Tag - Omx

Every website you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every phone call, voicemail or text message you exchange, every purchase you make with a debit or credit card, and virtually every piece of information on your personal and financial life compiled by commercial interests and government sources leaves a lifetime electronic footprint and paper trail.

It seems that privacy, once taken for granted, is a thing of the past. It could be argued that the very technological advances that make our lives more convenient have also made the all-intrusive Orwellian surveillance state more of a reality.

And that suits Guidance Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: GUID), a leader in computer forensic investigation technology, just fine. Guidance's software enables law enforcement organizations, corporations and government agencies to manage, search, collect, preserve and analyze digital information across computer networks. Guidance counts Halliburton (NYSE: HAL), the U.S. Department of State and a host of Fortune 500 companies among its clients.

Guidance's flagship product is EnCase, software that allows security personnel to monitor information traffic going in and out of their networks, and to sniff out and log suspicious activities by users (including specific patterns or keywords). A variation of the product is used in law enforcement labs by computer forensics investigators to collect digital evidence. EnCase can do everything from restoring "deleted" files from computer hard drives to helping catch rogue employees who are emailing company secrets to competitors, to tracking down sources of classified information leaks. Most experts prefer EnCase to competing products like Deepdive Technologies' DD500 and Paraben Corporation's P2.

Back in the days of the Johnson presidency – Andrew, not Lyndon – a little company began as a grinding shop in Bridgeport, Conn., to make scissors and keep them honed to perfection in a post Civil War America.
 
The little grinding shop, formed in 1867 as a local partnership and incorporated in 1882, was known for decades as Acme Shear. From its incorporation until the 1990s, the Wheeler family ran the show, before Walter Johnsen came in as president and chief executive officer in 1995.

Now headquartered in Fairfield, Conn., Acme has morphed into Acme United Corp. (AMEX: ACU). The company has sprung from its Americana small-business roots into a global provider of some basic products: as it says in its annual report, “innovative cutting, measuring and safety products to the school, home, office and industrial markets.” It has manufacturing and distribution facilities in the United States, Germany, Canada and Asia, yet it remains a microcap, with just about $50 million in market capitalization.
 
Its products might be considered mundane, but the range is fairly diverse. Most schoolkids and their parents should recognize one of its main brands – Westcott, a name that’s been around since 1872 – through which it sells rulers, scissors, letter openers, paper cutters and other items. It also makes house brands of those basic products for retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), and office superstores including Staples Inc. (Nasdaq: SPLS) and OfficeMax Inc. (NYSE: OMX).