Cisco Blog > Connected Life Exchange
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
The place: San Francisco. The time: a Saturday afternoon.
The scenario: after lunch, two out-of-town couples find themselves in a neighborhood where taxi cabs are scarce. One of the women remembers a new iPhone app called Uber that allows you to wirelessly order a Lincoln Towncar and bill the trip to a credit card.
Elapsed time between signing up with Uber and the car arriving: 10 minutes. Estimated incremental cost above a traditional cab: $7.
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Tags: apps, global networked economy, jobs, mobile, smartphone, software, tablet
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
While the European and United States economies struggle with mounting debt, there’s an encouraging success story south of the equator; one that combines infrastructure improvement, broadband deployment, and thriving commerce.
According to the findings in a white paper entitled Latin American Economic Outlook 2012 — jointly produced by the Economic Commission for Latin America and The Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) — between 2000 and 2007, public debt in Latin America
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Tags: broadband, economic development, global networked economy, latin america
If you have been following the market research summaries and news that I curate for my Broadband Nation Update list, then you will have noticed a common theme in the commentary – the global movement to deploy Next-Generation Networks has accelerated in recent months.
Perhaps the narrative crescendo will peak next week at the ITU Telecom World 2011 event in Geneva, Switzerland. The focal point for the conference is to Connect the World. One of the features of this year’s event is the “National Pavilion” showcase.
Why would a country promote their region’s talent, technology and innovation at the show? It’s intended to help attract international investment, and thereby build upon a local digital economy ecosystem as a foundation to create new jobs.
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Tags: connected nation, global networked economy, ITU, Smart + Connected Communities
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
Before he was the chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, Michael Boskin was my Econ 101 professor. It was from him that I learned about microeconomics, macroeconomics, and their famed multiplier effect — the latter being the theory that money spent creates economic benefits that have ongoing impact beyond the original investment.
In my previous post, Stimulating Economic Growth with Broadband, I talked about quantifying the benefits in terms of what businesses could expect — in essence, the microeconomic view.
Today, looking at a report from Deloitte on 4G deployment within the U.S. market (with applicability anywhere in the world), I’m turning to the more wide-ranging impacts that wireless broadband investment might have for business and the economy — essentially, the multiplier effect of broadband infrastructure investment.
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Tags: broadband, global networked economy, macroeconomics, microeconomics, wireless
Four months after launching the Connected Life Exchange, let’s reflect back on some of the key insights that we’ve shared thus far — about the evolving nature of the Global Networked Economy, how participation transforms the way we live, work, play and learn.
We’ve started to explore the user adoption trends that can be discovered as part of the Cisco CLUE initiative, and we will be sharing more details soon. We offered examples of progressive infrastructure investment plans that not only attempt to catch up with the global market leaders, but perhaps set a bold new benchmark for others to follow.
We outlined the mobile data traffic growth trends and reviewed the amazing forecast estimates that demonstrate how more and more people will have their first Internet access experience via a mobile broadband connection – most likely on a handheld device.
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Tags: broadband, economic development, economic impact, global networked economy, ICT
