One of the Fathers of the Internet

Today I went to Vint Cerf's kick-off lecture for Stanford WTO's annual colloquium series. The talk was a kind of overview of the Internet's history and current developments, and how innovation takes place.

The most important thing to take away is that the current Internet's penetration percentage is highly skewed. North America has 250 million Internet users, a 74% penetration, whereas Asia's 657 million users only account for 17% of the total population. Even more extreme is Africa, with only 5% Internet penetration. On the other hand, the people left off are more likely to first experience the Internet through mobile devices. What does that tell us? We need (much) better services, applications and infrastructure for mobile devices. How would we improve text and Web access, payment systems, navigation, location-based services, etc.? There is a lot to work on in this arena.

Sensor networks are also becoming a considerable part of the Internet. What we can do with these networks, specifically the applications and services that can be built on top of them, are still not fully explored.

He also highlighted the critical infrastructure for innovation to take place. To create a Silicon Valley, you'll need: Educated workers, liquid markets, venture capital, good socializing environment where everyone gets to know each other and tolerance to failures. Governments trying to create a Silicon Valley with just the hardware, but totally ignore the human resources and investment sources, are bound to fail, since nothing comes out of cold and brainless hardware (buildings, equipment, etc.) Communities that heavily penalize and look down upon (business) failures are likewise not suitable to be an innovative hub. For instance, business practices in Europe tend to focus a lot of negative attention on failed businesspeople, who often find it difficult to start over.

As a final note on speeding up innovation, Vint emphasized the importance of working together physically, despite the apparently convenient networked services like email, twitter and instant messaging.