+inc+Papakura.JPG)
The keynote speaker at IUG had some amazing facts and a perspective on how connectivity is changing the way we live. A lot of it was not new but he had real world examples of how he lives his life with technology and really served to underline for me how backward NZ may become unless connectivity is given a huge boost soon.Larry Irving served under Bill Clinton as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information. He now consults and speaks about information technology.
He was the person who coined the term "the Digital Divide" in his advice to the Clinton administration in the 1990's.
Some of the facts he quoted which I found incredible:
The Library of Congress has been collecting and cataloguing information since before 1800. In all that time, they had amassed a huge store of every kind of printed, cartographic, manuscript and photographic material. In round figures, call it 200 years - now an equivalent amount of content is added to the internet every 15 minutes.
YouTube now generates as much traffic as the entire internet in 2000. They only started in 2005. By 2010, because of their cable and wifi connectivity 20 typical US households will consume as much bandwidth as the whole internet did in 1998.
He has an amazing array (to us kiwis anyway) of devices to live his life, none of which cost more than $500. I thought the coolest one was a slingbox which transmits your cable TV to you wherever you are in the world. Sounds kind of ridiculous, but then you realise what options they have as far as their cable delivery and content. Satellite like our Sky is only for people in remote areas who can't get cable. Since we have been here I have seen guys sitting in bar watching ice hockey on one guys laptop over wifi via his slingbox because the game had finished on TV and he had recorded it at home. (I assure you I was only in the bar to observe). I saw another guy standing in the queue at the subway station on his way home after a baseball game watching a highlights package on his PDA from the game he had just left.
It's all bandwidth - it doesn't matter what you come up with to do once you have it, if you don't have it you can't do anything.
Larry quoted a project called "Connect Kentucky" which is a little like our peoples network project. They mapped the entire state for broadband (which here means cable) availability, speed and cost. The results have been phenomenal. If you're interested please take a look.
