March 2009 Archives

Sports and recreation frequently lead to falling down.  Whether it's American football or the equestrian arts, gymnastics or judu, you are going to spend some time laying on the ground and trying to figure out how you got there.  That's why good instructors teach you first how to fall, so that you will be able to get up again.

Intelligent Communities have a lot of experience in falling as well as rising.  None has probably witnessed so long a fall or so thorough a rise as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.  From World War II until it gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia endured 50 years of totalitarian rule and economic central planning.  Yet by 2005, Estonia had been admitted to the European Union and The New York Times was calling it "a sort of Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea."  Even in the current economic crisis, Estonia is one of the countries helping to bail out its fellow Eastern European nations, rather than being on the receiving end.

You can find the story of Tallinn's rise as an Intelligent Community on our Web site, because it was among our Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2008.  Tallinn is on our 2009 Top Seven list as well and we will soon publish an updated profile, following a visit by my colleague John Jung at the beginning of April.  I look forward to reading what he posts about his journey. In the meantime, as I follow the grim economic news, I have been thinking about how Tallinn pulled off such a comeback.

One thing leaps out from the data.  Estonia in general and Tallinn in particular are incredibly open to the world.  History probably helps.  Tallinn has been a seaport with close ties to Finland and Sweden for centuries.  Within a decade of independence, Estonia had passed model laws opening up its banking and telecom sectors to investment from foreign companies and established rules for electronic commerce, privacy and public access to information.  As a result, Finnish and Swedish companies came to dominate both communications and finance, which are the lifeblood of a modern economy.  Imagine how that story would play out in public in some places, including my own country.  But the people of Estonia seemed to take it in stride.

The other amazing thing is how fast and furiously the people of Tallinn adopted the modern digital lifestyle made possible by this investment.  In 1991, Tallinn was a place where ancient factories churned out low-quality hard goods for Russian markets.  Within fifteen years, seven out of ten residents of Tallinn were working in the service sector, from consultancy and accounting to advertising and design.  Broadband penetration is now at 48% for households, 96% for businesses and 100% for government.  Government has gone online with a vengeance, from an e-meeting system for the Council to an e-school platform for education, and the Estonian X-Road middleware platform (recipient of an ICF 2008 Founder's Award), which dramatically reduces the time and cost of building e-government applications.  The Tallinn-based company Skype announced on March 24 that it had become the largest provider of international phone calls in the world.

Somehow, Tallinn and Estonia came out of the long period of occupation ready and able to prosper in the Broadband Economy.  It may even be that the skills learned behind the Iron Curtain - patience, adaptability, and learning to do a lot with little - were key ingredients in their success.  Which is another way of saying that knowing how to fall can be the key to rising again. 

Part 3

As you can see from Parts 1 and 2 of my most current blogs dealing with the technical architecture of an Intelligent Community, I didn't get into the size of the pipe or the minimum spectrum needed in developing your wireless systems or discussion around the routers, digital boxes, RFID or WiMax opportunities and other systems. If you want that kind of information, we can invite our partners to showcase their technology and their systems architecture. It would make for some interesting examination and scrutiny. However, I want to personally make it clear that from my perspective, that is not what makes an intelligent community. The extent of your fixed broadband or wireless points of presence do not make you an intelligent community. Now tell me how you use it, the extent of penetration and use in households and in the community for social, cultural and economic good - that begins to get my interest.

