Economic development

This is 2007 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which reported that half of U.S. businesses are located in the home. Half, as in 50%. Which validates what I began saying ten years ago: Neighborhoods are business districts.

Communities that ignore this data and continue to hope that marginal DSL, asymmetric cable, and too-expensive cellular data services are "good enough" are closing off their own economic future.

Via Eldo Telecom, news that in England, people are moving from the country to larger towns because of bad Internet access. As Fred Pilot of Eldo points out (correctly, I believe), rural communities in the U.S. are also at risk. It's hard to imagine how anybody can manage with a dial up connection at home, which of course leads to people parking in the McDonald's parking lot so they can retrieve their email or so their kids can do their homework.

This article in readwrite confirms something I have suspected for a long time: that most successful entrepreneurs are not twenty-three and worth a billion dollars. In fact, according to the article, "...twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. A whopping 75% have more than six years of industry experience and 50% have more than 10 years when they create their startup."

If you think you are going to attract those young, business-hungry entrepreneurs types with some mediocre broadband, a couple of bike paths, and a Starbucks, think again. A start up company called Happy Hubs has just ratcheted the whole entrepreneurial attraction game up several notches. Happy Hubs is renting out luxury workspaces in Costa Rica, and is offering five star amenities like massage therapy, gourmet food service, maid service, and access to a beach.

There is some moderately coarse language in this article, but it is worth reading if you are interested in economic and community development. What caught my eye is how successful Chattanooga has been in re-inventing itself as the "Gig City." Three years ago, it is hard to imagine that the creative class in places like New York and Los Angeles could even tell you what state Chattanooga was in, but today, it has become the place for the young and restless to move to.

I see two things driving bandwidth demand in the business sector: VPNs and videoconferencing.

Fred Pilot excerpts two key points from a speech by Milo Medin, the head of the Google fiber initiative.

Read this short but detailed discussion of the space problem for start-ups and entrepreneurs by Melissa Thompson. Finding the right office space at an affordable price is a huge issue for small, entrepreneurial businesses. Many of them start in the home, but if they grow beyond a couple of employees, they will usually be looking for office space, and in my experience, many local and regional economic development organizations are not well prepared to help with this.

Robert Bell of the Intelligent Community Foundation has a must read article on how the Creative Class (Richard Florida's brainchild) is not delivering the results many cities were expecting. To the extent that a city is able to recruit Creative Class residents and workers, those upscale residents tend to displace blue collar workers and raise the cost of living in the area, which cancels out some or all of the positive effects.

An interesting article reporting on Lou Zacharilla's comments from his attendance at a conference on the future of libraries. Zacharilla is the co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum. Zacharilla noted that....

Here is a short news item on how Utopia, the community-owned fiber network in Utah, helped one business cut costs.

From the always excellent MuniNetworks, the story of how a tiny community out in the middle of nowhere attracted a $600 million data center. If you have never been to The Dalles, it really is an extremely isolated place. It's a beautiful town on the edge of the Columbia River. Fed up with lousy broadband, the community built its own fiber ring, and coupled with reliable electric power, that brought Google and its $600 million data center to the community.

Startup Blacksburg (#bva) met this morning to identify what the region needs to accelerate the creation of jobs and business opportunities in Blacksburg, Montgomery County, and the New River Valley. Using criteria established by Startup America, the area scores surprisingly well on most of the elements needed by startups and high growth potential companies.

If you are interested in seeing firsthand what happens when a city invests in open fiber, there is still time to register for the Broadband Communities Community Fiber Networks conference in Danville, Virginia in early November. Danville's open access fiber network has been a key part of an enormously successful downtown revitalization effort that has brought hundreds of new jobs to the community and international firms have been re-locating to Danville in part because of the high performance, low cost open access fiber network.

Susan Crawford, writing as a Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, argues eloquently for paying more attention to broadband capacity and affordability, especially in rural areas of the U.S. She argues that well-provisioned, modern broadband connectivity is essential to economic growth.

Chattanooga is providing financial assistance to people with technical backgrounds who agree to buy a house and move to the area. It's a brilliant idea, and coupled with their fiber network, Chattanooga continues to prove they are not just serving up the same old warmed over, forty year old economic development strategies.

The Intelligent Community Foundation has just opened its 2013 Intelligent Community Awards for nominations. This is the first step toward the Intelligent Community of the Year award, to be presented on June 7, 2013.

CNBC reports on a UNESCO Broadband Commission report that says every 10 percent increase in the availability of broadband will add 1.3% to economic growth. Don't think that sounds like much?

Danville's keen focus on a comprehensive plan to revitalize the downtown area started with creation of a City-owned open access fiber network five years ago. Downtown Danville continues to attract new development; the City just announced a $14 million redevelopment of a historic building that will bring 40+ jobs into the historic River District area of Danville, close to Main Street, shopping, and the Dan River.

The Virginia state legislature has passed bills providing new incentives to locate data centers in Virginia. The rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based data and services is creating demand for places to put all the data. And with data centers, there are jobs: