Eliminate the Digital Divide

Last year I attended the US Ignite launch event at the White House (see full video here), where a number of Obama administration officials made a series of announcements about programs around broadband policy. It was a wide-ranging and mind-boggling series of speakers, and I wrote up some thoughts about what it all meant for Chicago.

This is an age of conception— we are limited only by our imaginations

Since then, I’ve continued to take interest in US Ignite and their efforts to foster the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. The investments made here in Chicago, including the Gigabit Squared project that includes $2 million of investment from the State of Illinois as well as the Broadband Challenge from the City of Chicago— show that Chicago is very much a part of the Gigabit future.

What has struck me most, as I follow this work, is how far we have to go in terms of conceiving what this next-generation network looks like for regular people.

That’s why we’re a sponsor of the US Ignite Application Summit being held in Chicago June 24th – 26th.

What could you build if you weren’t restricted by the limits of network speed and latency? What if your network could support gigabit download and upload speeds? What if the power of cloud data centers wasn’t located on the east coast, but placed in your own backyard? What would you build?  What businesses could you launch if there were no limits?

That’s what we want to find out at this three-day event, running from June 24th to June 26th at the Allegro Hotel and UIC. We’ll be posting regularly from the Summit, so follow along on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.