Tad Dickens

1 month ago | cardinalnews.org | Tad Dickens

A quarter-century ago, Roanoke and Blacksburg’s technology community first celebrated itself. The inaugural TechNite happened at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center, but as Russ Ellis remembers, it was a more casual affair than many others since. “It was pretty scrawny by comparison,” said Ellis, an early player in the region’s tech landscape.

1 month ago | cardinalnews.org | Tad Dickens

Virginia Tech is adding a new level of drone defense research with $5 million from the U.S. Army. Five months after a rash of mysterious drone sightings along the East Coast, the university announced the award to its well-established uncrewed aerial systems, or UAS, research, according to a news release.

1 month ago | cardinalnews.org | Tad Dickens

A Virginia law meant to speed broadband deployment across railroad lines has hit its first guardrail, in the form of a state Supreme Court ruling. The court, drawing a distinction between a “public benefit” and a “public use,” ruled that Cox Communications cannot use the 2023 law to impose eminent domain on railways’ property while trying to reach the commonwealth’s more remote areas.

1 month ago | cardinalnews.org | Tad Dickens

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., has joined a call for the Trump administration to release broadband deployment funds and refrain from changing guidelines about what to do with the money. Warner, a co-author and negotiator of the 2021 law that created the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, says that President Donald Trump has been blocking the so-called BEAD dollars for months. Late last week, he co-signed a letter to Trump, calling on him to follow the law.

1 month ago | cardinalnews.org | Tad Dickens

An Abingdon nonprofit organization, looking to expand broadband access and literacy, put its blueprints in place. People Inc. of Virginia used $55,000 in federal money and worked with multiple Southwest Virginia nonprofits to create a plan that would help a variety of Southwest Virginia residents with digital literacy, coding and consumer protection, and would provide devices for doing schoolwork to children living below the poverty line, among other actions. People Inc.