From Jim Cossler: 

Site traffic continues to soar at GreenEnergyTV as we bring up additional functionality like the recently added global environmental news feature.

But, over the weekend we brought up the entire ecommerce platform and, holy mother of earth, it’s off the charts!

Want a woven hemp iPod case? How about a 900 watt wind generator for your home? Maybe a how-to book on sustainable gardening and landscaping techniques? Or your very own Planet Earth organic hoodie?

Visit www.greenenergytv.com.

Read, watch, shop and do some good for our planet.

Oh…and tell 200 of your best friends to do the same.

OK, for starters I’ll admit right up front I am a “boomer.”  I am also, like a lot of boomers, the parent of a teenager.  I’ve watched with amusement from the sidelines as the social networking space has evolved from such things as the “WorldsAway” joint venture between CompuServe and Fujitsu I worked on back when my teen was still in diapers to Second Life, which is already struggling with both “Get a life first!” backlash and trying to figure out a way to build a robust, profitable, long-term business.

And then, of course, there are Facebook and MySpace, which seem to have eclipsed early front runner Friendster.

Teens seem to dominate this space, but making money off of teens is never easy, and making money from the under 18 set online–where credit cards or at least a bank account are prerequisites for commerce beyond the advertising-to-eyeballs method–is almost impossible.

But as the venerable Gray Lady herself (for the non-boomer set, that’s the New York Times) points out today, “Older people are sticky.”  Teens and younger folk can be fickle.  It is difficult to keep their attention for long.  But older people tend to be more loyal (or maybe we’re just too lazy to try something new once we’ve found something we like–either way, the result is the same). 

As the article in the Times continues:

“That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

“The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.

“And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.”

 Which could, say some, lead to profitible online social networking sites in it for the long haul.  The article continues:

“Social networking has so far focused mainly on businesspeople and young people because they are tech-savvy and are treasured by Madison Avenue.

“But there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.”

Hey, they’re talkin’ ’bout my generation!

Click here to read the rest of the article for yourself… 

When the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were being displaced, any workers there fled to Cleveland where the steel mills were on the rise.  Today both states compete in the growing healthcare and biodevices market, and now it appears they will be competing with each other to become among the most wired (and wireless) states in the country.

From SSTI:

While many parts of the country are looking for innovative means to increase the number of citizens and businesses connected to high-speed Internet in both urban and rural areas, two governors recently announced initiatives targeting the further extension of broadband services throughout their states.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick declared the commonwealth would invest $25 million into a new “broadband incentive fund” to be managed by a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC), named the Broadband Institute. Under the plan, private companies will compete for funds to install equipment such as network fiber and wireless towers in rural areas that currently do not have broadband. According to the MTC, 32 towns in Massachusetts lack broadband access and 63 municipalities only have broadband in a limited area. The program’s goal is to make broadband available to all communities by 2010.

Ohio’s recent moves have targeted the expansion of broadband delivery to multiple stakeholders, including state and local government. Gov. Ted Strickland signed an executive order that extends and strengthens the state’s broadband network to all of Ohio’s counties and creates an organization to oversee future high-speed internet development.

The order directs some of the available bandwidth from the 1,850-mile, 10-gigabit Ohio Supercomputer Center Network (OSCnet) to a new entity named the Next Generation Network. This entity will be dedicated to the consolidation of service delivery and improved connectivity for state and local government, county and city network rings, public safety, the courts system, underserved populations, and additional public/private initiatives. OSCnet will concentrate exclusively on computing and connectivity resources for Ohio colleges and universities, small- and medium-sized companies, K-12 schools, hospitals, public broadcasting stations, and local, state and federal research centers. Together, the two networks will be administered as the Broadband Ohio Network.

The newly formed Ohio Broadband Council will be responsible for efforts to extend the Broadband Ohio Network to all of the state’s 88 counties. Additionally, the council is expected to coordinate future broadband programs funded by the state, to pursue federal investments in broadband, to address the digital divide in the state’s rural and urban areas, and to promote both public and private broadband initiatives. The council’s website is http://www.ohiobroadbandcouncil.org/.

