Joaquin Alvarado, Director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, invited Ourmedia to attend FirstMile, an important young conference at UC San Diego, so I flew down for the day. This was a high-powered group of 50 or so educators, technologists and key high-speed network movers and shakers who are paving the way for real broadband — the real Internet — to come to this country, not the paltry bits that flow across today’s pipies.
First off, the setting was impressive: the Cal IT2 facility shepherded by Larry Smarr and his team – 10 gigabits to the venue, a rare 4,000-by-2,000-pixel projector, a 16-by-30-foot screen, wi-fi and webcasting par excellence, and more.
I finally got to meet Dewayne Hendricks, a member of FirstMile’s Board of Directors (we talked darknets over lunch), whom you may remember from this Jan. 2002 Wired profile. Also met Susan Estrada of FirstMile.us (“big broadband everywhere”), Larry Smarr, Yvonne Andres of GlobalSchoolNet, Chris Baker of AARP, and many other accomplished “stakeholders” (as they say in these parts). Also “met” Elizabeth Daley (dean) and Charles Swartz (executive director) of USC’s School of Cinema Television, who joined us via a 1-gigabit high-resolution teleconference hookup.
I’ll admit that my biggest thrill, however, came when I met San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (snapped his image above on my Nokia N90 camera phone), who gave a keynote address and received an award. I told him he was the first politician I truly admired in the past 20 years, and we talked about finding Ourmedia some office space in the city.
A few snippets from Mayor Newsom’s remarks:
“I love the way someone once describe San Francisco: a city of 47 square miles surrounded by reality.”
“When the current U.S. administration took office, the U.S. was fifth in the world in broadband access. Today we’re 16th. I don’t think we can overstate the seriousness of this.”
“It’s not just the big digital media outfits like Lucas Films that are important in San Francisco, but the little guys as well.”
San Francisco wants to become the first city with free wireless access. “It is a disgrace that we’re talking about it when it should have been done all across the nation five years ago.” He equated free wi-fi with the public library system, adding, “We need to get serious about eliminating the digital divide.”
Scoop: San Francisco plans to announce its choice of a vendor partner for citywide wi-fi sometime next week.
“The biggest problem in politics today is that politicians are afraid to take risks.” He quoted Winston Churchill, who said the secret of success is moving from failure to failure with enthusiasm.
He hauled out his biggest guns to blast the telecoms, which are lobbying Congress to prevent cities like San Franciso from providing free wi-fi. “They’ve got lobbylists. They’ve got lawyers. Type in my name and wifi and you’ll get 18 million blog entries [a bit of an exaggeration, but point taken]. They’re scared to death.”
Great stuff.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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