ICF co-founder John Jung was a speaker at the 2009 Global Forum in Bucharest, Romania on October 19-20.  The 2009 Global Forum focused on "ICTs & The FUTURE OF INTERNET: Opportunities for Stimulating & Reshaping the Economy."  Featured speakers included Romania's President Traian Băsescu (pictured right), US Federal Trade Commissioner Thomas J. Rosch (pictured left), and French Senator and founder of Sophia-Antipolis, Pierre Laffitte.  Copies of the proceedings and presentations are available on the Items International Web site. 

ICF named its 2010 Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year today at a luncheon ceremony taking place at PTC'10 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (13:30 HAST, 18:30 EST, 23:30 GMT).  Click here to watch a video of the announcement.  The Top Seven announcement is the second stage of ICF’s annual Intelligent Community awards cycle. Click here for profiles of the 2010 Top Seven Intelligent Communities.

ICF Co-founder Louis Zacharilla will moderate a panel on January 20 during PTC'10 addressing the annual ICF theme - The Education “Last Mile”: How Broadband, Telecom & the Cloud are Building a Global “Knowledge” Workforce.

Bangalore, a city of six million in the southern Indian state of Karnartaka, is one of the world’s top centers of technology development.  About 80,000 people work in its high-tech industry, many of them graduates of one of Bangalore’s more than 100 research universities or technical colleges.  Hundreds of international companies — including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and American Express — have set up software development centers or contracted with local firms in order to take advantage of Bangalore’s supply of highly-trained, English-speaking computer graduates.  Because of the vast gap in per-capita income between the West and India, salaries are high by Indian standards but are only a fraction of those commanded by programmers in the US or Europe.  Just as important is the 24-hour working day that is created by satellite and fiber broadband circuits linking India and the US on opposite sides of the globe, with software engineers trading projects back and forth as their working days begin and end

Canada posted three communities, including Ontario, to ICF's Smart21 of 2010.

Riverside, CA was one of the communities named to ICF's Smart21 on October 16.

Three Virginia, USA communities were named to ICF's Smart21.

I have often shunned the idea of metrics for innovation as it has been very difficult finding companies being good at this.  However, I believe it is important to work this out in order to raise the innovation productivity and in this post I share some input from a couple of large corporations based on a discussion on LinkedIn last year.  Personally, I keep getting back to a visit at Intel a few years back. It was interesting to get an inside view of this Silicon Valley giant, but it was also strange to sense how it was driven by control rather than creativity. I did miss a more creative sense, but I take my hats off for their ability to measure their innovation initiatives in which they track the following information.

The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada (ICF's 2007 Intelligent Community of the Year) is launching a training camp to teach promising young Canadian entrepreneurs how to help create the country’s future economy. The VeloCity Entrepreneur BootCamp (VEB), which will run from May to July 2010, will be based in U-Waterloo’s VeloCity, a hybrid student residence and high-tech incubator that has spawned several start-up companies in mobile communications and digital media.

Maltese businesses are getting more and more hooked on selling their products and services over the internet.  According to new statistics published by Eurostat, Maltese businesses in 2008 managed to register 11 per cent of their annual turnover through sales over the internet. Although the EU average is slightly higher, at 12 per cent, Maltese businesses are fast gaining ground in using the internet as a new gateway for various commercial transactions.