Gov. Patrick’s Broadband Incentive Fund is a component his $12 billion, five-year capital investment program released Monday. The details of the program can be accessed at
http://www.mass.gov/Eeoaf/docs/fy08_capital_budget.pdf

To sign up for SSTI’s newsletter, which covers technology-based economic development efforts in all 50 states, go here.  SSTI does a great job of staying on top of emerging trends in TBED.

From Kauffman’s  Public Forum Institute comes this news about broadband penetration in the US:

A new study of broadband use in California offers some useful insights for other regions around the country and overseas. The study, Broadband for All?, examines patterns of broadband adoption and availability across the state. It notes the presence of three broadband “digital divides” in the state. First, broadband availability varies widely. Not surprisingly, broadband is more readily available in wealthier and denser parts of the state. In terms of adoption, 47% of California households have broadband (compared to 39% nationwide). Finally, the study finds large racial and income disparities in terms of use – wealthier families are much more likely to adopt broadband. Hispanic and African-American families have much lower broadband adoption rates when compared to other Californians – even though the availability of such services does not differ by race. The report concludes by recommending that policymakers focus on two key goals: boosting broadband availability in rural areas, and boosting broadband adoption and use by Hispanic and African-American families.Access the July 2007 Public Policy Institute of California report, Broadband for All? Gaps in California’s Broadband Adoption and Availability, by Jed Kolko.

Thomas Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason university, has an interesting take on broadband technologies in yesterday’s Financial Times:

“The vaunted digital television transition is under way. It offers to upgrade broadcast tele­vision picture quality. But high definition is mostly window-dressing. Indeed, television advertisers will not pay broadcasters much more for HD audiences, either because viewers watch on sets too small to notice it or because big-screen users subscribe to cable or satellite services for their HD fix…

“The US and most European Union countries have set aside at least 400 MHz for off-air television, frequencies considered to be the motherlode of radio spectrum, given their favourable signal characteristics. For cellular or mobile broadband networks, this airspace is far more capacious than what has been made available for 1G, 2G, and 3G cellular combined. Allowing tele­vision band frequencies to be used for non-broadcast services would reduce mobile voice prices and unleash a plethora of new applications.

“The prospects are exciting – but not to governments. While forcing consumers to buy new digital television receivers, regulators are only lazily attending to the digital dividend. Indeed, the five channels made available by Berlin’s 2003 switch-over lie idle. The Netherlands, the first country to go all-digital in television broadcasting in 2005, has likewise done nothing to reallocate its airwaves.”

 Go here to read the rest of Hazlett’s article.  For all the progress we’ve made technologically, our policies have yet to catch up to the new realities before us.

From Jim Cossler at the Youngstown Business Incubator comes news about this ineresting new company:  Green Energy TV.

“The firm is providing a free Internet television station from which people can watch videos from around the world on green/alternative/renewable energy issues. Any one from any where can upload a video to the site. In the very short time that it has been up, videos have been uploaded to the site by GE, Google, Yahoo, the United Nations, Penn State University, the US Department of Energy, Johnson & Johnson as well as from just individuals themselves.

Check them out at www.greenenergytv.com

 This year’s Ingenuity Festival is off to a great start.  An extra addition this year is OSTN’s Student Film Festival.   From Prashant Chopra:

WHAT: The Open Student Television Network (OSTN) and Internet2 will netcast its first ever OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival which will showcase selected student work from the 2006-2007 school year. 

Netcast streams can be viewed from the following link: http://www.internet2.edu/arts/filmfestival2007.html. 

WHEN: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, July 19, 20 & 21, 7-10 pm EDT

(Following the live netcast, streams will be archived for 3 weeks.)

WHY:  Student directors and producers participating in the festival will use Internet2’s advanced technologies to submit and screen their films for the festival. Each night’s events will be netcast for worldwide viewing.  Following each night’s screening at 9pm EDT, the live netcast over Internet2’s high performance national, regional, and campus networks will continue with an interactive videoconference linking student directors with press and audience attending the film festival for a live Q&A session. 

