Our digital future…when?

The American Chamber of Commerce “Digital Future Now” conference held in Auckland yesterday was a fairly thought provoking event.

The minister of communications and information technology, David Cunliffe, kicked proceedings off with a keynote which is available to listen to on the Science Media Centre website. It was a slightly lacklustre showing for a politician staring an election in the face and you could tell it didn’t go down well with the audience.

Animation Research’s Ian Taylor took issue with the minister’s apparent pre-occupation with the outcomes of broadband development - the applications and services we are going to use broadband to access.

“Just focus on getting the infrastructure in place” was Taylor’s view, which was mirrored by Bernard Hickey of Interest.co.nz and others. With the looming release of the Digital Strategy 2.0, it appears the Government is already looking past the infrastructure issue to try and figure out how it will kickstart content generation over highspeed networks.

Some reason that this shouldn’t be the Government’s job - the classic “build it and they will come” argument. Either way, the Government has clearly lost momentum ahead of the election in the area of broadband even though it has tangible results to show from the unbundling of Telecom - Cunliffe pointed out that investment levels in the telco space are almost double what they were before the last round of regulation of the telco.

There seems to bew a doscinnect between the Government’s view that broadband is coming right (therefore we only need patch up areas of poor performance) and the more ambitious view espoused by National that we need a sweeping (and expensive) plan to build fibre infrastructure nationwide.

The question, which currently has no clear answer, is what is going to get us the digital future we need to remain globally competitive, in the quickest fashion?

Lots of other interesting material from the conference, which I’ll get up as podcasts in the next few days. Mario Wynands of Sidhe Interactive gave an interesting speech about the commercial realities of the videogames market and there were interesting panel discussions about social media and mobile applications. Richard MacManus outlined how he has taken Readwriteweb.com (the 9th most linked to blog in the world) global from Wellington.  Now that’s a success story worth listening to!