So you have 20 years of engineering and business management experience under your belt. It is logical that you will have a level of tacit knowledge many companies will pay for.

In the years following the Dot COM meltdown I remember encountering many consultants. Guys we’d worked with for many years, and knew the Old Guy Working as Consultanttelecommunications business cold. Everybody thought when the Dot COM meltdown occurred, these guys would do great with their new consulting careers. I mean, with that amount of experience young companies should be throwing money at these guys with all the experience.

In a recent post on a cloud computing mailing list, an old timer from the telecom days admitted that for him “being an independent consultant means about the same things as “being unemployed.”

Sitting at a local coffee house wondering why the free wireless internet access is slow, it is easy to be indignant.  Indignant that the coffee house owner could possibly be so arrogant as to provide poor quality Internet access while I camp out with an hour old latte, updating important Facebook communities with my plans for watching television this evening.

How are we supposed to live like this?    Are we supposed to live like we are in a third world country while slurping our specialty coffee?

A third world country like Ghana, Vietnam, or Palestine?  If I was living in say, Somalia, I would be one of 1.14% of people within the country that have Internet access.  In fact, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in all of Africa there was only 4.7% of the entire population with access to Internet-enabled infrastructure or technology.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt refers to Twitter as a "poor man's email."  For millions of individuals, small business owners, and even emergency services organizations, Twitter is rapidly becoming an integral part of their business strategies and personal lives.

That fact is not lost on the private equity and investment communities.  Twitter confirmed a large investment on Friday, estimated at $100 million dollars, with a posting on their website:

"Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley"

"More than 90% of startup companies around San Diego compensate the founders and senior staff with stock options, grants, or restricted stock" advises Mike Kinkelaar, Partner at Procopio, a San Diego Law Firm.

Mike joined three other panelists discussing "Sweat Equity" and senior management compensation at the San Diego Software Industry Council's Entrepreneur's Forum Thursday evening in San Diego (SDSIC).

Sweat equity refers to "the efforts of executives or other shareholders into a company. This does not include money that is put into a business, which is financial equity. It is the time and knowledge that an individual or a group of individuals put into a business to make a result." (BusinessFinance.Com)

"We cannot know what tomorrow holds on the Internet, except that it will be unexpected."

The new FCC Chairman, Juliius Genachowski, addressed a group of journalists and industry experts at the Brookings Institution on Sep 21^st, focusing his discussion on reigniting the topic of network neutrality and "Preserving a Free and Open Internet." 

Quoting early innovators and leaders of the Internet, including Tim Berners-Lee, Genachowski reinforced the idea the Internet is intended as a "Blank Canvas, allowing anyone to contribute and innovate without permission."  An exciting idea, and an exciting confirmation the US Government sees the Internet as infrastructure.  While carriers such as Verizon and AT&T should be able to add value to their customers, the basic premise of Internet access is one of an onramp to the rest of the Internet-enabled world.

The FCC says US telephone companies have incurred a 26% increase in the cost of annual maintenance on traditional copper telephone lines over the past 5 years.  Verizon makes 25% better margin on wireless phone than "land line" phones.  FiOS is making it possible for Verizon to get into the high value video and cable television industry with a next-generation fiber optic infrastructure. So why would anybody find Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's announcement at a Goldman Sachs investor conference that "his company is simply no longer concerned with telephones that are connected with wires" a surprise? 

Well, there are still many people on the street who believe copper "land Lines" offer better quality, security, and value.  There are those who believe it is necessary to continue pumping money into technologies which are expensive to maintain, and offer little additional value to subscribers. 

There are those who believe expansion of high performance wireless infrastructure such as LTE (long term evolution) and 4G (4^th Generation Wireless) will not meet the needs of individual subscribers in both rural and urban areas.

Innovation is a catalyst for change in personal lives, education, how we work, and community life.  All are components that may fill a fundamental requirement for continued economic development.  In Ramallah there are many challenges to overcome in the journey from the current situation, to being in a competitive pool with other developing and modern countries.

ICT (Information and Communications Technology) development will contribute not only to the education and continued automation of banking, government, and eCommerce, but also to the overall quality of life in cities such as Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, and Jericho. 

International organizations and the Palestine government are developing specific plans to bring more network-enabled education resources to the schools.  There are efforts to extend both fixed line (fiber optic backbone infrastructure) and wireless communications throughout the city (Ramallah), and as regulatory issues and commercial issues mature, that infrastructure will eventually diffuse down to the individual subscriber level.

(01-05) 04:00 PDT Ramallah, West Bank -- Israeli troops staged a rare incursion into this city Thursday, bulldozing cars and vegetable stands near the central square as they engaged gunmen and stone-throwing residents in a chaotic two-hour battle that left four Palestinians dead. (LA Times, 5 Jan 2007)

"While the Israeli tanks rolled through our neighborhood, we sat at a sidewalk café and continued to drink our coffee" commented a diner at Thursday night's Ramadan feast. For the past four nights, most of the Palestinians I've met on the West Bank have shown a great enthusiasm in engaging me in conversations about Palestine, Ramallah, Israel, and the impression Americans have of the conflict and country.

The gentleman discussing his thoughts and memories of the last incursion Israel made into Palestine, nearly two years ago, was one of fatigue. "We are just tired of the misery this conflict has brought into our lives. We are no longer afraid of Israel, we just want the problems to go away."

"It's not about the addressable market today, it is about building a future for my 8 year old daughter," says Mohammed A, a Ramallah-based consultant in information and communications technology. "The World Bank can provide a lot of great statistics about the state of telecommunications in Ramallah, but if my girl does not have the same access to eLearning and education as an Israeli girl, she won't have a chance."

Of course there are a lot of politics and cultural issues involved.  Ramallah and the entire territory of Palestine are under Israeli administration, which poses many challenges in receiving approvals for telecom services such as wireless, including frequencies not only for internet providers, but also the mobile phone industry.  WiMAX is not allowed (in Israel as well) due to military restrictions, and much of the telecom and computer equipment destined for Ramallah is held up on warehouses on the Israel side awaiting customs clearance and release.

In the education system less than 1/3 of university students have adequate access to basic Internet access or computers, and very few primary and high school students have Internet access or eLearning as part of the curriculum. Government officials admit they had some mistakes in prioritizing educational resources, further reinforcing the obvious issues resulting in education system shortfalls.