Two More Thoughts

[Gary Davison]

In prepping for a talk about Bmore Fiber, I had two thoughts:

1) We should look a bit more at what other towns are doing, in order
to better understand how we can position ourselves. A good site for
this is:

http://www.zettaphile.com/2010/03/02/list-of-cities-vying-for-googles-gigabit-project/

Among the sites cited on the site are the following two references
from PC Magazine:

What happens when creatives run amok: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361038,00.asp

A post-submission update: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361871,00.asp

2) The recent announcement of Google TV led me to think about Google's
motives in pursuing this project. Given the announcement, and Google
doing the following:

- Acquiring control of large amounts of "dark fiber" over the past
several years (just Google "google" and "dark fiber", or start with
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/06/google_dark_fib.html)

- Constructing large numbers of data centers worldwide (see, for
example, http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html)

- Pursuing 132 (!) patents in targeted advertising (http://
industry.bnet.com/advertising/10005950/where-google-is-going-taking-
over-tv-advertising-perhaps/)

It seems apparent that they're trying to extend their advertising
model to video, using on-demand video with individualized
advertising. Thus far, they either own, control, or influence every
aspect of the system - except for the "last mile." That's where
Google Fiber comes in.

What this means for us is that we may wish to rethink some of our
approach - have we been viewing this as a computing problem when
they're viewing it as a video distribution problem? Google dropping a
billion dollars to see what a bunch of people in Duluth can come up
with in advanced network-driven apps makes little sense to me.
Learning about how much revenue per CPM AdSense can generate there is
a wholly different story.

To this end, I suggest that we consider reevaluating our approach
towards neighborhoods. In particular, we can pitch our diversity
thereof as a way for Google to not so much conduct a single, large,
experiment, but also view it as a host of smaller ones, each with its
own target demographic.

Hope I wasn't reiterating the blindingly obvious here. Your thoughts
please.

Sorry 'bout the inability to do hot links.

Cheers,

GCD