We will examine current broadband speeds and access in Hawaii, such as they are (check your own speed out at hawaiispeedtest.net); how we have lost our advantage over the last decade; the current market and appetite for greater speed and access; how a move to greater speed and access will affect and benefit our community; and what we need to do to achieve them.

What will it cost to catch up, and by whom will those costs be paid? Broadband is increasingly high tech, but affordable broadband is increasingly critical to our daily lives, businesses and the economic development of our state. At the end of the day, Broadband is at the heart of our economy and essential to keep us competitive in the 21st Century. The changes, policy issues and challenges must be identified and publicly addressed. Now, May 24, is a great time to get a handle on Broadband.

Sonny Bhagowalia, Hawaii’s Chief Information Officer, will present opening remarks. Yuka Nagashima of the High Tech Development Corporation will then moderate a panel of providers including David Lassner of the University of Hawaii, Brett Lewis of BlueStreak Broadband Networks; Clifford Miyake of TW Telecom of Hawaii; Nam Vu of ShakaNet; Kiman Wong of Oceanic Time Warner Cable; and Eric Yeaman of Hawaiian Telcom.

Let's meet and explore this important subject with these members of the press at the ThinkTech-HVCA luncheon on May 24th. As always, enjoy good food, great people and a first class networking experience. Register at hvca.org.

See you then!

Until now, State Chief Information Officer Sonny Bhagowalia has been in relatively low profile. But that changed on Friday in the big conference room on the Fifth Floor of the Square Building. Friday was a special gathering of the tech industry, people who would be interested and excited by a new information technology plan for the state. And they were.

Sonny got here last year. He's in a special situation created by a grant from Pierre Omidyar, working directly with the governor's office to rebuild out state IT infrastructure. No surprise but rebuilding is long overdue. He has found a system fragmented to say the least, and in general decline, with disparate systems that range into their fourth decade.

In September 2011, the state released a comprehensive assessment of its IT assets, policies and procedures in what was called a baseline report. The baseline report identified 204 business functions and services delivered by state government employees in 18 Departments and over 500 IT applications currently in use. Talk about fragmentation.

Sonny spoke of the efforts he and his four assistants have been making to try to understand what the state has and what will it take to put Humpty together again. It's obvious that finding a path to a transformational solution will take a lot more time, effort, and money. Sonny said he felt he could do the job in well say 10 years, even though in other places it might be done faster.

Computers and networks don't grow on trees. He and the government both want this system to be the best in the world with open access to public information, open data he calls it, and at the same time with the appropriate controls. There's a lot of hardware and there's a lot of software involved. It's not as if you can call Dell and ask them to ship over a truckload of terminals and servers and that’s that. It has to be planned, integrated and programmed.

We were all rooting for him and will root for him in hopes that the legislature will support him and fund him next year and in the years to follow so that he will have adequate staff and resources to do it right. This won’t be chump change – over time, hundreds of millions.

What a change this will be for Hawaii's image; from grass skirts to world class government IT, and why not? We have the will and we know what we need; hopefully we can find the money and stay focused on it. Talk about jobs, great jobs too.

The process will be grand. The people involved will learn so much. The government will be improved and made more efficient in so many ways us. What a blessing that will be. Hopefully, the public will come along and the unions won't stand in the way. We can come out on top with a new image and a new way of doing representative government. New computer systems transform their owners, and this is as transformative of any initiative we've seen.

Pierre Omidyar gets kudos for enabling this. Neil Abercrombie, too, for having the vision to see its value. We look forward to hearing much more about Sonny's project. We look forward to seeing the changes fall into place, seeing the successes tumble out at us and improve our civic life, and most ultimately seeing the state rise to new efficiency. It can’t happen soon enough.

The press wasn't there but will undoubtedly pick up on this and raise public awareness about it. If we're going to spend $6 billion on rail then surely we can spend a fraction of that on the core functionality of our government, something that will do far more to improve our economy and keep our kids at home. All things considered, this is the initiative that will give us most bang for our buck. Let's press ahead with alacrity. Sonny, we’re counting on you.

As promised at the meeting on Friday, the Governor’s office then released a draft IT Transformation Strategy, and encouraged the public to provide ideas and feedback, recognizing the need for socialization in a project of this nature, and demonstrating the state’s commitment to creating an open and transparent government.

