Tag Archives: SRI International

About 2820 days ago Search Engine Optimization

Somebody’s Watching You

It occurred to me the other day that, with all the Googling I do, I’ve never Googled “Google.” Hardly anyone else has either, apparently; I Googled “Googled Google,” which seemed like one way to check, and came back with 404 hits–barely a blip in the Googlesphere. The word Google itself returns 217 million hits on Google, well over four times as many as for dog, and more than twice as many as for bush, which presumably includes references to both the presidential and the leafy variety. It’s hardly news that Googling has become a near-ubiquitous phenomenon. But I think Google and the world of search engines is coming to have an even more profound impact on the business world than most managers realize, and in two ways. First, the ability to hunt down information on the Web isn’t merely a great convenience anymore–it’s becoming a critical success factor. What’s more, companies can now be so freely examined by the world at large that they’re going to need to adapt themselves to the scrutiny. Let’s consider that scrutiny. When it comes to thinking about how a company fares in a Google search, most of our attention goes to the “search-engine optimization” game–the unending race to get a website to show up high in the search results. But that attention is misplaced. In our ever more Google-savvy world, what really matters isn’t how your website fares in a keyword search, but the sum total of all the information that turns up whenever someone Googles you–much of it information over which you have no control. Whether you like it or not, in Google World, almost all companies are becoming transparent. Hand-held-device maker Palm, for example, is highly secretive about upcoming versions of its popular Treo smart phones, deploying near-KGB-quality subterfuges to protect the new designs. But last year, Treo users trolling the Web pieced together enough information to figure out that Palm had registered domain names for as of yet unannounced products called the Treo 670 and Treo 700. How’d they do it? The company had apparently used a Boston University professor as a front for the registrations, but the Web trawlers discovered the prof was a Palm consultant. Search “Treo 670,” and you’ll find other leaked tidbits, such as the fact that the 670 will be the first Palm product to be powered by Windows software. Apple Computer, for its part, can’t seem to keep anything a secret from Web rumormongers, despite CEO Steve Jobs’s well-known mania for nondisclosure. An explosion of blogs and third-party product and service review sites makes things even harder. Such sites already are making pricing information a matter of public record. Research Organics, a Cleveland biochemicals manufacturer, for example, would prefer to impress would-be customers with its array of products before discussing price. But that strategy often is not possible, says CEO Rob Sternfeld. That’s because a number of chemical-industry-oriented websites now post Research Organics’ product prices and specs, along with those of competitors. “You see side-by-side comparisons of chemicals at a lot of sites now,” says Sternfeld. “Some sites are like chemical eBays.” How do you adapt to the new transparency in Google World? For starters, see what’s out there. You’ve no doubt Googled your own company and products. But have you really taken the time to pore over all of the results? Even if you have, you better do it again, and keep doing it at least once a week for the rest of time, to see what’s slipped in. The hit that dings you may seem obscure, but thanks to Google there are customers, partners, investors, and regulators who will find it. “You have to be aware that a lot of people are looking at what’s out there on you,” says Kermit Patton, of SRI Consulting Business Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif. Patton notes that some companies set up automated searches that will alert them to any new Web mentions of companies they do business with. “That’s one reason some organizations set up damage-control operations to deal with negative hits,” Patton says. The new transparency is even more motivation–as if there weren’t plenty already–to play fair and square, be friendly, and sell something you’re proud of. To my eye, the biggest single source of negative comments about companies on the Web is nonresponsiveness to customer questions and complaints. The occasional beef is unavoidable, of course, but settling disputes fast, whatever their merits, is the best way to avoid bad feedback–as any successful eBay seller can tell you. If you wait until the venom hits the Web, there’s almost nothing you can do, given the speed and unpredictability with which information travels in cyberspace. Of course, you can always come at your detractors head-on. You can jump into third-party review sites to strike back at your critics. Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, and the popular social networking site Friendster have all fired employees who ran blogs the companies found objectionable. And Apple Computer has sued Web posters who traffic in information about unreleased products. My reviews: bad idea, bad idea, and bad idea. Few people value free speech more than Web users, who disdain attempts to intimidate information sharers and are not afraid to fight back. A better approach is to try to drown out the negativity by making sure there’s at least as much good, or at least neutral, stuff out there. The people and companies you do business with are becoming transparent too–and you can take advantage of it. The other side of the coin, of course, is that the people and companies you do business with are becoming transparent too–and you can take advantage of it. The information needed to understand customers, build partnerships, develop better products, and keep an eye on competitors is mostly sitting there on the Web. That means businesses need to give real thought to making sure they’ve got the right people spending enough time looking for the right kind of information and that there’s a mechanism for getting this intelligence into decision-making loops. Googling has become so strategic, in fact, that many companies farm it out to experts. SRI Consulting’s Patton runs a service called Scan that provides clients with business insights its experts distill largely from data freely available on the Web. Patton declined to discuss how much this sort of thing costs. But a quick Google search turned up a website on which a company claims Scan quoted it a price of $50,000 for the service. (Patton says the figure is at the high end of Scan’s price range.) Research Organics’ Sternfeld knows a thing or two about the value of Googling. Managers there all spend time digging through the Web for mentions of experimental drugs that might contain the kinds of biochemicals the company makes. Then they search for research papers linked to the drugs–at which point they offer to supply the researchers who wrote the papers with the chemicals at a great price. “If they start using us when they’re in development, they’ll bring us along when they go to production,” says Sternfeld. “We go from grams to thousands of kilos.” The firm has also searched out companies selling compounds in violation of its patents, and in one case has already negotiated a substantial royalty agreement. If transparency seems to be the order of the day now, just wait: According to some estimates, Google and other search engines can access only about one-quarter of all the webpages out there, because the rest are password-protected or otherwise not easily accessible. But that’s unlikely to be the case for the next generation of search engines. Who knows? Maybe it’ll give all those dogs and bushes a chance to even the score with Google. David H. Freedman, a Boston-based writer and Inc. contributing editor, is the author of several books about business and technology. Email him at whatsnext@inc.com.

About 2912 days ago Telecom and Wireless

The “Always On” Economy

I don’t envy science-fiction writers. After all, it’s getting pretty hard to stay ahead of the curve these days. Take The Golden Age, the acclaimed novel by John C. Wright. Published in 2002, the novel describes a future 10,000 years away in which people are shadowed at all times by a computer assistant ever ready to deliver dazzling tableaux of information and entertainment, as well as crystal-clear, three-dimensional visual connections to others. As it turns out, we may not have to wait 10 millennia to see Wright’s vision come to life. Three years should do it. When it comes to telecommunications, it’s hard not to feel as if we’re catching up with our own imaginations. Broadband Internet access hurls multimegabyte files at us in seconds, hand-held devices give us our e-mail on the run, Wi-Fi hot spots put us into the office network while enjoying lattes at Starbucks — mobile phones can even determine our exact location and relay it to the police in an emergency. But the networked present is about to look as out of date as a 200-pound Pong console would to a PlayStation Portable-packing teenager. A host of new technologies is on the verge of creating a new, even faster-moving “always on” business culture, in which anyone anywhere can reach out and touch almost anyone or anything else — and not just in text, snapshots, or murky video. At first ding, this might sound like your worst nightmare, especially if you already grumble about our BlackBerry culture. In reality, though, the next wave of electronic connectivity may feel less invasive, and a lot more human, than the current one — especially to the employees, suppliers, and customers of companies that master it. What will that brave new world of telecommunications look like? My guess is it will look a lot like this: 10 a.m. You’re at the airport waiting to board when you get a video call on your mobile phone from a major customer in Europe. You can tell from a twitch of his lips and his finger-tapping that he’s losing patience with the project delays. Your relaxed smile reassures him some, but not as much as the video clips you zap him of the completed mockup that came in from the subcontractors in Bangalore two hours ago. Such a scene is closer than you think. “The quality of PC videoconferencing is becoming amazing,” says Malachy Moynihan, a vice president at Linksys, in Irvine, Calif. New technology already developed by Apple and others relays about 250 times more data than you get with conventional video connections. And such transmissions will look great on the next generation of high-resolution mobile smart phones, thanks to new mobile networks already coming online that send data up to 500 times faster than conventional mobile connections, making even cable modems seem logy. 11:30 a.m. During the flight, you connect your notebook, via the aircraft’s local area network, to the screens of engineers in