Let me offer an example. Taipei has 5000 POPs (points of presence) and is considered the world's largest WiFi community. They are now exploring WiMax in order to stay ahead of the curve. They have extensive broadband penetration to the home and in the office and factory floor. But that alone would not get them a mention at any ICF awards program. But they also have an extensive innovative smartcard system that works as equivalent to cash transactions and can be used on the Transit systems and at the same time can alert mothers on their cellphones when their children have arrived at school carrying their smartcards. Taipei also extensively trains its citizens in the use of all the platforms and applications available to them over the Internet. There is an extensive system of public access points for these applications and platforms throughout the city and region in public libraries, public offices, retail areas and even in 7-11 stores that seem to exist on every street corner throughout Taiwan. No need for your own laptop or home PC. And no need to travel downtown to City Hall. Government services, forms and transactions are easily handled online at any a 7-11 convenience shop or at home. Libraries are automated, even unmanned, using broadband technologies for security and processing; the advanced Microsoft School of the Future uses research-intensive broadband to educate its primary grade students; and Taipei's cultural centers are all connected and proactively engage its local citizens to participate in the cultural aspects of the country. Their push to be an intelligent community has been infectious to the point that their neighboring county, Taoyuan has recently joined the ICF family as a Smart21 Intelligent Community. Taipei's activities are also catching on across the entire nation of Taiwan, aiming to be an Intelligent Island. These are the actions of leading intelligent communities. This is not an isolated experience. I can cite you 80 examples from around the globe that have similar, although unique stories to tell.

ICF uses 5 key indicators of Intelligent Communities:

    * Broadband Infrastructure
    * Knowledge workers
    * Innovation
    * Digital Inclusion
    * Marketing

Beyond these, consider such virtues as leadership, collaboration, sustainability, governance, culture, and advocacy. And each town, city or region, the opportunities for use and benefits are going to be unique and will need to be looked at differently.

ICF has a new book that has just been released, called Broadband Economies. Check it out on our website. It speaks about many of the examples from around the world that meet these criteria. ICF currently has 80 towns, cities, regions (and even Provinces and nations) that are part of the Intelligent Community alumni. We look forward to attracting many more each year. But don't expect to get on the list if all that you have to talk about is some fiber-optics in the ground or a WiFi service in your local coffee shops.

More information on the Intelligent Community Forum can be found at www.intelligentcommunity.org.

In a few hours I will leave for my first Top Seven site visit.  I arrive in Stockholm on Sunday morning (14 March) for meetings which begin on Monday (16 March) at 8:30 with a morning visit to Kista Science City and conclude the following day with an afternoon visit that includes elements of how the community, where one out of every 12 Swedes lives, has become a "culture of use."  Of particular interest is an insight into their version of web 3.0 usage and how the 45,000 employees of the government, the country's largest single employer, are becoming the leading proponents of what Stockholm calls its "Vision 2030" program.

I am looking closely at the weather reports.  I recall that last year at around this time I had flown from Rome to Tallinn, Estonia where I was assured that weather had been mild and nearly Spring-like, only to be met by a Baltic blizzard.  I grew-up in Upstate New York, in a region around the Finger Lakes.  I was used to snow.  But this was spectacular.  Fortunately my hosts last year, especially City Secretary Toomas Sepp and Mayor Edgar Savisaar, provided me with some useful clothing to weather the weather!

In Sweden I will be looking to inquire further into three main areas:

How the community has managed to incentivize its under-30 population.  With such a widespread government employment base it was curious to read that "78% of the 18- to 30-year olds in the city of Stockholm envisage becoming company owners, and that 33% prefer being a company owner to being an employee."  This view is reliant on Stockholm (or any community) creating new enterprises, rather than more government work.  In the current climate of stimulus packages at the national level, and with an apparent larger footprint for national and state governments, does this view prevail?

"Interactive, Internet-based modules are being combined with local practical work so as to access and involve everyone working within the city of Stockholm."  This is a direct culture of use statement, which I will attempt to drill further into for reporting purposes.  This ties directly to the Vision 2030 program.  By 2030 Stockholm will be the hub of the growing Stockholm/Mararen Valley region and the center for growth via international trade.  Clearly broadband and the applications developed from it will be central to the strategy.

The human face of the broadband economy.  Throughout the reports and nomination forms submitted by our correspondents and Stockholm, there are references to the issue of "Digital Inclusion," ICF's fourth criteria for assessing a community and naming it as an intelligent community.  One challenge, apparently, is the district of Jarva, where a high percentage of foreign-born residents seem to be a concern and which tests the notion of a wholistic approach to the community's vision.  I will look at Jarva on Monday.  

