Mediaboss Marketing

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John Roach

What would you do if had if you had an Internet service that could download a 2-hour movie in about 5 seconds?

You could, of course, watch a bunch of movies. City officials and investors in Chattanooga, Tenn., hope you have some other creative business ideas that take advantage of its 1-gigabit-per second Internet.

That is, the city has an Internet that is 20 to 200 times faster than what's available to customers anywhere else in the country. They want innovators to figure out what to do with all that speed.

If you think you've got some ideas, hurry up and submit them to the Gig Tank competition. There's $300,000 in seed investment and prize money at stake. The deadline for entries is March 1.

There are two tracks in the competition one for students and another for entrepreneurs. Organizers expect more than 100 entries, Jack Studer, a partner with VC firm Lamp Post Group, told me Wednesday.

On the student side, ideas range from collaborative teaching and learning projects that involve high-definition video streaming to applications that take advantage of all the data stored in the cloud.

Entrepreneurs with business plans in hand are heavily focused on healthcare applications such as telemedicine and ways to share massive files in real time.

"An MRI is a couple of terabytes of data so you can't really share that in real time unless you've got some pretty massive bandwidth from point to point," Studer noted.

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'Gigabit' ideas wanted for superfast Internet

Will constant access to the Internet make today's young people brilliant multitaskers or shallow, screen-bound hermits? A new opinion poll finds that technology experts believe the answer is "all of the above."

According to a new survey of 1,021 technology experts and critics, hyperconnectivity is a mixed bag. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed agreed that the Internet has wired the under-35 crowd differently, and that this rewiring is a good thing, stimulating multitasking talent and an ability to find relevant information fast online. But 42 percent of experts believe that the hyperconnected brain is shallow, with an unhealthy dependence on the Internet and mobile devices.

BLOG: Does the Internet Make You Smart or Dumb?

"Short attention spans resulting from quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature," Alvaro Retana, a technologist at HP, responded in the survey. "The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus."

Dire predictions

According to the Elon University Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project, which conducted the survey, the technology expert split is closer to 50-50 on whether the rise of the Internet is a boon or a bane. Many people who responded that Internet-savvy Generation Y is at a mental advantage tempered that opinion with warnings about the dark side of connectedness. [10 Facts About the Teen Brain]

BLOG: Is There a Gender Gap Online?

"While they said access to people and information is intensely improved in the mobile Internet age, they added that they are already witnessing deficiencies in younger people's abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply," Janna Anderson, director of Elon's Imagining the Internet Center and a co-author of the report detailing the findings, said in a statement. "Some expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and several mentioned Orwell's '1984.'"

George Orwell's 1949 book described a dystopian society where information was strictly controlled. One respondent who mentioned the book was Paul Gardner-Stephen, a telecommunications fellow at Flinders University.

"[C]entralized powers that can control access to the Internet will be able to significantly control future generations," Gardner-Stephen wrote. "It will be much as in Orwell's '1984', where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought, so future regimes may use control of access to the Internet to shape and limit thought."

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Internet Makes Us Smarter & Dumber

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire -02/29/12)- RSA Conference USA 2012 -- Just thirty years from its initial appearance on the world's computing stage, the Internet is now so embedded in business and society that life without it is almost unthinkable. Yet there are key aspects of life on the Internet -- security, privacy, reliability -- that constantly threaten to overwhelm its benefits. That ongoing threat is the driving force behind a new cross-industry, non-profit being launched at this year's RSA Conference, called the Trustworthy Internet Movement.

The Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM) is a vendor-neutral organization with a mission to resolve major lingering security issues on the Internet, such as SSL governance and the spread of botnets and malware and to ensure that security is built into the very fabric of private and public clouds. Founding principal and veteran of the information security industry Philippe Courtot, Chairman and CEO of Qualys, has personally pledged $500,000 in seed money to get the initiative off the ground.

"With two billion people relying on the Internet for much of their personal and business lives, it is incumbent upon the industry to put its collective heads together and resolve the problems of online security, privacy, and reliability once and for all," says Courtot. "This is no longer just an issue of technology but of society as a whole."

Drawing on individual talent in large corporations, cloud providers, and industry groups as well as tapping into the resources of technology leaders and the venture capital community, TIM will fund and foster collaborative innovation through working groups between these stakeholders. Together, members will identify the hard issues to be solved and create solutions to address them.

TIM FundamentalsThree core pillars will guide the work and focus of TIM: Innovation, Collaboration and Individual Expertise.

Criteria for membershipThe group will be actively recruiting for membership in TIM during the RSA Conference USA 2012; participation is invited on the following bases:

Courtot encourages anyone and everyone with a stake in the future of the Internet to visit http://www.trustworthyinternet.org and sign up to participate.

"We have a unique opportunity with the rapid spread of cloud-based services to leverage the power of the industry and the wider community of Internet users to resolve the issues that are holding back the Internet from fulfilling its true potential," said Courtot.