Want to see the draft? Check the Office of Information Management and Technology’s website (http://www.hawaii.gov/oimt).

“The state’s business and information technology transformation strategy establishes the foundation for a fundamental re-thinking of the way government conducts business,” Sonny said. “The transformation is not about just modernizing legacy technology systems. It is about transforming the state’s current business processes. Naturally, technology will play a significant role in enabling this transformation and the new way of how we deliver programs and services to citizens and businesses in Hawaii. We have a lot to change and improve but we are taking important foundational and methodical steps to get to a New Day.”

That’s pretty ambitious, and promises that this will be a mighty effort by the Abercrombie administration. Let’s be sure to stay tuned.

Comments on the draft will be taken through Friday, June 1. Feedback will be considered by OIMT and incorporated into the final version of the IT Transformation Strategic Plan that will be published in July.  If you have any ideas, whether you work for the state or not, go for it.

Broadband is Hawaii’s gateway to the universe, and don’t forget it.

Used to be in the late 1990s that we had among the fastest speeds in the world, but that slipped in the Lingle administration and is no longer the case.

Fact is that broadband doesn’t come down from heaven like cargo cult, we have to work for it, and we have to work to keep up with the speeds or we fall behind.

Speed costs. Not only the cost of fiber, which Oceanic Time Warner and Hawaiian Telcom have been putting in over the past few years, but also hardware, expensive black boxes that connect to the fiber.

We have some of the infrastructure, but we need to put in more, and that means more money. If we’re going to keep up, someone has to take the plunge and make the investment. It’s not enough to let the market creep up – we have to incentivize what we need.

Who will step up – the state, the carriers, the people, new investors, who?

If our kids and students are to have the educational opportunities and prospects they deserve, we need to get the speed. That includes the neighbor islands, and every corner of the state.

If our businesses and startups are to have the leverage they need to complete in a global 21st century, we need to get the speed.

In short, we need to get the speed everywhere in Hawaii and we need to get it at rates that are reasonable, especially in these difficult times. It means everything to the future.

Right now most people and businesses have 5-10 megabits (ten million bits) per second and some have as much as 50 megabits, but what we really need is more like a gigabit (a billion bits) per second, ultra high speed broadband 100 or 200 times faster.

No time to waste, but who is doing what to move us there. Well, High Tech Development Corporation (HTDC) is doing something and ThinkTech is working with it to develop public service announcements to let the public know about this, and about how important it is that we work together for greater speeds.

Those PSAs will play on network and community TV through the summer. Hope you get to see some of them and that they raise your awareness about broadband.

What’s more, ThinkTech and the Hawaii Venture Capital Association are presenting a luncheon panel program about broadband at the Plaza Club later this month – on Thursday, May 24th – featuring a number of qualified and enthusiastic speakers on the subject.

We’ll try to show you how important speed it and what it can do for the state. We’ll also try to show you where we are in developing the speed we need and what more we can do to incentivize the investment that can bring it to everyone here at reasonable prices.

We can’t afford to do less. Come see Broadband in Hawaii on May 24th and raise your understanding about Hawaii’s connectivity, and its future. Sign up on hvca.org. See you there.

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Join us at the next ThinkTech Hawaii Venture Capital Association luncheon on April 26, 2012 at the Plaza Club 20th Floor from 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. for a great conversation about “Transportation in Hawaii, The press weighs in on Rail.”

Rail is the largest public works project ever undertaken in Hawaii and will affect all of us. With that in mind, we plan an examination into the subject from a different perspective. No debate, no rail or anti-rail, just an in-depth conversation with a host of journalists. We will explore the coverage, the costs, the challenges, the impact, the trade-offs, the likelihood of success, transportation oriented development issues and what it all means to our congested highways and byways.

After opening remarks from Mayor Peter Carlisle, we will present two panels of journalists: The first panel will examine "the Coverage on Rail," moderated by Steve Petranik of Hawaii Business Magazine with panelists Jerry Burris, Richard Halloran, Mark Platte and Barbara Tanabe. The second panel will examine "the Story on Rail," moderated by David Tumilowicz of Hawaii Business Magazine with panelists Mark Abramson, Michael Levine, Ian Lind, Neal Milner and Malia Zimmerman.

