I'll never forget that morning 2001. I got up early on the east coast to write an essay for the upcoming Agenda 02 conference
and my brother Joe IM'd me to tell me what happened. I immediatly turned on the TV. WOW have things changed.
Because of that dark day three years ago, I changed my career focus to broadband wireless rather than search. I felt a moral responsibility to help develop technology that might have prevented and hopefully prevent an event from happening again.
Three years ago I wrote:
How can it be that we live in an era where doomed passengers recognizing their fates were able to call family members once the planes were hijacked? The "real time" information that those heroes received on United Airlines flight 93 saved countless lives in Washington, D.C. The real irony, however, is that although people on that plane were able to say their last goodbyes, we don't have the software and interconnected systems to inform us that the plane had been off course for 30 minutes or more before crashing. Conversely, people in New York City couldn't use their mobile or office phones and had to rely on email and instant messaging.
Let's face it; we don't have a real-time interoperable software environment. Our Internet environment is reliable and "always on," yet we don't have the software advances and interconnected intelligence to make these systems work in real time. The prospects for real-time software technology today are light years behind the advances in global telecommunications and networking. We need secure standards in order to develop real-time interoperable computing.
What has changed from three years ago? Nothing much. We need to do more deployment of intelligent broadband infrastructure. Homeland security today is a joke. Wireless broadband is the key enabler to a safer country.
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