees from both Stanford and MIT, and recently founded ICOHub, a protocol that builds trust between tra...[Read More]

Sacramento’s Aaron Jilg is one of the lucky attendees at the biggest drone speed race in California history, featuring competitors from around the globe. He’s still buzzing after the winners are crowned inside the Golden 1 Center, overlooking the futuristic course. “Today was absurd!” Jilg says, after Team Elefun, featuring members from Norway and Sweden, claim the biggest chunk of the $25,000 pot. “I’ve never seen anything like this [competition]. So fast and so accurate — this could definitely be an X Games sideshow kind of thing. It’s like watching motorsports, but with a lot more technicality.” Jilg is raving about the second Xfinity California Drone Speed Challenge, held at the Golden 1 Center on July 19 in downtown Sacramento. The race has turned the floor of the Kings’ arena into a ...[Read More]

Principal architect Jason Silva, of Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture, conceptualized the facade of the new Powerhouse Science Center in Sacramento to represent humanity’s place in the universe. The facade will be sectioned by multiple planes, creating continuous vector lines that extend across the building and site. “The vectors were inspired by the concept of connectivity,” Silva says. “We are all but a small part of our universe, and yet we are all connected in some way. The vectors discretely extend over the building and conceptually continue out, infinitely, reaching all parts of our special world.” This design concept will soon become reality, as the Powerhouse Science Center broke ground earlier this summer. The $50 million project revitalizes and expands the historic PG&E power...[Read More]

Security remains a top priority for organizations in terms of new investment, according to our annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study, though not all of that spending is heading toward additional security headcount. After two years of increases, IT security personnel have declined slightly as a percentage of total IT staff. As shown in Figure 1 from our full report, IT Security Staffing Ratios, IT security staff members declined to 2.9% of the total IT staff at the median in 2018, on par with the percentage in 2016, and down slightly from last year. Previously, the ratio was stable from 2013-2015 at 2.6%. Keep reading this article on the Computer Economics

Niki Peterson of the UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on preparing future entrepreneurs For the last dozen years, the UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has fostered hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs out of the classroom setting and into the real world. Comstock’s sat down with Senior Program Manager Niki Peterson to learn how her institute is helping turn the Capital Region into a world-class incubator for innovation. How does our region compare as an entrepreneurship incubation site to places like Silicon Valley? Many people are calling Davis the Palo Alto of 20 years ago because of our proximity to the capital [city] and all the great technologies being developed here. We’re really well-positioned for what’s happening now in entrepreneurship an...[Read More]

Does Verizon’s 5G wireless network have the power to boost entrepreneurship in the Sacramento Region? Dimitrios Dovas didn’t move his startup from Silicon Valley to Sacramento because he heard the high-speed 5G wireless network was coming to town. He relocated last spring looking for engineers. “Sacramento can be the center for the next wave of technology,” he says. His company, Highlands Power, makes compact electric motors and generators. It’s a small startup of only six people. Right now, Dovas is interviewing local engineers to expand the company, fully convinced of the Capital Region’s potential as an electric autonomous vehicle hotspot. The news that Verizon chose Sacramento to deploy its high-speed 5G network, he says, helped verify his vision. He sees the network — the fifth genera...[Read More]

As a female founder of a tech startup, I am excited to be building my company,  ProPlanr Inc.. There’s one other thing I am equally excited about – empowering women in the business and technology ecosystem right here in Sacramento. After attending many tech startup conferences, events, workshops, and summits throughout the Bay Area and the United States, I found that something was missing from most of these gatherings.  They did not include programming, education, and resources specifically for female founders. When attending these startup events, I’d look around the room and discover I was one of very few women present and usually the only woman of color in a sea of young white men. I thought to myself, “surely there are resources and technology events that are diverse and inclusive of wo...[Read More]

Sacramento Kings And Golden 1 Center To Host Tech Showcase At California Classic Opening Day On Monday, July 2, the Sacramento Kings will host a Tech Showcase during the opening day of the California Classic Summer League at Golden 1 Center, the world’s most technologically advanced and sustainable arena. Select startups in various phases of their development will demonstrate their innovations designed to make the world a better place through technology. “At the tech showcase, we are using the Kings platform to highlight creative start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovations from around the region in the heart of California’s fastest growing city,” said Sacramento Kings Owner and Chairman Vivek Ranadivé. “The California Classic creates a unique opportunity to connect technology and community th...[Read More]