INTERVIEW:
Question 1
You have talked about smart communities for smart children. What do mean by that?
Answer
The generations that grow up enter a new world, use new tools and speak to each other in
new ways. My child has completely differently ways of thinking about what television is,
what the world outside our home is because of the Internet. Suddenly, on the screen my
child can read an Italian newspaper, watch French television, go to Singapore, and she
thinks it is normal. It is not normal to me. It is something that took a lot of work and
investment. So what we’re seeing in a smart community is a new generation that
assumes they can share, communicate and interact with other people. The older generation
thinks that to determine the future of your town, you must go to a meeting in a hall. But
the child today does not need to travel, does not need to go to the meeting hall, but has
information about the town., about the street, about their neighbours right there on the
Internet.
Question 2
What is a Net Day ?
Answer
In California, parents want their children to be involved in high technology. It means
jobs, being part of the new global economy. But the schools in California don’t have
any money. So parents decided to go into their own child’s school and put in all the
networking technology, put the wire in, go to businesses, get the computers and bring them
in. They decided to do it as volunteers one day. So Net Day was a volunteer activity when
100,000 parents in California on one Saturday morning went to 4,000 schools, and in one
day wired the schools to go on the Internet.
Question 3
And in Europe?
Answer
Europe is very different from the United States. In California, for example, there are
over 1000 separate school districts that are run locally. In Europe you have a ministries
of education, centralisation. Nonetheless, in Europe in the last week of October there
will be Net Days in England, France, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. People are
going to their child’s school, putting in the wire that allows a classroom to be
linked to a central point in the school and then out to the Internet. So parents, often
engineers, are going to their own child’s school to do what they know how to do today
because the parents work for Thompson or Philips or Olivetti.
Question 4
What are the objectives of a Smart Community?
Answer
I think the goal for all communities is to provide a safe and healthy environment for
people to live, where families can, grow children can learn, and you can feel happy.
People have different ways of living. The mayor of a city a city as big as Turin, has very
serious problems to solve to make the city a good place to live: the water must be clean,
the power must be good, the streets must be clean, there must one police force to keep
people safe. All of the ways of doing that involve communication. And as the new
technologies of communication become cheap and ways to publish become ubiquitous, everyone
has access, everyone can participate in the way their own city or town works. Today, if I
want to be involved in the way my city works, I have to go to a meeting. It is a long
meeting, and I may not have time to do it. But if I could see the budget, if I can see a
little bit of what affects me on my computer screen, free on the Internet, I’m a
better citizen, I’m better informed about my community. When something threatened my
community, whether it is crime, or bad water, or something that affects my children, I
could find out about it very quickly. Why don’t newspapers do this? Because even a
large newspaper can only cover a tiny bit of news. The largest newspapers in Rome or in
Milan can only cover the big topics; they can’t cover a school out in the
countryside. But on the Internet, everyone can be a newspaper publisher and everyone can
tell the world what they have, what they need, and what could be better about their town
or their school or the life they lead.
Question 5
You say that the culture of telecommunication and the culture of computers is very
different. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Answer
In all the technological changes, the most important thing is to bring the price of the
technology down and make it easier to use. No one will use something that’s
complicated and expensive, but when the telephone became cheap, everyone got a telephone.
When the video tape recorder became cheap, everyone got one. The same is happening with
computers, and most of the change is coming, firstly because the technology becomes twice
as fast and one half as expensive every 18 months, and secondly because the networks are
now becoming free. Because the high bandwidth, the speed that you can send information is
easy to do; fibre has infinite bandwidth, fibre is just glass. It is being installed in
cities around Italy every day. The power companies and telephone companies are all doing
it. The radio, wireless, the cellular telephone companies suddenly link people that are in
very remote places into the network. All of these technical events coming together at the
same time as deregulation of the telephone monopolies is causing this huge shift. And
that’s why the Net Day idea that a school can link to the international Internet and
do it for very little money is now possible.The existing telephone companies have a way of
making money that is based on voice. But today the voice goes into small packets, which
can be transmitted across radio, across wire, across fibre, across cable. The old
boundaries that separated the telephone company from the electricity company from the
cable company are erased. Everything is digital, which means that information can pass
through any pathway and the cheapest pathway wins. Today for someone in a home to speak to
their mother, they use a telephone with a copper wire. Very soon the cost of cellular will
be so cheap, it’ll be easier to use a cellular telephone, which is just a computer
and a radio. As the new radio technologies come down from the satellites, you could be
anywhere in the mountains, anywhere on the ocean, and speak to the satellite, and the cost
of that can be less than the cost today for a wire telephone.
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