City with Superfast Internet Invites Innovators to Play and offers $300,000 in prize money for ideas

Citizens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have access to one-gigabit-per-second Internet–that’s 100 times the U.S. national average, and fast enough to download a two-hour movie in about five seconds. The only question is: what to do with it?

The city is hoping a contest with $300,000 in prize money will help answer that question. Entrants are invited to come up with clever ways of making use of the city’s blisteringly fast Internet, which was installed in late 2010 with a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, as part of federal stimulus efforts that also built out the city utility’s long-planned smart grid.

By David Talbot

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39801/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-02-29