Featuring programs from around the world, the OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival promotes the exhibition of original and student-produced film to increasingly broader audiences, celebrates the artistic development of student video production, and encourages the exploration of innovative fiction and documentary storytelling.

For details of the films and shows involved in the screenings, visit:

http://www.internet2.edu/arts/filmfestival2007.html

WHERE:  The OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival takes place as part of the Ingenuity Festival at Monte Ahuja Hall, Nance College of Business,

From the Kauffman Foundation’s Public Forum Institute:

“A new Brookings Institution study, by researchers Robert Crandall, William Lehr, and Robert Litan, takes a hard look at the economic effects of broadband deployment.

“While most casual observers would suspect that broadband deployment is a good thing, there are remarkably few empirical studies that detail its effects on output and employment. This new research indicates that broadband deployment does indeed have positive economic impacts. In fact, for every one percent increase in a state’s broadband penetration rates, employment increases at a rate of 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.

“If these figures are aggregated to the national level, we find that this increase could lead to an additional 300,000 new jobs per year. Based on these early findings, the researchers recommend that state policymakers be more aggressive in terms of promoting competition in broadband services. This competition will help reduce costs, improve services, and further hasten deployment efforts.

“Access the June 2007 Brookings Institution paper, The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, by Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan.”

Perhaps now those who have been hesitant in their support for efforts like OneCommunity and Governor Strickland’s emphasis on building out Ohio’s broadband infrastructure will begin to see why these efforts are essential to the development of a robust, healthy economy in Northeast Ohio.

From the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF):

Should a fall of 11 places in international rankings for broadband penetration be of concern for U.S. policymakers? Expanding broadband access for business and residents has become a key element of many regional development strategies. The Internet has become a key resource for entrepreneurs and small businesses, as well as a necessary ingredient in preparing students for the modern workforce. Widespread broadband use offers many advantages for regional economies, especially in regions that have traditionally lagged in high-tech development, but may now be able to access information and markets that were once beyond their reach.

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) highlighted why state and regional efforts to expand broadband access are becoming vital to sustaining U.S. economic prosperity. SSTI reported on recent examples from two states, West Virginia and Vermont, that were implementing new strategies to expand broadband and wireless Internet access for businesses and individuals (see the May 14, 2007 Digest).
OECD found, since 2001, the U.S. has fallen from 4th to 15th in national broadband penetration. In the second half of 2006, the U.S. had the second-slowest rate of increase among OECD countries. The rankings, which are based on the number of broadband subscriptions per capita, suggest that the U.S. may fall even farther in the next few years, as countries like Australia and Germany continue to make strong gains.

Earlier this month, Robert McDowell, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commissions, strongly objected to the OECD rankings system responding to the report at a national broadband policy summit. Challenging their methodology, McDowell holds the OECD research does not account for the variation in the number of individuals per household. Since the OECD data only accounts for the number of broadband subscriptions per capita, countries with more individuals per household are at a disadvantage. [Editor’ note: The U.S. average household size of 2.57 individuals is tied for 11th among the reported countries. The figure is above several nations ranked higher for broadband penetration without taking household size into consideration.]

McDowell notes the OECD report also does not account for the speed of broadband service. National average download speeds vary between 61 mbps in Japan to just 1 mbps in Greece. At 16th, the U.S. currently ranks even lower on average speed of broadband connections than on penetration, but McDowell reports recent successes with fiber-to-the-door network pilot programs suggest that the U.S. may soon be able to improve its high-speed services in many cities.

As an additional observation, McDowell cites alternate recent surveys reporting 43 percent of U.S. households receive broadband service, well above the E.U. average of 23 percent.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) recently addressed the commissioner’’s concerns in a white paper that proposes an alternate set of metrics for estimating the state of national broadband deployment. The ITIF ranking system assigns each OECD country a score based on OECD measurements of broadband subscriptions, the average number of individuals per subscribed household, the average speed of broadband connections, and the average cost of high-speed connections. The U.S. does modestly better in the ITIF rankings than the OECD report, coming in 12th among all OECD countries; however, slow speeds and low adoption rates still appear to place the U.S. at a disadvantage in the information economy.

