Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Blue Ridge Crossroads: Best place to start a business in the U.S.?
The Blue Ridge Crossroads region in southwest Virginia may be the best place to start a business in the United States, if the results they rolled out this week are any indication. Three years ago, the region's leaders started an aggressive program to diversify their economic development strategy to include more focus on entrepreneurs and business start ups.
In less than three years, Carroll and Grayson counties and the City of Galax (the three local governments that comprise the Blue Ridge Crossroads region) have helped start 85 new businesses. Those businesses have created 391 new jobs, and there has been more than $19 million in direct capital investment, with an estimated total economic impact of nearly $80 million.
The EDA is building a regional high speed fiber and wireless network that will eventually provide service to every home and business in the region, so that entrepreneurs can start businesses from home and have access to high performance, business class telecom services, including VoIP phone service and Internet access. In 2009, as part of that effort, fiber will be installed at the three existing business parks in the region.
The EDA is also building a major new business park close to two of the busiest interstates on the East Coast (the intersection of I-81 and I-77), and planning is already underway to have fiber and wireless services at that location.
A key success factor in spurring new business development has been Crossroads Institute, which took an old, empty big box building and converted it to a world class business incubation and higher education facility. The facility is home to dozens of public and private entities, and the availability of high speed Internet access has been important for attracting jobs and businesses.
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SpaceX wins the race
SpaceX, the private rocket company, successfully launched a satellite size hunk of aluminum into orbit, making it the first private rocket to boost an object into earth orbit. Like Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne (which only made a sub-orbital trip), the SpaceX accomplishment will continue to accelerate private investment in space. Rutan is busy building a fleet of space tourism vehicles for Virgin Galactic.
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AT&T and Verizon say "No" to customer tracking
Verizon and AT&T deserve congratulations for endorsing an opt-in approach to tracking online behavior. This means they won't try to build dossiers of where you go online unless they get your permission. The online dossier information can be valuable, as data can be mined and sold to advertisers.
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Knowledge Democracy:
U.S. Broadband: Almost as good as Nigeria?
Nigeria is using a high performance network for the national post office (1,500 locations) to jumpstart community broadband connectivity. A new national backbone will be built, using the post office needs as an anchor tenant. But the high performance network will be designed to support other community broadband and service needs.
This could work well in the U.S. at the regional and state level, and in fact, states like New Mexico are already studying just that--using state library, telemedicine, and research network needs to serve as the backbone for an open network available to businesses, residents, and service providers (Disclaimer: Design Nine was hired by the State of New Mexico to do that study).
Private, single use networks are expensive and often limit economic development potential, because a dedicated K12, health, or state agency network usually can't be shared with the private sector. By building a single high performance network like the one planned for Nigeria, several anchor tenants can help offset the cost and not only lower the cost of telecom for their own organization but for the whole community as well. Some places in the U.S. are planning these networks, including the Eastern Shore of Virginia Broadband Authority.
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Internet radio may finally take off
Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.
No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.
A few years later, streaming radio and podcasting took off in a big way. But streaming radio got knocked down almost immediately by huge increases in royalties that made it financially impossible for small start-up Internet radio stations to develop a market, and even for bigger operations, the cost of royalties was difficult.
A tentative agreement has been reached between the RIAA, which controls music royalty, and the radio industry. For Internet radio operations, they will pay 10.5% of annual revenue instead of a per song fee. This makes perfect sense, as it will allow small niche Internet radio operations grow without high royalty fees that are not linked to actual income. And musicians and songwriters will still get compensated in some indirect proportion to the number of people actually listening (radio stations with a large audience will have more revenue, and will so the royalty revenue will be higher).
This approach is identical to the revenue sharing models adopted by broadband projects like nDanville and The Wired Road. Revenue share models allow many new and innovative services to start up inexpensively because the fees to content owners or the network are paid in proportion to success.
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Japanese scientists plan to build a space elevator
Japanese scientists are developing plans for a space elevator. A couple of U.S. firms have also been working on the same concept, which does not require new scientific breakthroughs, but is instead requires solving a series of engineering and materials fabrication problems. The biggest one is developing a process to make a 62,000 mile ribbon of carbon nanotubes. Carbon fiber materials are strong enough to support the loads that will be imposed on the ribbon cable, but the manufacturing processes to make the cable have to be developed.
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Email is a time waster
New research suggests that email, to hardly anyone's surprise, is a huge time waster. A UK scientist studying how we use email found that stopping to check your email imposes a big time loss on us as we switch back and forth mentally between tasks. For those who have their email set to check automatically on frequent intervals, the overhead of task switching can eat up an entire workday out of a five day work week.
The solution is pretty simple. Turn off automatic checking and check your email only a few times a day. Fewer interruptions means more time spent on work.
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Wave energy may power Google
Google's power hungry servers continue to send the company out to look for cheaper sources of electric power. According to this article, the search giant is studying the idea of putting massive banks of servers on giant barges tethered in the ocean, where wave energy would generate the power needed for the servers.
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Jobs creation and broadband: a case study
Perhaps the most frequently asked question we receive is, "How will broadband help our local economy?"
The answer is, "...in ways you can't even imagine."
Broadband and the expansion of connectivity via both fiber and wireless is creating entirely new businesses and jobs that simply don't appear in the strategic plans of most economic development agencies.
A case in point is Trism, which is a $5 game for the iPhone. Trism's popularity has netted the single developer $250,000 in revenue in just two months. He is now seeking investment capital and is making plans to hire new workers and to expand substantially.
What enabled this? New technology in the form of the iPhone, sophisticated new software written by Apple to deliver software like Trism cheaply over the network, and the network itself.
I have not been able to verify this, but I'm willing to bet that Trism was developed at home, and that that home has a broadband connection.
eBay has said that it believes more than 500,000 people in U.S. make a full time living from buying and selling on the auction site. That's a whole industry, and virtually of those jobs represent home-based workers. The economy is changing, and new jobs and businesses are emerging wherever affordable high speed broadband is available.
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The IPSO Alliance is mapping the future of appliances
The IPSO Alliance (IP for Smart Objects) is mapping the future of appliances and gadgets. Many common household and industrial items will have an IP address in the near future, enabling them to connect to the Internet and perform functions like system diagnostics, power management, transmission of environmental information (temperature, light, motion, health status), and software upgrades.
Telehealth applications will benefit from the new functions enabled by IP connectivity. As robust and reliable broadband connections to the home become more common, more older citizens will be able to enjoy a higher quality of life and will be able to live independently much longer because of relatively low cost telehealth diagnostic and monitoring devices in the home.
In-home and industrial power management and control will save homeowners and businesses lots of money because power hungry devices like water heaters, furnaces, heat pumps, air conditioners, and dryers will be able to talk to the electric and gas utilities, which in turn will be able to turn those devices on and off (with the permission of the owner) to help smooth demand for energy.
What is the essential ingredient? Residences and businesses have to high reliability broadband connections--fiber everywhere.
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