Bob Metcalfe took the stage at Gig Tank’s Demo Day last week to be interviewed by U.S. Ignite CEO Bill Wallace about gigabit-per-second Internet speeds and entrepreneurship. The inventor of Ethernet cracked jokes, offered advice and predicted where the Internet will go next in the 45-minute interview, which ended in a standing ovation.
Photo: GIGTANKBob Metcalf wore a suit, a tie and bright red-and-yellow sneakers when he took the stage at Gig Tank’s Demo Day last week to be interviewed by U.S. Ignite CEO Bill Wallace about gigabit-per-second Internet speeds and entrepreneurship. The inventor of Ethernet cracked jokes, offered advice and predicted where the Internet will go next in the 45-minute interview, which ended in a standing ovation. Here are some of his thoughts, as recorded by reporter Shelly Bradbury.
Q: What do you think will be the next killer application of gigabit network?
A: I have one in mind. My favorite one. You all know that the Internet disrupted the U.S. Postal Service with electronic mail. And we disrupted the music industry with iTunes and similar stuff. We’ve done serious disruption to retail with websites like, say, Amazon. We’ve created a series of major industry disruptions. Well, there are some ahead. My favorite are education, energy and health care. They’re in serious needs of disruption.
Look at education. You know what a mooc is? It’s a massive online open course. The Internet is going to disrupt higher education in a very positive way. These moocs are the beginning of the disruption, and it’s fantastic.
Not everyone wants it to happen. The moocs have an unsolved problem: You’re taking a class with 100,000 other people. How do you get the interaction with the professor? How do you get peer-to-peer interaction and discussion? How do you create a scalable education community under this mooc model? This is going to be one of the killer apps of this gigabit network. High bandwidth, multiple location communication will somehow re-create the learning community.