I believe that broadband in the service of a more humanistic approach to daily life is essential to success for the 21st Century.  Collaboration depends on our ability to understand and view the other as being in the "same boat" and worthy.  I head to Stockholm, a first-time Top Seven Intelligent Community, with the perception that it may represent this model.  I will report further once there and once my made-in-Estonia gloves and wool cap are safely within reach!

More information on the Intelligent Community Forum can be found at www.intelligentcommunity.org.

I live in a small town in the suburbs of New York City, where the local paper recently ran a story that caught my eye.  "Web site has potential to inform residents," said the headline.  Well, I thought, change may come slowly to suburbia, but it comes at last.  The article reported on the local government Web site, www.creskillboro.com, which has moved to a new content management platform allowing it more frequently update news, forms and links.  Not exactly the cutting edge of e-government, is it?  But hey, at least the paper covered it.

I wish I could take the residents of my town to visit Issy-les-Moulineaux in France, one of our 2009 Top Seven Intelligent Communities.  It, too, is a suburb - though with over 61,000 residents, it is nearly eight times larger than mine.  In Issy, they also believe that the Web "has potential to inform residents," but that's about where the resemblance ends.

In 1980, the people of Issy elected a visionary named Andre Santini as their Mayor.  He made it his mission to rebuild Issy's economy for a time when information and communications technology (ICT) would take the place of traditional industry as a generator of jobs.  He and his team did it so effectively that Issy now more jobs than residents.  Instead of people commuting out of town in the morning, as I do most days, they are commuting into Issy to work.

How did they do it?  Mayor Santini believed that government should lead by example.  In 1997, Issy outsourced its entire IT operation to a private company so that his team could innovate at the speed of business rather than of the civil service.  The vendor has reengineered Issy's government portal, launched in 1994, to provide news, online public procurement, online applications for permits, streaming video of City Council meetings, a "citizen relationship management" system, and an interactive Citizen Panel that involves residents in decision-making.

Until January 1998, France Telecom held a monopoly on all telecommunications.  The end of the monopoly began a slow, halting process to open up the market - except in Issy, where the government had negotiated deals with alternative carriers to build networks that went live as soon as the monopoly ended.  Today, a total of six alternative carriers provide communications services, and broadband penetration is at 80% compared with the French average of 50%.  Today in Issy, your kids can attend a CyberKindergarten, where parents check in by Web cam and interact with their children.  Elders can go to a CyberTearoom to learn digital skills in a comforting environment.  Neighborhood council elections are conducted online and, in the most recent vote, attracted 62% of residents.

Issy also has an aggressive economic development program targeting ICT companies, but does not engage in the typical tax-based incentive strategies.  It counts instead on offering a location near Paris with superior broadband infrastructure, a business-friendly climate and innovative e-services.  The combination seems to work.  Today, 57% of the companies in Issy are in the ICT sector, including Cisco Systems Europe's regional headquarters, Orange Internet, Sybase, Marie Claire Group, Canal+, Eurosport, GlobeCast and Microsoft Europe.  This success has made it possible for Issy's population to grow 35% since 1990 without any increase in government payrolls.   

Meanwhile, back here in northern New Jersey, my town's leaders are clearly worried about being accused of wasting money on this new-fangled Web stuff.  Borough Clerk Barbara Nasuto said, of hosting the Web site, "It's not cheap."  Converting the site cost $6,000 and the annual expenses for running it are $3,000 per year.  Don't' get me wrong.  I love my little town.  But $3,000 is about what it costs this commuter per year to leave it and work somewhere else.

More information on the Intelligent Community Form can be found at www.intelligentcommunity.org.

I am usually asked two questions regarding the annual Building the Broadband Economy Summit in New York.

#1: "Who will be named Intelligent Community of the Year from among the seven communities?"

and.....

#2: "Why is Brooklyn the site of your Summit?"

To answer the first question: I do not know.  No one does.   I do know that each of the Top Seven are remarkable places, and typify the best practices of communities in the "Broadband Economy."  

