CTAC founder, Bill Colem and and the Dakota Future were recently in the Rosemount Town Pages. Bill is leading the county-wide economic development group in an effort to become one of the top seven Intelligent Communities in the world by 2012. The award promotes smart use of broadband technology.
Pursuing the award is a good way to help Dakota Future make a concerted effort to use technology wisely to support economic development. Winning the award would bring worldwide recognition to the county.
Also if you’re in or near one of these areas, on behalf of the Blandin Foundation, I’d like to invite you to attend an accompanying Broadband Policy Seminar. The seminars are hosted by a local partner and are held on the day before the Task Force meeting.
Here’s the official inviation:
Blandin Foundation and regional partners including ARDC, Region 9 Development Commission, and Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, are promoting informed public participation in the Task Force meetings by hosting free seminars prior to each Task Force visit.
Each seminar will include regional panelists actively engaged in broadband deployment and use, and time for participants to organize their regional voice for the task force meeting the following day.
Minnesota Broadband Policy Seminars
• June 18, 3-5 pm, Sawmill Inn, Grand Rapids
• July 16, 3-5 pm, Region 9 Development Commission, Mankato
• August 20, 3 -5 pm, Big Woods, Fergus Falls
Broadband is in the news these days. Stimulus funding, the state broadband task force, municipal networks, new technologies are all topics for discussion – not just for techies anymore. Some skeptics are right to ask, “What’s the point?”
My answer is, “The point is to become more intelligent, as individuals, communities, regions and countries.” This morning, I cast my vote as a jury member for the international Intelligent Community Forum (www.intelligentcommunity.org) awards. I was privileged to review the applications and community reviews for seven communities around the world. Casting my vote was both difficult and exciting. All of these communities are combining efforts to develop robust networks and create a culture of use. Strategies for broadband development included a blend of private, public and private-public networks. Strategies for increasing use focused on schools, senior citizens, entrepreneurs, research universities, health care and government administration and citizen participation.
The international rankings for broadband deployment have had the U.S. falling in recent years. As I read about how these communities are using broadband for community and economic development, it seems clear that we are also falling behind in application development and usage. At the recent MHTA Spring Conference, Marc Lautenbach, IBM’s North American General Manager, talked about a smarter planet and how the world is changing. His primary question to the audience was “How are you changing?” It was a definite wake-up call that we all need to think smarter and act more quickly to keep up with the global pace.
We need advancement, not just on broadband infrastructure. We need better services over the infrastructure. We need more people using broadband. We need those people to be doing more and more sophisticated applications over the network. I ask you and your community’s leadership, “How are you changing?”
Eindhoven in the Netherlands has a FTTP open access network. Speeds to the home are 100 Mb.
What are they using it for? Good question! Eindhoven has announced plans to position their region as a bandwidth intensive laboratory with an invitation to application developers to use the Eindhoven as their place to identify, create and deploy new applications. New services for residents - attraction of skilled and creative talent and new jobs. That’s intelligent!
According to all of the people on the ICF agenda, a community with a shared vision and a culture of inter-sector collaboration has tremendous advantages for competing in the global marketplaces. They can move faster, overcome more barriers and achieve more.
Earlier this week, CTAC founder, Bill Coleman spoke with other members of the Blandin Broadband Initiative team to folks around the state you are interested in improving broadband access in Minnesota.
Bill Coleman is a founder of the Minnesota Broadband Coalition, an ad hoc group of citizens, businesses and organizations that believes that more, bigger, better broadband is needed to ensure Minnesota’s and our own future.
The vision is to ensure a high quality of life and a globally competitive future for its citizens, businesses and communities, Minnesota must be committed to making the necessary investment to become a world leader in the universal deployment and use of ultra high-speed next generation broadband.
We’re looking for new members. If you are interested in more, better broadband, please join us.
Connected Nation is currently working on a map of broadband access and speed throughout Minnesota. The results of that map will be used by the Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force in making recommendations to the state in regards to broadband policy.
Much of the mapping is created with information supplied by broadband providers in the state. To balance out that information they are asking Minnesota homes and businesses to test and record their speeds by visiting the Connect Minnesota Site.
Help do your part by visiting the site and recording your speeds.
According to ComScore, the global internet audience surged past the one-billion mark in December 2008. China represented the largest online audience in the world in December 2008 with 180 million internet users, representing nearly 18% of the total worldwide internet audience, followed by the US (16.2% share), Japan (6.0% share), Germany (3.7 percent share) and the UK (3.6 percent share).
Pew Internet and American Life released a study this week on adult use of social networking tools. Did you know that the percentage of adults with profiles on social networking site went from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2008?
Younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young but that’s changing.
You can check out Bill Coleman’s profile on Facebook.
Bill Coleman was one of a handful of people asked to speak at Senator Klobuchar’s Broadband roundtable at the Capital this week. Here are his comments on the experience:
It was fun to be a part of this meeting and hear the perspective of Senator Klobachar and the importance that she places on broadband development.
I tried to emphasize that there are multiple considerations to this discussion - getting broadband of some sort to everyone while making significant efforts to get big broadband to where it is needed right now.
The mapping project was discussed briefly as it related to the state broadband task force. Knowing where 1 Mb broadband is available does not inform a future oriented broadband policy. One map would be easy to draw - that would the map that shows where 50 Mb service is available at prices comparable to our economic competitors in Europe and Asia.
