Wired: Tech Biz
Dispatches from Silicon Valley.

$4 Billion in Broadband Stimulus Grants Tied to Strict Net Neutrality Rules
Two federal agencies are now ready to hand out $4 billion in grants and loans to help bring broadband to the people and stimulate the economy, but applicants have to promise to play fairly with whatever devices, applications and services users want to use.

Clive Thompson on Cuba's Potential Tech Boom

Back in the '80s, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, with unemployment as high as 17 percent. But the scrappy nation had one advantage: It always invested in education, so while the Irish were poor, they were smart.

American tech companies like Dell and Intel eventually realized the island was full of underemployed brainiacs and opened up offices there. The Irish were soon performing tasks such as developing software and working in pharmaceutical manufacturing and research. By the late '90s, the influx of jobs turned the country around: Ireland was filled with people who were smart and also wealthy, among the richest in Europe. The Celtic Tiger was born.

Is there another country today with the same potential, one that could erupt in an intelligence-driven boom? Yep, though it's probably not one you'd expect: Cuba.

I visited Cuba a few years ago and was surprised at how much it reminded me of Ireland. Everyone was smart, skilled, and seemed hungry for opportunities to improve their lives—perhaps even more so than the Irish had been back in the '80s, because they'd spent decades under Fidel Castro's human-rights-crushing thumb. Now that President Obama is talking about opening up trade, Cuba experts predict that the country could explode with creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. "There's tremendous potential," says Gustav Ranis, an economic-development expert at Yale.

Like the '80s Irish, Cubans are eerily well educated, particularly for such an impoverished people. Education is one thing Castro has done right: 99.8 percent of adults are literate, and nearly a third have graduated from high school, many with the sort of vocational training in mechanics and farming the US foolishly let slip a generation ago. Based on UN statistics, one out of five young adults in Cuba graduates college.

Cubans also have a hacker mindset. They've needed it to handle the constant privation. They keep 50-year-old cars running with cobbled-together parts. They cadge gray-market Internet access by making friends with local officials—among the anointed few the government allows online. When Soviet food supplies vanished, Cubans turned to urban gardening.

If the US embargo ends, Cuba could become an Ireland-like high tech outsourcing resource. "They've got all the skills you need for software programming," says Kenneth Flamm, professor of international affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Cubans, many of whom study English in school, would be particularly good at "localizing" US software for Latin American markets, Flamm says. Plus, Havana is only an hour's flight from Miami, making it convenient for offshoring.

Medicine would be another potential area of growth. Cuban health care, particularly preventive care, has been amazingly good; Cuban life expectancy is on a par with that of the US. The country has poured millions into biotech, creating vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B. "Biotech and health tourism have really serious potential," says Vicki Huddleston, a Brookings Institute expert on Cuba.

Mind you, white-collar jobs aren't enough. Cuba has more than 11 million people, and gainfully employing that many requires tons of jobs in textiles, light industry, and agriculture. Organic farming, interestingly, could be big: Because the embargo has made it hard to get pesticides, Cuba has used comparatively little of them, which means much of the island is organic-ready, so long as it avoids the "resource curse" and stays away from too much mining and oil drilling. Retaining the social welfare net would also be crucial.

Obviously, this is blue-sky thinking. To really open up trade, the Castros will have to liberalize their repressive regime. (An independent journalist I met while visiting in January 2003 was arrested two months later.) There's no telling if or when that will happen. But let's hope it does. In sheer human potential, Cuba is an economic and technological miracle waiting to happen.

Email clive@clivethompson.net

Bing Snags Small Gain From Google
Bing grabs a percentage point in the search wars, stealing a sliver of the search market from Google. Is it the beginning of a long march or just the product of an ad campaign?

Pure Play iPhone App Startups Attract $100 Million in VC Bucks
Venture capitalists drop $100 million into the coffers of software firms seeking to make their fortune selling apps for the iPhone. Clearly, the VCs are expecting consumers to keep falling in love with mobile devices and the apps that extend their usefulness.

Pirate Bay Heading to Davy Jones' Locker
The $7.7 million sale of The Pirate Bay spells its end as a file sharing maverick.