Let's meet and explore this important subject with these members of the press at the ThinkTech-HVCA luncheon on April 26th. As always, enjoy good food, great people and a first class networking experience. Register at hvca.org.

See you then!

Last week, Best Buy announced they would close 50 of their stores by 2013. It’s not clear if that includes Hawaii’s two Best Buy stores, but if Best Buy does close 50 stores that would leave 1,105 stores in the U.S. and 185 stores in China under the company's “Five Star” brand.

In the announcement, Best Buy said they were closing these stores to “lower costs,” and they projected their savings to be $250 million in 2013 and a total savings of $800 million by 2015.

But Best Buy plans to open the very same number of stores in China during the same period. So it’s got to be more complicated than lowering costs. Maybe they need the money to open the new stores in China. Maybe it’s that they think the China stores will be more profitable than the U.S. stores. Most likely, it’s all of the foregoing.

For Hawaii, it’s downright scary. First, we had and then lost Computer City, which had a store in Victoria Ward and another in Waikele, replaced happily with the larger CompUSA. These big box computer stores were invaluable to anyone who wanted to stay current on computers.

But then CompUSA went down in 2008 and KS, its landlord, had no interest in leasing that facility to another computer retailer. So it stood dormant for two years. Then KS made it into a used car sales lot, which it is today, not selling a single computer to any of us.

What a loss. The good news, of course, was Best Buy. It arose to replace its predecessors and despite an over-allocation of household appliances it has continued the tradition of providing Hawaii with retail computers. And it has done a great job in that, all to our mutual benefit.

That’s why this announcement is so troubling. If Best Buy closes the Hawaii stores, or goes the way of history like Computer City and CompUSA, what will we do then? We’re in the middle of the Pacific. Being relegated to mail order, only, will be a burden on all of us.

It will slow down our progress. Your router fails, well order one and wait three days or more and pay the shipping. What exactly do we do for those three days? We will feel the pain almost immediately. We’ll become backwater in the most highly leveraged tools of all, computers.

Mail order like Amazon is more efficient. While Best Buy pays the cost of shipping new goods, returns and outmoded goods back and forth, Amazon and other online competitors only ship one way. Although we don’t yet pay GET with Amazon, we do get to pay the cost of shipping.

I’d like to think that local investors will pick up the slack and open their own brand of Best Buy, but we know that’s not true. Name one big box that’s locally owned. Even the small computer store that popped up in Kaimuki after CompUSA closed, went out of business shortly thereafter.

So if and when Best Buy goes, we’ll be out of luck, it not permanently, then for a long while, while the rest of the world moves on without us into the computer miracles of the 21st Century. This will be a blow to our small businesses, and also our sense of computer awareness.

I can’t believe that the Best Buys in Hawaii are not making money. Our Best Buys are always crowded and people seem to be shopping with a certain relish. But that’s what they said about CompUSA before it closed. Hard to believe, but there you have it.

Certainly, I don’t wish any of this, and in fact I wish against it. But given this announcement perhaps we should start thinking about the awful possibility that our Best Buy stores could close, and the terrible troubles we will have in getting consumer computer equipment if they do.

A message to Best Buy: stay in business, stay in Hawaii, and don’t trade us off for an adventure in China. We’re here, we’re technologically dependent on you, we shop with you regularly, and best of all you have no significant brick and mortar competition here. So why give that up?

Best Buy said 14 of its new stores in China will be "mobile store-within-a-store concepts." The "store-within-a-store" is a small Best Buy store located within a larger Best Buy store. Best Buy also plans to open 100 "mobile small format stand-alone stores" in shopping centers in the U.S. in 2013. Hawaii doesn’t need those.

Hawaii needs the Best Buy stores it already has.

Governor Neil Abercrombie brought his wife Nancie Caraway to the ThinkTech-HVCA Kakaako Arising program at the Plaza Club on March 22nd. They stayed and participated in the program through the end, and that was a big part of the magic of it. It became a kind of salon on Kakaako, and one of our best programs.

