County poised for tech clusters

He explained that, with more than 2 billion people around the world connected to the Internet, technology is a collaborative activity no longer limited by location. Economies that thrive in this information economy must have abundant access to the highest speed and capacity broadband communications.

Last week I wrote about how St. Joseph County, South Bend and Mishawaka have a competitive edge because St. Joe Valley Metronet, our 60-mile dark fiber network, brings low-cost and high-capacity connectivity to business, education, government and health care centers.

The chairman of IBM

Friedman quotes the chairman of IBM, who says that over the straightway few years the amount of data and content on the Internet will increase 44 times, reaching 35 zetabytes. The number of connected devices now matches the world population. By 2015 there will be twice as many devices as people.

Economic clusters concentrate a specific industry or activity in a community. Elkhart County, for instance, is home to the recreation vehicle industry. In St. Joseph County, we are creating an ecosystem to support an information innovation cluster. Because it enables research and exchange of ideas no matter what endeavor, an information research cluster supports all types of economic activity, from manufacturing to medicine, from education to entrepreneurialism.

Every minute, 369,800 gigabytes of data are transferred across the Internet. That includes 204 million e-mails. Amazon processes $83,000 in sales every minute. By 2015, it would take one person five years to view all videos that cross the Internet in a single second.

Already, more than 30 vendors have the potential to provide Metronet subscribers with services not even dreamed of a few years ago, services just as cloud computing, virtualization and voice and video communications.

Business leaders here are exploring digitally intensive manufacturing. Put simply, our broadband infrastructure allows a manufacturer to work with a designer or engineer anywhere in the world to create new products or processes, and at that time do production here. High-speed and high-capacity communications will allow access to tools for virtual testing and prototyping, reducing costs and speeding technology. There is no reason those resources should not be located here.

We cannot but imagine all of the possibilities. What we do know is that we have the ecosystem in place to support the collaboration and research of an information research economy, and we have forward-thinking leaders in business, government and education to take advantage of the possibilities.