Minneapolis and Copenhagen, and the three of you collaboratively tweak three-dimensional blueprints of a complex new design. As you move your mouse to suggest a change, a supercomputer 2,500 miles away adjusts the design on everyone’s screen. Later, you review some freshly updated reports and video clips sent by employees and subcontractors scattered around the planet, all of which were blasted wirelessly onto your laptop just before you stepped on the plane. In fact, high-end computing vendor Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif., already sells software that allows a PC user to manipulate ultracomplex images via remote supercomputer. Meanwhile, “infostations” at airports, gas stations, and other hot spots will soon use super-high-speed short-range signals to blast huge files onto passing notebook PCs and mobile devices. As for broadband networks on planes, Lufthansa has offered them for more than a year, and other airlines, including Japan Air and Scandinavian Airlines, are following suit. 2:15 p.m. You land and head over to a branch office, where you take a meeting with other top managers. Because your mobile phone now runs on a supersmart network, the device recognizes your location and knows from prior experience that you rarely take calls when you’re in this particular conference room. It knows not to interrupt you now, instead taking video messages or routing calls to others in the company. But suddenly your phone does chime — it’s a major customer in South America, someone worth interrupting a meeting for. The smart, always-on infrastructure will provide people with unprecedented control over who will be able to reach them and in what circumstances, according to Alain Briancon, chief technology officer at InterDigital, a wireless technology and applications developer in King of Prussia, Pa. Within the next five years, telecommunications networks will be able to recognize patterns in your phone use, understanding which calls you always accept and which are screened — taking into account time of day, location, and even, by noting the location of their phones, who you’re with. 5:20 p.m. In a taxi on the way back to the airport, you replenish your phone’s fuel cell with a razor-blade-size cartridge and reach your son on the school bus to ask him how the game went. Not so well, he says, beaming you a video clip taken by a teammate’s mom that clearly shows the referee wrongly calling him out of bounds on a key play. After commiserating, you call your daughter. She points her mobile phone at the math homework she’s stuck on, and you help her spot the mistake in her work. You reach your wife driving back from work; she suggests you tap into the local news back home, which is just now showing a news clip of the damage from a fire across town. Video-quality mobile phone access will become so inexpensive that you’ll probably want to give it to all your family and employees. Not only that, you won’t need separate wire phone or broadband services — you’ll do it all through a mobile network, for maybe $80 a month combined. “You’ll be able to stop thinking about what it costs to make a call or send a message,” says Michael Gold, senior research engineer at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif. As for fuel-cell-powered phones, disposable fuel cells are about to hit the market as a replacement for phone batteries; refillables are a year or so off, and thumbnail-size micro-jet-engine power generators now under development at MIT and elsewhere are about five years off. 7:00 p.m. Back at the airport, your flight delayed, too tired to work, you download a movie that isn’t in theaters yet — it’s been released on the network first. The picture quality, however, is better than that in your local movie theater, which, unlike your phone, has not yet been upgraded to high definition and surround sound. Your network holds all but urgent or family calls and messages while you enjoy the show. Entertainment already dominates data usage on phones, and phone fun is only going to get bigger with rich broadband access as users fill their downtime with multimedia sports clips, 3-D games, and, of course, music. Some new music already is going straight to mobile phones. Robbie Williams’s greatest hits collection, for example, was released on memory card in December in the United Kingdom. Music videos are starting to do the same. The new, more intense, more discriminating level of interaction coming to a pocket near you may well prove so compelling that some businesses will want to restructure themselves around it. There will be a lot of ways to do it: Create closer collaborations between more geographically scattered employees and partners; develop deeper and more frequent connections with customers via always-on video selling, training, and service; even sell services delivered by mobile broadband networks. “The number of applications is going to explode,” says Sanjay Mehta, marketing director for Portal Software in Cupertino, Calif. Sci-fi author Wright needn’t fret about all this stunning progress robbing The Golden Age of its futuristic punch — he was smart enough to work in some interstellar travel. Now, there’s a technology that will safely lag our imaginations for decades, if not millennia. But here’s a bet: By the time we do make it to the stars, our phones will work there. David H. Freedman, a Boston-based writer and Inc. contributing editor, is the author of several books about business and technology.