Steven Levy on Neil Young's Massive Blu-ray Project

Neil Young has been working on his Archives project for so long that the big news in the tech world when it was first announced was Windows 3.0. Back in 1988, the curmudgeonly musician conceived the mother of all box sets, a multimedia data dump that presents the breadth of his work—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in hi-def audio. Young envisioned Archives as not just a spiffed-up music collection but a virtual autobiography, including video footage, photos, press clips, and memorabilia such as original lyric sheets and personal correspondence, retained against all odds. To Young fans—and anyone interested in how digital media can enable new means of self-expression—this sounded pretty nifty.

But in preparing this harvest of material, Young has made even Microsoft look like a short-order cook. Year after year, Archives remained in perpetual just-about-there mode. ("It's already together," Young gushed to an interviewer back in 1991.) Then, a couple of years ago, the advent of hi-def optical formats removed a significant barrier. Larry Johnson, Young's media wizard, explains that fans could at last enjoy super hi-fidelity audio while simultaneously poring over set lists from a 1969 coffeehouse appearance and newspaper reviews of Buffalo Springfield.

Well, Archives has finally arrived. The full version includes 10 Blu-ray discs (128 songs in 24-bit/192 kHz stereo and a reissue of the seldom-viewed documentary Journey Through the Past), a 236-page hardbound book, a poster, and code for downloading the music (even though Young regards MP3s as the aural equivalent of Satan). And this is only volume 1, covering his prolific career up to 1972.

Longtime Youngophiles like me will be giddily overwhelmed from the get-go. When you follow an artist closely for many years, your own consciousness inevitably becomes intertwined with theirs, and sudden access to their personal vault of unreleased tunes, alternative mixes, and private paraphernalia is a bounty that requires a lot of unpacking. Archives drops you into the Neil Wide Web. At first I jumped from one gem to another. It thrilled me to hear gorgeous versions of tunes I'd experienced only on fuzzy bootlegs, to discover cheesy instrumentals from Young's high school band, and to view evocative items like the article his father (a well-known Canadian journalist) wrote after seeing his son play Carnegie Hall.

Eventually, though, I got frustrated. The paradox of Archives is that while it breaks ground in exploiting the relatively new Blu-ray format, the very concept of physical media is racing toward obsolescence.

Archives shares its central interface metaphor with 1970s computers: a file cabinet. That navigational trope has more miles on it than Old Black, Young's vintage Les Paul guitar. Young plans to add folders to the cabinet by letting users download additional material. Subsequent volumes of Archives will stretch the cabinet to ludicrous proportions. "It will be like a file drawer that goes on for a mile and a half," Johnson says. But this puts limits on the Neil Wide Web that don't exist in Google's world; search functionality would be a welcome addition.

Considering the rate of production at Young's digital operation, it may take a decade or two until Archives gets around to the current period of Young's oeuvre. My guess is that by then the project will quite logically move to the cloud (with access granted via subscription fee or limited-time pass), where all of Young's outtakes and memorabilia—along with photos, sound files, and reminiscences provided by his fans—will be available in an instant. (If the Internet of 2020 can't deliver top-grade audio quality and hi-def images smoothly, all will be lost anyway.) The alternative—a stack of 40 or 50 Blu-ray disks on the verge of irrelevance—would just leave us helpless.

Email steven_levy@wired.com.

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google
Google may be a verb that means search, but if you aren't seeing other search boxes, you are missing out. Wired.com takes a look at the rest of the search services on the net and finds some beauties.

After Sale, Can Pirate Bay Survive?
The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker, is likely to be lucrative for its new Swedish owners, Global Gaming Factory X AB. The site, which is expected to go legitimate, will probably rake in cash from its VPN venture and its YouTube-like service.

Jackson's Death Puts Lucrative Beatles Copyrights in Play
The King of Pop is dead, but controversy over his interest in the Beatles library lives on.

The Wired Interview: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook's founder and CEO talks about the limitations of walled gardens, the evolution of privacy online and why Home Depot should "humanize" itself.