While the Governor was making his opening remarks, Nancie came up to the podium and whispered something to him. A moment later he said we should not forget to include “green roofs” on the roofs of Kakaako. This reference to urban gardening was oft repeated and became a thread in the program.

Actually, there’s already an urban garden growing in Kakaako, atop the CompUSA building there. It comes in the form of black bags of soil on the roof, out of which gardens grow. Although with the plans for redevelopment the used car lot at the CompUSA building won’t be there that much longer, that rooftop is a beginning and perhaps a symbol for rooftop gardening in the area, and elsewhere

Kakaako is a perfect place for Nancie’s suggestion. The air is clear, the sun is tropical, the rainfall is right (although rooftop gardens can be watered very easily), and there aren’t many bugs or natural enemies on the roof. All you need is access to the rooftop so you can tend your garden. It’s nutritious, fun and not very difficult, what with the many kits and supplies you can buy on the internet to get you started.

You can buy supplements for the soil, seeds, watering lines, and that’s all you need. The cost is minimal, and so is the work. Everyone with access to a flat roof can do it, and if we all do it we can have a more sustainable city with fresh do-it-yourself fruits and vegetables supplied from above. Like the old Shirokawa Inn at Waihino near Naalehu, restaurants can send their guests out for to pick desert. What a wonderful touch for the new Kakaako now in coming.

BrightFarms, the first hydroponic rooftop greenhouse company, is growing in Brooklyn. This makes New York a model for urban agriculture and a center for the entrepreneurial food movement. BrightFarms designs, finances, builds and manages rooftop greenhouses to sell to food retailers. Its greenhouses are designed to produce lettuce, greens, herbs, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. It uses no land, 95% less water, no chemical pesticides and a drastically reduced carbon footprint. What’s not to like about that?

We can do exactly the same thing here, or very likely better. Our legacy is rich in agriculture, so let’s get started and show them our stuff. Thanks for coming to the program, Nancie. It’s a great idea.

Exactly how many passwords do you have, in the 17 years of the Internet?  How much time a day do you spend trying to remember them?  How many times do you find you can’t remember them, and that you have no good record of them?  How frustrating is that, for you and me and everyone around us?

Passwords are a pain in the apps.

You can lose your password in so many ways:  you don’t write it down and you forget it; you write it down wrong; you write it down but lose it; you write it down but forget the place you wrote it down; you write it down but you later changed it and didn’t write the new one down; you have it all right, but it’s compromised somehow so you have no security even with it.   I could go on.

And how many passwords do they want you to have, and with what special requirements?  Do you have to have both lower and upper case?  Do you have to have numbers as well as letters?  Is there a minimum length?  Do you have lower and upper case and also numbers and letters and a minimum length?   All this makes it that much more difficult to create and remember them.

How bad is it to use the same password for multiple accounts – will someone with access to the first account figure out how to compromise another of your accounts?  How often do you have to change it, and once you change it how long do you have to wait before you can use the old one again.  And if you lose it, how do you remember your secret Q&A?  What if you forget that too?

Who can you trust with your passwords?  Should you tell technical support?  Should you tell the people in your office, how about your personal secretary?  Can you tell your friends, how about your good friends?   Can you tell your wife, your kids?  Just how paranoid do you need to be and with which ones?

Should you put passwords on everything, even the log-in on your laptop or wireless router?  Should you lock your computer or cellphone?  Should you keep a file of your passwords and how do you protect it?  Should you encrypt it?  Where do you keep the password for it?  Suppose you lose that one too?

I really can’t stand it anymore.  I hate passwords.  It’s so time consuming to have to make, secure, remember, record and otherwise deal with them.  If you don’t know what I mean, just forget one critical password and you’ll find out.

Over the years, there have been efforts to bypass passwords, to replace them with parts of the user’s anatomy, like your thumbprint or retinal scans.  None of those are in general use by the public today.  In fact, I don’t know anyone who uses an anatomical substitute these days, outside the movies of course.

Graphic, kinetic images or patterns are easier to retain, even if they’re not so easy to write down.  So we’re starting to see passwords as a series of dots that you’re supposed to connect in a certain way.  That’s easier than remembering words, but the same problems apply to disclosing and changing them.