About 4646 days ago E-Commerce

On the Wired Front

Cover Story Blue-collar communities are designing their own high-tech networks to attract business Tacoma, Wash. Stand on a street corner and you can feel it. Not the unstoppable rush that hits you when you emerge from a New York City subway station. Not the charged air hovering about MIT in Cambridge, Mass., or the relentless new-day vibe of a Silicon Valley morning. But there’s something brewing in Tacoma, this city on the south shore of Puget Sound. Young men and women on their lunch breaks dot the sidewalks. Men in hard hats pop in and out of boarded-up, abandoned warehouses and mills that they’re renovating into San Francisco-style loft offices. Cranes swing around the waterfront, where new buildings are going up. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before in 20 years,” says Rob Grenley, an area native who cofounded two companies in downtown Tacoma: Grenley Stewart Resources Inc. and ID Micro Inc. How is it that after decades of stagnation the city of Tacoma is sputtering back to life? For starters, it’s only about 30 miles south of Seattle, where the high-tech growth spurt has gobbled up almost all the available space and ratcheted up real estate prices to twice what they are in Tacoma. And there’s another ace up the smaller city’s plaid-flannel sleeve: a state-of-the- art, high-speed fiber-optic network that covers the city. Tacoma — rich with small-city business perks like a sane commute, ample parking, and a start-up-friendly permitting process — is now technologically equipped to play ball with the big kids. Two or three years ago, says commercial real estate broker Eric Cederstrand of Colliers International, corporate clients refused to even drive past Tacoma and look out the car window. Seattle was the city they wanted on their business cards. Now, he says, the Tacoma warehouses he’s renovating are filling up faster than he can sandblast the timbers and hang the reproduction windows. “It’s like Tacoma was put in a time capsule,” he says. “All of a sudden we’ve broken open the time capsule, and we are literally creating a brand-new city.” The new network in Tacoma represents another chance at economic viability — perhaps even boomtown success. As is true with many small cities, all this might not have happened if Tacomans had waited for the local cable or phone company to install the high-speed networks that businesses now demand. Frustrated with the inattention of big cable and phone companies, publicly owned utilities in tiny towns and small cities in states all over the country have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve dug up streets, laid fiber-optic cable, and connected residents and businesses to new high-speed lines. Service providers are rushing in to sell Internet access through the new infrastructure. (In some cities, the utilities are even selling the services themselves.) The introduction of choices has made life easier for the businesses already in place and made the cities more attractive to start-ups. For Tacoma, the new network is much more than a tangle of glass threads. It represents another chance at economic viability — perhaps even boomtown success. City of Destiny Nearly surrounded by water, with preposterously huge Mount Rainier looming in and out of the clouds to the southeast, Tacoma tends to hang back behind its sexier sister, Seattle, just up Interstate 5. In 1873 the Northern Pacific railroad chose Tacoma over Seattle for its western terminus, and ecstatic Tacomans tagged their town the “City of Destiny.” For many years paper mills choked the air with an acrid stench that came to be known as “Tacoma’s aroma.” In the 1960s a shopping mall was built in Tacoma. Almost immediately, the downtown retail district started to collapse. Buildings stood abandoned for decades. Crime rose; street gangs moved in. To business owners in those days Tacoma’s nickname must have sounded ironic. “We were the corner business on both corners,” says Steph Farber, whose family’s LeRoy custom-jewelry shop has occupied a storefront in the middle of a downtown block since 1942. For years buildings on both sides were blighted all the way to the end of the block. By the 1980s, Tacoma was standing still as Seattle flourished. Thousands of people from the Tacoma area clogged I-5 every morning on their way to jobs in Seattle and surrounding King County. When Rob Grenley left for college, Tacoma had “a postapocalyptic look,” he recalls. “You didn’t want to do business there unless you had to.” Grenley worked first on Wall Street and then in Seattle, but returned to Tacoma in 1990 to start a truck-fueling business with Greg Stewart, a childhood friend. Things were just beginning to turn around then. City officials were working hard to clean the place up. They threw all their resources at improving public safety. They ripped down offending buildings and put grassy parks in their place. And they clung tightly to Tacoma’s marquee business, the Frank Russell Co., a multimillion-dollar international investment-services firm that is headquartered on Tacoma’s waterfront. But in the early 1990s the city’s communications infrastructure was still stuck in a technological tar pit. “You’d get on the phone and it would be, ‘All circuits are busy,’ ” recalls Steve Klein, superintendent of Tacoma Power, the municipally owned electric utility. The cable service was equally poor. “They had a monopoly, with no incentive to improve the infrastructure,” Klein says. