A week ago I was invited by the Danish government to join a discussion today on: ”How can government, academia and business work together to maximize the potenital of ICTs and the internet to increase productivity and create growth?” as part of the Danish Internet Government Forum conference (#DIGF).
Apart from the very official sounding and long winded question, I actually think it’s a very interesting question, and one government for the most part seems to get wrong (full disclaimer: I worked for said government not long ago, forming equally long winded questions) so I said yes, and went to the round table discussion today. I decided I wanted to share some of the topics discussed with everybody, maybe so we can continue the discussion here?
The hot potato in this discussion is broad band distribution, should everybody have equal access or should we distribute it where it has the largest effect, and then risk parts of Denmark (insert your own country here) falling behind? The politicians are very afraid of touching this one, since the voters in less populated areas might object loudly.
My argument was, that no matter what we do, growth would happen where there was enough smart people, easy access to airports and great locations to work, yes internet speed is important, but I’m not choosing location for my start-up based on mbps, but the other factors. You can see my presentation below:
But that made me think, is the speed of Internet access at all such an important parameter in 2010 (as long as we go above 10mbit please). I think other factors might be just as important, distance to nearest physical cloud computing centre, just looking at http://cloudsleuth.net you can see that the average ping time for DK is 8+ seconds, (Jakob Nielsen have defined usable response time as below 1 second http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html). If we take a broader look Tradeshift today delivers business networking to more than 50 countries, so globally speaking service delivery time becomes incredibly important, and the countries who have created a great environment for cloud infrastructure providers to establish themselves can reap the benefits of better service delivery.
So what can we do to create a better environment for establishing cloud data centres in Denmark?
A large obstacle to get cloud infrastructure placed in Denmark might be our data laws. The single largest question we get from our Enterprise customers, is what protections our cloud application has from government snooping (really anybody, but they are mostly paranoia towards government). We usually answer that we are double paranoid, as we don’t even trust our cloud provider to be secure, so we have built encryption and security into our own software stack running of the cloud. But I don’t believe we would be able to place the hosting in let’s say Denmark, because of the very substantial snooping the government does on internet traffic and the very lax protections a company has in regard to government demanding access to our customers data.
Robert Kahn (inventor of TCP, a crucial part of the Internet) also made the point that it might be hard to build a cloud software industry in Denmark, given the small size of our home market, but I actually disagree – I think this is one of our largest advantages, is that our home market is so small that we have to build global products to begin with.
All in all it was an extremely interesting discussion, but what is your perspective, how do we use ICT to create growth?
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