The ITIF paper makes several recommendations to help pull the U.S. out of its broadband slump. At the national level, they suggest that Congress should exempt broadband services from paying into the Universal Services fund, create federal tax incentive to deploy new networks, and adopt a higher-speed standard for high-speed Internet services. At the state level, ITIF recommends the adoption of statewide video franchise agreements, which would allow broadband services that offer Internet-based video services to bypass the time-consuming process of negotiating local agreements. Since television-over-the-Internet (or IPTV) services are one of the major drivers of expanded fiber-to-the-door services, these statewide franchises could encourage the spread of much faster networks. The paper also advises states to fill in the gaps left by federal broadband studies by collecting and reporting local data about broadband penetration.

Download Accessing Broadband in America: OECD and ITIF Broadband Rankings at: http://www.itif.org/files/BroadbandRankings.pdf

From the Open Student Television Network (OSTN):

(OSTN) and Internet2 announced today the dates of their first joint film festival. The OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival will showcase student work from the 2006-2007 school year over three nights of screenings from July 19 through July 21, during the Ingenuity Festival at Cleveland State University’s Monte Ahuja Hall.

Student directors and producers participating in the festival will use Internet2 technologies to submit and screen their films for the festival. In doing so, the OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival demonstrates the true viability of Internet technology to deliver high quality digital entertainment.

Each night of the OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival will focus on different areas of the OSTN Channel’s programming: short films, documentaries and student television shows. The screenings will spotlight select student work from institutions such as USC, Brown University, Duke University, the Asian Young Filmmakers Forum and the International Film School of Paris as well as work from Cleveland- area schools such as Oberlin College, John Carroll University and the University of Akron. The documentary screening will also feature portions of OSTN’s first ever public service initiative, HBO’s “Addiction.”

“This Festival is a celebration of the original, inspiring work of student filmmakers,” said Prashant Chopra, Chief Executive Officer of OSTN. “We are pleased to collaborate with Internet2 to create this platform for student filmmakers to showcase their talent and creativity.”

Following each night’s screening at 9pm EDT, Internet2 members’ high capacity, high performance national, regional and campus networks will provide an interactive videoconference linking student directors with press and audience attending the film festival for a live Q&A session.

“The OSTN-Internet2 Film Festival creates an innovative venue for student filmmakers to share their work and experiences in a rich and interactive environment,” said Ann Doyle, program manager for Internet2’s Arts and Humanities Initiative. “High quality videoconferencing and video streaming technologies continue to break traditional geographic boundaries providing students access and exposure to new opportunities.”

Because of the support of local and national sponsors, each of the film festival screenings is a free event. Through outreach to its member institutions, OSTN brings recognition to Cleveland’s growing arts and technology design industry to a nationwide audience.

Showcase Details: OSTN Short Film Showcase - Thursday, July 19 This showcase features two hours worth of the year’s best short films from around the world, including two premiers from the 2007 Ivy Film Festival, The Guided Storm from Jeonbuk Independent Film Association and Cataracts by Nina Sarnelle from Oberlin College. Other Ivy Film Festival competitors featured are Attack of the Cephalopods by Eric Bramley and Dave Logan from Duke University and Crispy Bacon by Olivier Farmachi from the International Film School of Paris.

OSTN Documentary Film Showcase - Friday, July 20 Friday’s showcase presents two hours of the OSTN Channel’s best documentaries. Works include Trauma by Robert Duns from John Carroll University, Voices of the Past, Faces of the Present by Genna Duberstein from Ohio State University, and a show from OSTN’s first ever public service initiative, HBO’s Addiction.
OSTN Student Television Showcase - Saturday July 21 On Saturday evening, OSTN features the very best of its student television programming and airs favorite episodes of Brown University’s Elected, USC’s Birnkrant 616, Ball State University’s Something Else TV (SETV), and the University of Akron’s Akron After Hours.

For more information, see: http://www.internet2.edu/arts/ filmfestival2007.html. For more information on the complete4 festival, visit www.ingenuitycleveland.com.