By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

When most of us were in school, our teachers instructed us to “show our work.” It wasn’t enough that we came to a conclusion; we had to demonstrate how we had arrived at that conclusion.

That’s why this October 2011 report on the socioeconomic effect of fiber to the home (FTTH), sponsored by the Swedish government’s broadband council, Bredbandsforum, is so interesting: the authors, Marco Forzati and Crister Mattsson, show exactly how they arrived at their numbers — achieving a positive payback of 1.5:1 in five years.

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Tags: broadband, fiber network, FTTH, ROI, socioeconomic development, Sweden

Recently I was chatting with a couple of people at an event in Shoreditch about what makes a creative industry cluster — such as Silicon Alley and the East London Tech City — flourish and grow.  We concluded that there are some key ingredients required to fully develop the community; the presence of Big Tech, legal, accountants, VC’s, and of course start-ups operated by savvy entrepreneurs.

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Tags: British Innovation Gateway, business clusters, Digital Britain, entrepreneurs

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

One of the plum assignments of my journalism career was co-authoring a report for CIO about IT in Australia. Ten days in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne (with a weekend jaunt to Tasmania) brought out one key aspect of the Australian attitude toward technology: being isolated from most of the world, they have to be twice as creative.

At that time, in the late 90s, Australia had already deregulated its telecommunications industry (just a year after the U.S.) and developed a state-of-the-art $3 billion national fiber-optic network.

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Tags: Australia, broadband, fiber network, ICT, infrastructure, public policy

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

Last year, I wrote a series of editorials about how mobile data services — mobile agriculture and banking in particular — are becoming major economic drivers in developing economies. While these services can benefit all people in regions under-served by traditional infrastructure, women may benefit in particular.

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Tags: economic development, GSMA, infrastructure, mobile applications, mWomen, NGO

By Steven Shepard, Contributing Columnist

By anyone’s estimation, 1891 was an eventful year. It saw the birth of a plethora of people who would go on to change the world: David Sarnoff, who would lead the invention of video. Earl Warren, who would sit on the US Supreme Court as its Chief Justice. Erwin Rommel, who would (albeit reluctantly) lead the Axis powers in North Africa during World War II. Fanny Brice, singing comedienne. Henry Miller, author. And Sergey Prokofiev, composer of extraordinary music.

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Tags: inventor, telecommunications network, telephone network, voice communications