How about something more subtle, like the way we type, assuming that no two people type exactly the same way, that we each have different keypress timing and patterns for different combinations of keypresses.  This is psychological, but not consciously understood.  And arguably, no two are the same.

The mission is to get unique metrics on these patterns.  If you can figure that out, you could get rich.  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, wants to develop a non-password system that just uses the unique user experience of each user, and it’ll pay you for your research in this area.

All the user has to do is type his name, and the software would know him.  The authentication would happen in the background.  They call it the “cognitive fingerprint,” “keystroke dynamics” or “keystroke biometrics,” measured by how long you hold down a key and move to the next in a word, phrase or sentence, things that take milliseconds and would be difficult or impossible to imitate.

Research is already underway, and researchers claim accuracies of up to 99.5 percent.  So there’s no time to waste.  DARPA wants a system to recognize the user in only a few keystrokes, and to detect the irregularities of an intruder.  This assumes that the user’s personal rhythms have already been recorded.

Use of the mouse may also provide behavioral biometrics for user verification.  Everyone uses the mouse differently, and you can therefore also get a person’s signature from his or her special way of using the mouse – the way the person moves the cursor across the screen or between words or objects on the page.

Surely, Hawaii has programmers with the skill and curiosity to figure this out.  It’s just a matter of making a record of exactly what the user is doing and distinguishing that from what other users do, in typing and in use of the mouse.  Yes, it can be done, and will be done, soon.

This is a challenge to all able-minded programmers in Hawaii.  Think of the aggravation you’ll save saving us all from all those passwords. When I think of all the time and effort I spend chasing passwords every day, it can’t come soon enough.  Indeed, the world is waiting for passwords to become passé.

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It will feature opening remarks by Governor Abercrombie then two blue-ribbon panels. One panel will be about landowners and developers.  The other will be about designers and innovators.

We'll have HCDA and various landowners as well a number of creative startups and entrepreneurs. The program will cover the projects under way and many other  remarkable things happening in Kakaako.

This is a turning point in Kakaako - will it be Downtown East or Condo Canyon?  We will know pretty soon. Come down and find out about Kakaako.  The Plaza Club at 11:30 a.m. this Thursday, March 22nd.  Register at hvca.org.

See you then!

We’ve had some bad weather this week. So has the mainland. In fact, it seems that there is a lot of bad weather these days, all over.

Like the frog getting slowly boiled, climate change is having its effect. The strange thing is that no one talks about it. It’s as if this bad weather, apparently increasing little by little all the time, is just a regular thing. But you can’t help thinking that yes it is climate change and that no one makes the reference, something like the elephant in the room and the emperor’s new clothes.

Oh, I could be wrong and maybe this is all just a streak of bad weather getting bad press. But it seems to me that this kind of pop up storm has been getting worse, streak after worsening streak, and it’s just too easy to dismiss it as ordinary. It’s not ordinary and it seems to bite a little deeper all the time.

I hope FEMA and Civil Defense and other such agencies are thinking about this, since it will be on them to deal with really bad storms as they arise. I hope someone is making the connection between climate change and the increasing severity of the weather. Maybe they don’t say anything because they don’t want to incite a panic on the issue.

Over time, and assuming the metrics of these storms show an unrelenting increase, the public will have to get it, with or without panic. Maybe they’ll become a little more activated on the issue and will do all the things that the scientists have suggested to hold or roll back the process, like getting off oil and the like. On the other hand, Hawaii by itself can’t stop global warming. It takes the whole world to stop global warming, and organizing global action isn’t easy. Maybe it’s simply too late.

I’d like to think there’s time to roll it back, however, and I hope we can get together on group action in the near term. The trick is staying sensitive to the issue, and I suppose that means watching the storms and examining the linkage, and then getting public support for affirmative steps, and taking them, whatever the costs.

So this week Hawaii has had some bad rain, and although many people were seriously inconvenienced, or just took the opportunity to stay home, in the larger picture so far it’s not that threatening. But we have to take it as a warning, with the possibility, or likelihood, of much greater severity coming soon.

The reality is that climate change and weather surprises are to stay. So get used to it. We live in a remote island state with limited supplies thousands of miles and several days from any disaster relief. We really need to think ahead and develop self-reliance. We don’t have that now. Think renewables. Think local agriculture. Think transportation. Think redundancy. Think disaster planning in general.

