This morning was a good crowd of people … with several new faces to
me. With this many people we were sure to have a number of great
conversations.

I started things off by sharing some of what I have been learning about
China. On my recent trip to Singapore I began reading a book
given to me at work called China, Inc.
… an eye-opening review of what is going on in China. One of
the interesting areas is where the Chinese professors that I met one
evening started to explore my thoughts on Open Source software.
They wanted to know who in America really thought they could compete
providing service and support for Open Source compared to the work
force they are creating in China. Good question …

We then ventured into discussion about Utah State Education. One
of the people who came works for the state school board. After
covering some of what the board does, we heard about what the new
`charter` schools are … they are a new type of school popping up all
over the state.

Since an employee of Utopia was
here, we got to hear about the progress of this 100% fiber build out
here in Utah. Some of the other people that came, who live in
some of the original 14 cities, were anxious to hear when they will
eventually be able to connect. There was a lot of complaining
about the lack of information about the progress of the Utopia build
out. What was amazing to hear, was that the biggest product that
is selling is 10Mb of Internet bandwidth – fully symmetric! – for
$39.00 per month! I want to see Wasatch County and Heber City get
involved in this!

While talking about streaming media over Utopia, we got to hear about
Phil experimenting with streaming, and that got us into talking with
streaming over wireless. As we explored this conversation we
returned to the conversation about Utopia.

As the meeting went on, we talked about various job opportunities in
the valley, and then got to hear from a couple of the folks from CleanFilms who are providing cleaned versions of movies to their customers. We also talked about ClearPlay
who does a similar thing. They are both dealing with lawsuits
from Hollywood about destroying the `artistic integrity` of their
movies. Looping back, I suggested that they might look to China
as a market where editing of content and `censorship` of content is
government sponsored. They indicated that the recent arguement
from Hollywood is that they fully intended to enter into this market
themselves.

I brought up Google Talk, and we exploded into the whole conversation
about where is this going.  There were a lot of good ideas, and
this spun into the entire discussion about identity, digital identity,
certificates …

Too much to talk about … it was a great morning … we probably could have gone all day!