Where is our largest technological plan?

Publishing Guidelines: You may publish my article in your newsletter, on your website or in your print publication provided you include the resource box at the end. Notification would be appreciated but is not required. Where is our largest technological plan? By J.C.Melo The period, more or less one year before September 11. The White House Technology Advisor worked in the mankind largest plan until now, to install a fantastic communications and IT network of 100 Mb/s in 100 million houses in the next 10 years. A plan bigger than the Kennedy's plan to place a man in the Moon in 10 years. The plan was being developed with a lot of priorities, 470 companies had already petitioned to participate and/or to invest, they discussed the more suitable communications protocol among the existent ones - as the H.323 - and the new ones, etc. The forecast was to announce it until the end of 2002. That plan had very big goals, among which I can remember: 01. e-Surgery 02. e-Physician 03. e-Education (all levels) 04. e-Training (for companies) 05. e-Business (B2B, B2C, C2B, and by voice) 06. Iterative TV 07. e-Movies 08. e-Security (Federal, State, Country, homes) 09. e-Elections 10. TV telephony 11. e-Police 12. e-Government (all between the government and the Citizens) 13. e-Theater 14. e-Conferences 15. e-Libraries 16. e-Sciences 17. e-Polls 18. e-Management 19. TeleCommuter (home work) 20. All IT processing and storage through distant data centers 21. An estimated 1,000,000 new companies and more e-Xs that you can imagine. In every moment that I thought of this plan, I lamented two things: first, to be 73-years old and probably cannot accompanies him in the next 30 years, and second, the dozens of technological ideas that I could suggest. And then the September 11 happened, the main national priority moved to security matters, the investments - government and privates - moved to another directions and the people worried more about the moment than with the future. But in order to survive, without the smallest doubt we need this technological plan in order to maintain the world technological hegemony of the United States in the next 30-40 years and as a result, our world economic hegemony. And as you realize, I am talking about our children and grandsons future. Now we are choosing a new President but any that comes to be the chosen, again that plan must have a very high priority, and for its greatness and for its long duration naturally he doesn't depend on a specific Party or a specific government. Now we have a lot of communication products and services - mobiles and its thousand of applications, digital TV, etc - and a lot of IT applications and services - CRM Customer Relationship Management with sophisticated voice and bidirectional Call Centers, ERP Enterprise Resources Planning, Voice over IP Voip, BI Business Intelligence, Data Mining, AI Artificial Intelligence, GSI, the wide Internet and its thousand of applications, etc - but all those are small embryos of what is possible to do. What we need to do? As the plan is natural and technologically possible and in its largest portion depends more on the private initiatives and less on the government, my suggestion is the creation of a nonpolitical Foundation to fight for this plan in the White House, the Congress, the media, the society, the industries, the colleges, etc., and naturally to integrate all those sides. I have the freedom of initiatives in my blood and for me nothing is more powerful than a very true entrepreneur. After all, those entrepreneurs created the successful United States, therefore we need only to repeat the recipe. For ever.