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 had deregulated the wholesale side of the power business. To stay competitive, Tacoma Power was planning a fancy digital network that would allow it to operate switches, read meters, and manage power loads from remote locations. Klein calls this type of service electricom, from electricity and telecom. “Microprocessors are in everything,” he says. “They need electricity to power them, and they need telecom to interact.” The SRI International consultants Klein hired to review the plan told him that while he was at it, it made sense to install a bit more fiber than was called for, to wire the city for high-speed Internet access and other applications. The city surely needed it; its franchise office had been negotiating with cable provider TCI Inc. for service upgrades, but TCI representatives were stonewalling. Klein approached TCI and phone company US West about teaming up to share the cost of the new network. “They told us to get lost,” he says. In 1997 the city council approved Tacoma Power’s plan to spend $100 million on a fiber-optic network. (The money came from the utility’s wholesale revenues; residential and business customers saw no rate increase. Tacoma Power customers have the second-lowest rates per kilowatt hour in the state, according to the company’s government and community-relations manager, Diane Lachel.) Construction of the network began in January 1998, and by July the power company had its first cable customer. Today the Click Network, as it is called, covers 180 square miles. Tacomans now have choices, which forces better customer service. The city’s marketing people claim that 100 start-up companies have located in Tacoma since Click went live; some have relocated from Seattle. Those businesses (and city residents) can choose from five different Internet service providers that the network supports. But the real surprise came along in the same month that Tacoma Power broke ground on Click. TCI suddenly announced a decision to invest $30 million to upgrade its own infrastructure. “When they finally woke up to the fact that we were a reality, they tried to stomp us,” Klein says. But, he adds, Tacoma residents and businesses now have choices, which forces better customer service. Tacomans also have seen hundreds more jobs, more venture capital, and better workforce training in their hometown. Dublin transplant Bill Towey runs a high-tech incubator through his private-investment firm Tacoma Venture Partners LLC. “A lot of these workers were already here,” he says. “They just don’t drive north to Seattle or Redmond anymore.” Towey plans to raise $15 million for his incubator. He and various local companies are involved in a technology boot camp for Tacoma high school teachers. Giddy with the first signs of success, and eager to tout its prospects, Tacoma has retained the New York City marketing firm Development Counsellors International for $127,000. Tacoma’s economic-development director, Juli Wilkerson, is touring the country, promoting “America’s #1 Wired City” to site-selection companies. City employees now have E-mail addresses that end in wiredcityusa.com. And broker Eric Cederstrand is hot on the idea of changing the names of Broadway and Commerce Street to Broadway.com and E-Commerce Street. “There’s a positive-multiplier effect,” Rob Grenley observes. “More people come, which means businesses will grow and flourish, as opposed to people not wanting to come here on a bet. It’s nice to be heading toward that in your hometown.” Naturally, AT&T, which bought TCI in March 1999, says the company had planned to modernize its services all along. “Regardless of whether Click Network was in place or not, TCI would have upgraded Tacoma because plans had always been in place to upgrade at that time,” says Steve Kipp, executive director of communications for AT&T Broadband’s Northwest division in Seattle. Yet the Tacoma experience with TCI was echoed in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. In fact, some 65 municipalities have made end runs around their cable or phone monopolies to offer telecom services, says Martin Gidron, managing editor of UT Digest, a newsletter in Silver Spring, Md., that has chronicled the phenomenon. The