Thou shall network

Yesterday I was at a symposium at the Mediapark in Hilversum the Netherlands (The municipal representatives of the town consider the city still as the broadcast city of the Netherlands instead of promoting it as Content City of the Netherlands). Looking back at it I think that symposium was not exactly the word that fitted the occasion, but it was interesting. The audience consisted of HU students, coleague instructors and outsiders. The program consisted of a key note address about networking and demonstrations of students’ projects.

The event was opened by Dr. ir. Egon Verharen of SURFnet, the Dutch academic and research network, whose key note address bore the biblical title: Thou shall network: advanced internet networks and applications. He showed the development of SURFnet over the years since 1986 and of course he started to stutter from pride when he introduced SURFnet6, which was launched last Monday. It was rather funny to see that he was in one of the most advanced hi-tech venues in the Netherlands and he was unable to show the network due to a hardware problem. Yet he was prepared for such disasters and was able to show the increase in quality of the screen.

As the room was filled with students (extra study points, I guess), he indicated them what they were going to get from this network. In their campus building they will receive the fastest network connection in the Netherlands. Every campus building will have a 1Gb connection. Mr Verharen prodded the students by saying that they should be now the television and movie makers of the future. What the bloggers are now on internet, will be the vloggers for the future. It is just a question of bandwith and time.

The students projects were a mixed bag. One of the projects caught my attention. It was a health project for kids with obesity. It was not as much the program offered to the kids, but the fact that projects were started in this field. It reminded me of the Sneakers and obesity projects of Nokia. What surprised me was the fact, that the students had problems finding a sponsor for the project; eventually they were taken into a commercial cross media project.

Tags: network