Technology Futures

I was fortunate enough to have dinner the other night with a very gifted and smart county administrator, who told me this:

"Our job is to attract talent to our region, not businesses. If we have talented people, we can do anything. And to attract talented people, we have to have the amenities that they want and expect, like broadband."

I think he has it exactly right. In the Knowledge Economy, businesses are becoming more and more portable and less and less reliant on traditional infrastructure like water and sewer. It does not mean that infrastructure is now irrelevant or unimportant, but it does mean that we have to think about it in different ways.

I was at a major top tier college recently, and they told me they had a hiring crisis. New faculty were turning down well paying jobs at this prestigious school. Why do you think? It was because broadband was unavailable outside the "downtown" area of this otherwise rural community. Many faculty wanted to live outside town where they could own a few acres of land and really enjoy country living, but broadband was no longer a nice luxury, it was now a life necessity. These prospective faculty were telling the college they simply would not live in a community without broadband.

In other words, these talented people were not attracted to this community because of the lack of broadband in residential areas, not business parks. So you have to have affordable broadband options in your business and industrial parks, but you also have to have it everywhere else if you want to attract talented people to your region.

NetworkWorld reports that spam traffic has jumped substantially in the past month or two. Fueling the deluge of junk mail are two changes in the spam ecosphere. Spammers are using two new zombie programs that infect Windows computers, making ordinary desktop computers into spam machines that can send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails per day. Often, people don't even know their machine has been infected; the only hint that something may be wrong is sluggish performance.

The second thing driving the new levels of spam is "image spam," which replaces text with GIF and JPEG images. Very few junk mail filters are able to detect that an email with just an image in it is spam, so spammers are both sending out more of that kind of spam, but we are seeing more of it in our IN boxes because our email filters and firewalls can't detect it. There is some work being done to use image processing software to identify and detect image spam, but it will take some time to get the software working well enough to deploy.

Ultimately, I see no solution other than to charge a fee for email. The problem with spam is that there is virtually no cost to send it. In essence, the cost of delivery is paid by the receiver, rather than the sender. If we had a micropayment system in place where it cost, for example, 1/100th of a cent to send a piece of email, it would cost most people and businesses almost nothing, but spammers sending millions of emails per day could no longer afford to do it.

For some time, I have been telling communities that quality of life and affordable broadband are the drivers of economic development in rural areas of the country. But over the past few months, I have come to believe that there is a third factor: reliable electric power. As we store more and more data and dish more of that data out to a global audience via our Web sites and businesses, reliable electric power is a critical resource that is needed to keep electricity-hungry servers humming.

How important is it? Wired reports that Google is building a new office campus and data center next to a hydroelectric dam. It turns out that not only do communities need redundant fiber connections to the Internet. They also need redundant power connections into business parks and business districts, to minimize power outages. A company like Amazon is doing millions of dollars of business PER HOUR, and just a few minutes of losing connectivity to the Internet or to electric power is disastrous.

Regions served by public electric utilities or by electric coops are well-positioned to take advantage of the new interest in rural areas by high tech companies, because those utilities are more flexible and can more easily make investments that benefit the community.

Finally, safety and security are also driving the shift to placing these in rural areas. In the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina, companies are realizing decentralized operations are a business necessity. And the low cost of land, lower wages, less traffic, and the beautiful countryside helps too. Rural communities, start your power generators for the coming boom of the Energy Economy.

In a victory for personal privacy, a German court has ruled that if a customer requests it, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) must delete the IP log data that shows what a customer has been doing on the Internet and when. In the U.S., unfortunately, we are headed in the other direction, with the Federal government anxious to make ISPs responsible for retaining such information--forever! It is a huge and costly burden, with little justification, since most of us will never commit a crime that might require such data, and in my opinion, it is intrusive and an invasion of privacy.