trend will continue, Gidron says, since “the demand for telecom services seems to be insatiable.” Heart of the Commonwealth Some 3,000 miles east of Tacoma, nestled among seven green hills far less dramatic than Mount Rainier, lies the city of Worcester, Mass. Worcester — birthplace of Abbie Hoffman, the diner restaurant, the smiley face, and the Pill — has long been known as the Heart of the Commonwealth. The name fits: the city’s central location and highway and rail infrastructure make it a natural for commerce. Worcester has also been known as New England’s utility closet, because it was a manufacturing center for many years. Most of Worcester’s industrial powerhouses have moved on to cheaper pastures, leaving the city with an assortment of old, abandoned buildings, including a cold-storage warehouse that burned catastrophically last December, killing six firefighters. In the 1960s, Worcester replaced a massive piece of its core with a suburban-style mall. The shopping center never really caught on, but like the one in Tacoma, it sparked the collapse of the city’s formerly thriving downtown retail base. In the past few years Worcester officials have staked the downtown’s future on another huge, single-use project — a mammoth medical facility — and have restored the 90-year-old Union Station, a beaux arts train depot that had been left to rot for decades. (Tacoma also recently restored its own Union Station, which is being used as a courthouse.) Worcester residents have always suffered from a bit of an inferiority complex, partly because their town, like Tacoma, is within the shadow of a larger, more vibrant city (in this case, Boston). Even the restoration of Union Station, the pride of the city, came only after years of contentious intracity squabbling and institutional paralysis. Now, nearly a year after the project was completed, its beckoning retail space is almost entirely unoccupied. Like Tacomans, Worcester, Mass., residents have always suffered from a bit of an inferiority complex, partly due to their proximity to a larger, more vibrant city. Another part of the problem may be Worcester’s form of government. The chief executive is not the mayor but rather the city manager, who is appointed by the city council instead of being elected by residents. Worcester has had only three city managers since 1953 (when business leaders succeeded in instituting this “professionalized” municipal structure), and none of them has been directly accountable to voters in the way elected officials are. That can make it difficult to create real change. “Worcester has gotten a little bit behind the curve,” says Arthur Couture, an entrepreneur who eyed neighboring towns before choosing Worcester and its easy commute for his software and computer-services company, ICAL Systems. Now, Couture says, Worcester officials are being pressured to leapfrog ahead. A new fiber-optic network has been installed in the city, and local businesspeople are relying on it to lure new companies to their hometown. A marketing brochure only slightly less effusive in tone than Tacoma’s PR avalanche labels Worcester “America’s #1 Cyber City.” Worcester’s network differs from Tacoma’s in one fundamental way: a private-sector builder of fiber-optic networks called NEESCom, which was established as the telecom subsidiary of the electric utility formerly known as New England Electric System, installed it at no expense to the city. Gidron of UT Digest says that more than 150 private electric utilities have similarly entered the telecom market. Tom Wharton, a former bankruptcy-turnaround consultant, is the man who turned NEESCom’s head. In 1998, Wharton bought a bankrupt Internet service provider. Bell Atlantic was going to charge him $6,000 a month for connectivity in Worcester. So he drove 45 minutes to Providence, R.I., where he could colocate his servers with another provider for $250 a month. On the drive back to Worcester, he mused that it was unfortunate he couldn’t locate his business in the city where he lived. Why, he wondered, was Worcester’s technology infrastructure so far behind that of other New England cities? Wharton wrote a letter to the editor of the city’s daily newspaper. “The next thing I knew,” Wharton says, “I was heading a task force.” He began working with the Worcester Area Chamber of Commerce to bring the city’s technology infrastructure up to speed. Hearing about Wharton’s efforts, NEESCom figured that Worcester would make a great hub for its new regional fiber-optic network and offered to wire the city at its own expense. About half a dozen competitive telecom companies have since moved in and started selling services on the new network, and Wharton estimates that the influx of providers has drawn at least 10 start-ups to Worcester. That includes a new venture for native entrepreneur Steven Rothschild, who, after having run a