About the Trustworthy Internet MovementThe Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM) is a non-profit, vendor-neutral organization that leverages the resources of the technology industry, information security professionals, and the venture capital community to resolve the problems of Internet security, privacy and reliability. The organization will fund and foster collaborative innovation through focused working groups to identify specific issues and create new solutions to address them. TIM was launched at the RSA Conference USA 2012 in San Francisco, California. More information at http://www.TrustworthyInternet.org.

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Trustworthy Internet Movement Initiative Launches at RSA Conference USA 2012

A ship dropped anchor off Mombasa, Kenya, and cut the Internet to six African countries earlier this week.

It will take three weeks to repair the damage. In the meantime, the Internet in Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Juba, the capital of South Sudan, is functioning at a reduced speed. It will impede the normal flow by about 20 percent, according to the BBC's Nairobi correspondent, Noel Mwakugu.

The Indian Ocean East Africa Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable, which connects East Africa to the United Arab Emirates, was severed when a ship dropped anchor in a restricted area restricted because of the presence of the sea cabling. (See here for an interactive cable map.) The Teams cable was carrying redirected traffic from the earlier cutting of three other cables in the Red Sea, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The outage comes at a time when Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, has assumed a much greater profile as a center of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, largely due to the recent availability of fast, reliable broadband connections. These undersea fiber-optic cables, laid in 2009 and which connect Africa to the world, have kicked off Kenya's high-tech industry and prompted an increase in Kenyan Internet users from 1.8 million to 3.1 million in the first year.

RELATED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

Bitenge Ndemo, Kenya's permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communications, says that the cost of the internet outage could reach $500 million by the time repairs are finished.

"We do not have the cost yet but it runs into millions of dollars sinceTEAMS and EASSY carry almost 70 percent of the traffic from the East AfricanRegion," Mr. Ndemo told the Monitor. "Most providers had cut off satelite thinking we have sufficientredundany," Ndemo adds, and the Kenyan government has urged other new cable lines to land elsewhere to prevent future line cuts in the high-traffic sea-lanes outside Mombasa.

In the meantime, Kenya's losses have been significant. "There have been major disruptions and loss of revenue in the past fewdays," Ndemo says. "In my estimation we shall have lost up to $500 million by the timewe are reconnected."

Jessica Colao, the manager of iHub, a high-tech incubator in Nairobi, estimates that the cut in Internet service will affect an estimated 10,000 people in Nairobi who work in the tech industry. All of those people, along with larger companies who have started to locate in the city -- such as Google, Microsoft, and Samsung -- will suffer the frustration of a substantial slow-down until the cable is repaired.

In addition to work taking longer, and therefore costing more, a slowing in the rate of information carried online could also cause multiple websites and online services to "time out. A time out is a limit on the duration allowed for an online instruction to be followed and is configured on a server-by-server or client-by-client basis. A time out will require a user to begin the process of retrieval again (and again). In many cases, users will never access the information at all, bringing work to a standstill for the duration of the repair.

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Ship's anchor cuts Internet access to six East African countries

Will constant access to the Internet make today's young people brilliant multitaskers or shallow, screen-bound hermits? A new opinion poll finds that technology experts believe the answer is "all of the above."

According to a new survey of 1,021 technology experts and critics, hyperconnectivity is a mixed bag. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed agreed that the Internet has wired the under-35 crowd differently, and that this rewiring is a good thing, stimulating multitasking talent and an ability to find relevant information fast online. But 42 percent of experts believe that the hyperconnected brain is shallow, with an unhealthy dependence on the Internet and mobile devices.

"Short attention spans resulting from quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature," Alvaro Retana, a technologist at HP, responded in the survey. "The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus."

Dire predictions

According to the Elon University Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project, which conducted the survey, the technology expert split is closer to 50-50 on whether the rise of the Internet is a boon or a bane. Many people who responded that Internet-savvy Generation Y is at a mental advantage tempered that opinion with warnings about the dark side of connectedness. [10 Facts About the Teen Brain]

"While they said access to people and information is intensely improved in the mobile Internet age, they added that they are already witnessing deficiencies in younger people's abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply," Janna Anderson, director of Elon's Imagining the Internet Center and a co-author of the report detailing the findings, said in a statement. "Some expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and several mentioned Orwell's '1984.'"

George Orwell's 1949 book described a dystopian society where information was strictly controlled. One respondent who mentioned the book was Paul Gardner-Stephen, a telecommunications fellow at Flinders University.

"[C]entralized powers that can control access to the Internet will be able to significantly control future generations," Gardner-Stephen wrote. "It will be much as in Orwell's '1984', where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought, so future regimes may use control of access to the Internet to shape and limit thought."

Online optimism

Many experts praised the talents needed to navigate the Internet, however, and suggested that people who have grown up connected will blossom.

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Expert Poll: Internet Makes Us Smarter & Stupider