One of the best things about the Summit is when I engage each in a 30-minute conversation.  I do this as part of a segment called "Top Seven Conversations."   You can see last year's conversations on our web site.  I am keen to interview Stockholm and Eindhoven, two communities I am tasked with inspecting this month.  Both are innovation centers, which incubate businesses as part of a long-term strategy for job creation.  I plan to blog from Stockholm and Eindhoven during my site visits.

The second question ("Why Brooklyn?") is easy to answer.  Forgive me if my passion for the place sounds like promotional copy for the Travel section of the Times or a sales pitch for a place which has given my think tank a home.  But I temper my old instincts as an ad copywriter by saying, simply, that you have to like a place that produced the second most prolific inventor of the 20th Century.  Read on.

I answer the second question with a question: "Where else but Brooklyn?"  One of America's greatest poets, Walt Whitman, long ago made his home there.  I can feel the truth of his words and his passion for the place in his work.  I understand it.

Breukelen (the original name), was named after the community in Holland.  Today it is a community of over 2 million people (that is larger than Manhattan).  It is cinematically famous for its bridge and the toughness of its citizens.  But people should get over that image.  The bridge is beautiful and the people are like people everywhere who work and struggle to prosper in the world.  There remains an image of a brawling, modestly educated place where people are looking for a fight or way to cut a corner.  As with most stereotypes, that image of Brooklyn needs to be balanced with Nobel Prizes and great works of literature, finance and human culture which pour out of Brooklyn - and innovation, which runs as deep and as forcefully as the currents in the East River.

During the resurgence of New York, beginning in the mid-1990's, Brooklyn benefited most.  As the modern rap artists, painters and poets of its Brooklyn Heights, Willamsburg and Red Hook neighborhoods say, "It has stayed real" as it stabilized again.  Today it combines a deep, diverse culture of races, classes and places.  It has solid communities that operate on a human scale.   

The borough is referred to as the "Left Bank of New York." It is home to artists, celebrities, business leaders and, yes, technology corridors.  This surprises people from outside New York City.  Those of us living in New York take it for granted.  But it is easy to be fooled by its rustic, earthy character.  However, most people who understand urban communities quickly figure out that this is a sophisticated place which gives urban living relevance.

Many of ICF's contributors, past and present, live in Brooklyn.  Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine and author of Crowdsourcing, not exactly a low-tech guy, lives a few steps from Polytechnic University.  He spoke at our '07 Summit.  Anyone who has spent an afternoon strolling along the Park Slope district or the Metrotech Center,  where Polytechnic University, home to the ICF Summit, is located, realizes that Brooklyn is what we want our urban communities to become: diverse, unpretentious and mobilized to meet the future.  It has roots and it accepts those who have uprooted.  Young people seeking the undying "American Dream" walk the streets from everywhere, many of them holding two jobs as they study for an MBA and apply their energy in an attempt to feed the next round of global innovation and progress.  No matter where I travel, I always meet someone who lived or went to school in Brooklyn - and has fond memories of the place.

People will not be as dazzled as they will be when we entertain them at the Penn Club in Manhattan on May 13 or, of course, the spectacular Samsung Experience at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan.  The Time Warner Center, perhaps the last great large-scale development in midtown Manhattan, is the site of our Top Seven Reception on May 14th.  The fact of Manhattan is that it is simply a jewel.  Visually it offers all kinds of grand possibilities and the pulse is undeniable.  But like the brain, the left and right need to work together to form the perfect balance.  We have it with Brooklyn and Manhattan forming the left and right banks for our Summit.  Manhattan provides the glamor at night, but our global dialogue on the future of the community of the 21st Century will take place in the heart of the borough where Walt Whitman wrote:

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.