family furniture business for 16 years, had started Furniture.com in Worcester. In 1997, Rothschild’s high-speed T1 line was costing him $1,800 a month. He was having trouble finding tech-savvy executives who were willing to work in Worcester, and venture capitalists weren’t breaking down the door to fund a company in the former mill town. All of that, combined with the tough time he was having in getting tax credits, prompted him to move the company to Framingham, halfway between Worcester and Boston. But earlier this year Rothschild launched an online lightbulb store, called Bulbs.com, in Worcester. High-speed Internet service costs him $168 a month — less than a tenth of what he was paying three years ago. He’s also having an easier time recruiting managers. And there’s even a new $15-million fund for early-stage Worcester businesses. “The technology infrastructure is taking out some of the roadblocks to staying in the city,” Rothschild says. Wharton’s task force — the Worcester InfoTech Project — has taken on the mantle of marketer for the city’s new high-tech offerings. But the NEESCom network hasn’t been a panacea. “This isn’t Field of Dreams — ‘If you build it, they will come,” says Couture, who hasn’t even been able to connect his business to the network yet. Another prominent local company, Tatnuck Bookseller, is situated just a few hundred feet away from one of the city’s three network rings, which cover the downtown business district, a biomedical park, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “We are betting our company’s future on giving our customers access to us and having access to them,” says Tatnuck owner Larry Abramoff. “Not being wired is hurting my business right now.” (Until the network reaches him, he’s making do with leased T1 lines and a wireless service.) Still, Worcester’s model — in which a private company, rather than a public utility, installs the network — may prevail in future business-community resurrections. Tacoma’s model has goosed some big privately owned phone companies. In Washington state, GTE Northwest sued the Douglas County Public Utility District to stop it from expanding its fiber-optic network (the suit was later withdrawn following changes in state law), and the Washington Independent Telephone Association took Pacific County Public Utility District to court to stop it from providing Internet service to customers. So far, Texas, Missouri, and Virginia have passed laws limiting publicly owned electric utilities from offering telecommunications services. AT&T’s Kipp views the public companies’ inroads in this area as a conflict of interest. “We’re beholden to our shareholders,” he says. “Then we have to go in and compete with the government, who’s also the regulator. That could have a chilling effect on competition.” Steve Klein of Tacoma Power doesn’t really care if Click loses residential customers to the new AT&T offerings; he built the network for the power company’s own purposes, and the Internet-access stuff is just gravy. The mayor’s office doesn’t mind if some Tacoma residents think “Wired City” sounds as if a bunch of caffeine addicts have staged a coup. Some of the new start-ups may not even survive. But 100% success is not the point. The point is to get things going. The more that entrepreneurs hear about Tacoma, the more seriously they will consider starting or relocating a business there. For the first time the people of Tacoma — and Worcester and other old-economy communities like them — are leveraging their technological assets to promote entrepreneurial businesses. They’re grabbing the reins and kissing destiny good-bye. Jill Hecht Maxwell is a reporter at Inc. Technology . Question Authority Small cities want their zip codes on your letterhead, and they’ll try their darnedest to convince you that their technology is state-of-the-art. Don’t believe the hype. Here are some key questions you should ask regarding tech infrastructure before you relocate: Can I connect to a fiber-optic network in your city? How much will it cost to plug in? How long will it take? Who’s competing to provide me with service? What are the rates? Is the network connected to major cities nearby? How many other companies are there? Do they use the network? Can residents connect to the high-speed network and telecommute? Are wireless services available? Up to Date in Kapolei Remember when every burg across the nation was billing itself as the next Silicon Whatever? Well, now several cities and at least one state want to be known for their wired wonders. Here’s a sampling of the claims: The Wired City Kapolei, Hawaii America’s Most Wired City Louisville, Ky. The Most Wired City in America Stillwater, Okla. America’s #1 Wired City Tacoma, Wash. America’s #1 Cyber City Worcester, Mass. The Internet Capital The state of Virginia Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.