Aston stayed invested in Symbol Technologies despite its bad management team, Zerhusen says, because of its niche bar code technology.

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Still, Lanza believes that's enough to make the company competitive against the likes of Sun Microsystems and Symbol Technologies for leadership in the space.

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Along with Motorola, Connect Things and bar code giant Symbol Technologies, AirClic has raised half a billion dollars to form a company that will put scanning technology into wireless devices.

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These hardware upstarts include Airespace, Colubris Networks and Trapeze Networks, as well as Aruba Wireless Networks, which runs most of Dartmouth's campus, and Symbol Technologies, a publicly traded company known for its bar code scanners.

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The ultimate Bolofsky-killer, Stark says, will be the thousands of handheld Symbol Technologies computers the city is giving agents (only a fraction of tickets these days are issued by police officers) to replace old-fashioned citation books.

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