The generations since Whitman wrote those words have done great things in Brooklyn.  For those tracking New York's response to the global financial crisis, it can be noted that Polytechnic took a step forward on New York's behalf last week.  The link below is the announcement of a new business incubator that was launched by New York Mayor Bloomberg and Polytechnic's president, Jerry Hultin.

http://www.poly.edu/news/fullNews.php?id=1515
 
I encourage those of you invited to the Summit to ask Jerry about this. 

The article gave me a snapshot of Polytech's contributions over the generations.  It continues to graduate people like Eugene Kleiner, whose company, Fairchild Semiconductor, helped ignite Silicon Valley's high-tech boom.  The article also mentions Paul Soros, whose firm encouraged global trade by engineering ports in 90 countries.  I alluded to Jerome Lemelson at the start of this blog.  He is the second most prolific inventor of the 20th Century, with 550 patents.

ICF is about broadband as infrastructure and innovation as its output, so we feel a legacy connection with Brooklyn and this institution because they do things like this.  

More patents will surely follow.  Mel Horwitch, who many of you know, leads the Department of Technology Management into a new era.  Mel continues to make the Innovation Technology & Enterprise (ITE) school worthy of the three words in its name.  His interview with Robert from our office in New York is worth viewing to get a sense of why ICF calls Polytech its home!

I hope I have begun to answer question #2: "Why Brooklyn?"  It was Polytech and its school of ITE which first reached out to ICF not long after we decided to take our summit off the road and give it a home in New York.  Brooklyn has remained home for the Summit since 2005, and we know that there is no place like home. 

I encourage those of you who have been invited to the Summit to come and to take a look around Brooklyn.  I would be interested in your assessment of Brooklyn as a community.


More information on the Intelligent Community Forum can be found at www.intelligentcommunity.org.

I am writing this from the CeBit show in Hannover Germany, which is the world's largest information technology trade fair, typically attracting a half million people to a fairground boasting 27 huge halls.  It covers everything IT, from automated industrial processes and customer relationship management systems to peer-to-peer file sharing and cloud computing.  And this year, attendance is down 25%.  That's over 100,000 people who could not justify making the trip.

This recession is getting scary.  Well into its second year, it still seems to be accelerating.  The experts are, one by one, throwing up their hands and saying they don't know what will come next.  Economics columnist David Leonardt recently reported that job losses were greatest among the less educated, whereas the past two recessions hit hard on "white collar" employment.  This recession is also affecting men more than women, who are suffering job loss at only 80% of the rate of men.  At the community level, the impact is equally uneven.  It depends where you are, what industries drive your economy and on whether or not you have robust broadband.

I believe in the positive economic impact of broadband - but I wish I had more facts to support my belief.  We can observe that the broadband Web continues to stimulate a rising tide of new businesses and business models.  I have seen many here in the halls of CeBit.  And while most are highly speculative, some may be the next Amazon.com, iTunes, Google or Facebook.  What's especially important about these broadband icons is that none stands alone.  Each has become a platform spurring the growth of still more businesses, from eBay entrepreneurs to  iTunes apps and Amazon.com Associates.  The success of online businesses may have ripple effects that reach worldwide.

But the Web has also shown a unique ability to destroy business models.  The recorded music business, feature films, and television are all being upended by broadband as digital files take the place of hard copies.  Retailing has been likewise transformed, and the declines that business travel and hotels will experience in this recession may be cemented into place by faster growth in videoconferencing.   

But the research into the economic impact of broadband is painfully thin.  In June 2007, the Brookings Institution in the US found that, for every one percent increase in broadband penetration in a US state, employment increases by 0.2-0.3 percent per year.  In February 2008, Connected Nation issued a report estimating that a 7% increase in broadband penetration in every state would give the US an additional $134 billion in economic benefit through new jobs, reduced costs, time saved and carbon emissions reduced.

Such broad estimates leave me unpersuaded.  I see a burning need to conduct objective research at the community and regional levels - where the economic activity really takes place - to find out what impact broadband has and how it is produced.  With the European Commission and the Obama administration preparing to invest billions in broadband infrastructure, it's past time for the facts.

More information on the Intelligent Community Forum can be found at www.intelligentcommunity.org.