“Semper Paratus” (the Coast Guard slogan) – always prepared – seems more than a little appropriate. The dreadful days of Iwa and Iniki could return any time, and next time storms like that could visit the whole state, not just the neighbor islands, including state-wide mission critical infrastructure in Oahu. I don’t have to tell you what would happen to the tourism industry, but actually it goes far beyond that.

The rise in sea level won’t happen for a while, but unprecedented weather could be just around the corner. Just as our economy is mono-dimensional, so is our infrastructure. If it fails without a safety net, without the ability for prompt repair or replacement, we won’t have anywhere short of evacuation the mainland to fall back on. Because we’re an island state, we have to be that much more organized and responsive in addressing risks like this.

There’s no room for complacency in the middle of the ocean. So don’t be misled by the rain this week. It’s more than mother nature. It’s a message.

It’s Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Coming down Kalakaua from Beretania you already know you’re in trouble. You’re stuck and all you see ahead of you is block after block of green traffic lights. But traffic is jammed the whole way. Drivers are decompensating while the traffic stands stock still.

The time creeps with the traffic but it doesn’t get any better once you cross Kapiolani. Now you’re good and late, and it’s getting worse. The further you get into Waikiki, the more the traffic compresses. Still a sea of green. It’s total gridlock, not just tonight, but every night. We’ve all been there.

Waikiki, of course, is the jewel, the undisputed engine of our economy. It’s also the exchange point between the tourists and the community. Surely we can do better about the traffic coming and going in and out of Waikiki, but we accept it just as it is, suffering in silence not saying a word.

The lights in and through Waikiki are not timed, even though timed lights are ubiquitous in cities around the mainland, and cheap. I guess we can’t spend even that to alleviate the traffic in the center of the undisputed engine of our economy. We’d rather ignore the elephant in the room.

The makai lane on Kalakaua is lined with a quarter mile of cars who can't turn right. It’s because there are no right turn signals. You’d like to turn right, but pedestrians fill the crosswalk while you wait, so you can’t. Then the light changes and pedestrians fill the other crosswalk so you can’t turn then either. You have to wait for a sliver of a break in the traffic. For dollar half right turn signals could avoid the problem, but in a $12.6 billion industry I guess no one can afford them.

Who’s in charge here? Where’s the Mayor? Where’s his staff? Is there one person at City Hall who cares about this, who has some sympathy for the prisoners of Kalakaua, who spends even one moment dealing with it? Absolutely not - they’re all busy pushing rail. That is what they do.

Signal light sensors could also help, also for dollar half. They could change the signals when there’s no cross traffic. But there are no sensors either, so you’re stuck while the cross-streets are empty, forced to sit watching the lights turn from red to green, green to red, for what seems an eternity. Incredible that our great nation could put a space ship on the moon, but then this.

No, nothing is being done. As a result, the traffic is jammed up without relief, while the lights turn interminably from red to green, green to red and we grow frail basking in the glow. This is a huge barrier to visiting Waikiki. Who says we should go there? This is proof we should not.

People’s tempers flare, their horns blare, everybody is at their wits’ end. Nobody wants to come here again. And it seems to get worse every time, because the traffic is more congested and no one has done anything about it. I used to think that sometime, somewhere, some city employee would notice the agony of the congestion in Waikiki, but by now I know better.

Just as the traffic is hopelessly jammed, city government is jammed on the traffic, leaving the engine of our economy jammed. It’s hard to believe the city could care less. It would be so easy to do something, even something modest, even as a humanitarian mission for all the poor souls suffering there, but in deafening silence no one ever does anything or even speaks of it.

And where are the police? You don’t see traffic cops out there trying to manage the traffic. Maybe they’re also stuck and can’t get close enough. So there’s no human intervention to help get us through it. All you see is that sea of lights, that deadly hypnotic rotation from red to green, green to red, while your time on the planet fritters away.

Really, what cows we are in Hawaii. Why we tolerate this grotesque insult to our quality of life, our economy and our intelligence, is hard to fathom. At the end of the day, or night, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen in Waikiki and in so many other places on our island.