This is SIIA Information Industry Summit Days, goes the proclamation from Mayor Bloomberg. Neat! Streamlining operations is Paul's goal, focuses on software providers. Focuses on partnering with software providers. My apologies to Paul, I needed to step away for this panel, so this is not live-blogged. The key factor I picked up from Paul's presentation is the ubiquity of broadband wireless communications working their way into the municipal infrastructure for public support services. As one of so many who lost dear friends and colleagues on 9/11, I can appreciate the importance of this greatly. But at the same time one thinks about the 19th century history of New York City, where tremendous investments in public water systems helped to fuel its growth. Broadband wireless to the scale that municipal water services were taken in that era would help to fuel growth in NYC to a similar degree.

Ubiquitious broadband wireless would help to get the Internet to penetrate to all 8 million NYC citizens as well as the hundreds of thousands of affluent commuters who enter the city each day. Each square inch of pavement in the five boroughs should be equipped for ecommerce, so that geolocation services can help people take the key advantage of a city - proximity and density - to funnel revenues to local merchants and services providers. As with water systems this is a huge investment, but just was water allowed people to feel secure that fires would be controlled anywhere and pure water would allow for good health the economic and creative health of New York relies on far-thinking commitments to public wireless as soon as possible. Paul's highlighting of the problems that this entails are valid, and there are ways to do this with the private sector to get the most effective results for both citizens and services providers. But New York needs a Robert Moses of wireless really soon to get this key objective in place - especially for less affluent citizens who need to be able to educate themselves into today's economy. End of soap box. Thanks.