| ICF Opens Nominations for 2010 Intelligent Community of the Year |
| Monday, June 29, 2009 |  Nominations for the 2010 Intelligent Community Awards are now being accepted. Communities large and small, urban and rural, in developing and industrialized nations are invited to apply. A nomination form, samples of previous successful nominations and a white paper describing the 2010 Theme are now available. Deadline for nominations is September 21, 2009.
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| ICF's Building the Broadband Economy Videos are now Available |
| Monday, June 8, 2009 |  ICF's annual summit, Building the Broadband Economy, may be over, but you can still benefit from the insightful panels and discussions via the video archive. Coverage includes "Conversations with the Top Seven Intelligent Communities," "The Revolutionary Community in Recessionary Times," "Communities Onlne vs. Online Communities" and the 2009 Intelligent Community Awards.
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| Stockholm Named Intelligent Community of Year 2009 by ICF |
| Friday, May 15, 2009 |  ICF named Stockholm, Sweden the Intelligent Community of the Year for 2009 at an awards ceremony this afternoon at Steiner Film Studios in Brooklyn, New York. Also recognized were the recipients of the ICF’s Visionary of the Year Award, Mayor Andre Santini of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, and of its three annual Founders Awards: Taoyuan County, Taiwan; Dave Carter, head of the Manchester Digital Development Agency in the UK; and Andrew Spano, County Executive, Westchester County, New York, USA.
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| Stockholm, Sweden |
| Thursday, April 23, 2009 | 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year
 During the early Nineties crisis, the City of Stockholm decided to pursue an unusual model in telecommunications. The city-owned company Stokab started in 1994 to build a fiber-optic network throughout the municipality as a level playing field for all operators. Stokab dug up the streets once to install conduit and run fiber, closed them up, and began offering dark fiber capacity to carriers for less than it would cost them to install it themselves. Today, the 1.2 million kilometer (720,000-mile) network has more than 90 operators and 450 enterprises as primary customers and is now in the final year of a three-year project to bring fiber to 100% of public housing, which is expected to add 95,000 households to the network. Stockholm's Mayor has set a goal of connecting 90% of all households to fiber by 2012.
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NYU panel calls for Silicon Alley revival |
|  NEW YORK -- There are a lot of big financial firms, medical research institutions, and media companies in New York City. So why are there so few startups? The professor admitted that universities could do more to encourage entrepreneurship, the venture capitalist admitted that it is easier to help big companies than small ones, and the representative of city government said the Bloomberg administration has big plans to boost business in New York City. At the Building the Broadband Economy 2009 summit of the Intelligent Community Forum held at NYU's Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, a panel of experts said that the economic crisis gives the city an opportunity to reduce its dependence on Wall Street.
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Stockholm wins broadband award |
| New York City-based think tank Intelligent Community Forum has named
Stockholm, Sweden, as the 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year. The
annual gathering of global best-practices communities emphasized a
"culture of use," not just access to broadband technology or
"households passed" availability.
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Taoyuan County, Taiwan Receives Founders Award from ICF |
| Press coverage of the Founders Award presentation to Taoyuan County.
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STORIES WE ARE FOLLOWING |
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Can Governments Till the Fields of Innovation? |
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 Innovation — the tricky, many-step process by which ideas become products and services — has typically been seen, studied and celebrated at the micro level, as a pursuit for entrepreneurs and clever companies. But governments are increasingly wading into the innovation game, declaring innovation agendas and appointing senior innovation officials. The impetus comes from two fronts: daunting challenges in fields like energy, the environment and health care that require collaboration between the public and private sectors; and shortcomings of traditional economic development and industrial policies.
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East Africa Gets Broadband |
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 The Horn of Africa is one of the last populated bits of the planet without a proper connection to the world wide web. Instead of fibre-optic cable, which provides for cheap phone calls and YouTube-friendly surfing, its 200m or so people have had to rely on satellite links. This has kept international phone calls horribly overpriced and internet access equally extortionate and maddeningly slow. But last week, in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a regional communications revolution belatedly got under way when Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, plugged in the first of three fibre-optic submarine cables due to make landfall in Kenya in the next few months. They should speed up the connection of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as bits of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, to the online world. Laying the cable cost $130m, mostly at the Kenyan government’s expense; Mr Kibaki hailed the event for bringing “digital citizenship” to his countrymen.
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Broadband Demand Largely Immune to Recession in US |
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 Broadband adoption appears to have been largely immune to the effects of the current economic recession in the United States. In the April 2009 Pew Internet & American Life survey, more than twice as many respondents said they had cut back or cancelled a cell phone plan or cable TV service than said the same about their internet service.
- 9% of internet users (7% of all adults) say that in the past 12 months they have cancelled or cut back online service.
- 22% of adults say they have cancelled or cut back cable TV service in the past 12 months.
- 22% of cell phone users (19% of all adults) report that in the past 12 months they have cancelled or cut back cell phone service.
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