Like me, the Wi-Fi Alliance is based in Austin, so I asked them if they wouldn’t mind setting up a home tour that would allow me to see the future of Wi-Fi in action. In the segment below, I sit down with Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose home I visited to talk about Wi-Fi on handsets as well as the future of Wi-Fi peering, which would create device networks independent of the Internet.

Davis-Felner says the Alliance has certified 249 mobile handsets since 2003, 106 of them this year alone. She expects Wi-Fi on handsets to be more common in the years to come — a prediction that, after reading our readers’ opinions of the BlackBerry Storm shipping without Wi-Fi, I wholeheartedly agree with. And in the last two minutes of the video, Davis-Felner talks about networking WiFi-enabled devices for sharing photos, playing games or printing without ever having to access the web.

With the change in administration it’s time to stop pussyfooting around the issue of broadband access in the U.S. It quite honestly sucks. Yes, some people have access to FiOS, but others have access to speeds that rank even lower than the lame 768 kbps classification of broadband adopted this year (!) by the FCC. Uneven coverage and a lack of competition mean that we in the U.S. pay more for our broadband than many other countries and that about 1 percent of the population can’t get access at all. This has got to change, and the private market isn’t going to do it because it simply isn’t profitable to string fiber, coax or even copper everywhere people have settled.

With consumer groups and industry players calling for a broadband bailout, I’m inclined to agree, even if it does mean Google gets more broadband subscribers for free. The government needs to get involved, and it needs to throw some money at the problem — albeit in a highly organized way. I’ll argue later about what should be done, but first here’s a few reasons why it’s important. Broadband is like electricity and running water — every town, if not every person, needs access to it. Not to watch cats on treadmills or download porn, but because it gives people cheaper access to the world.

Educational Access

Today the New York Times ran an article about the rising costs of a college education and offered up the idea of distance learning as being one solution to rising costs. I don’t think distance learning can substitute for the entire college experience, but having participated in several distance learning classes, it can be used in conjunction with meetings online or weekly in-person meetings  to create a rich learning and discussion environment. Broadband makes that possible today, and faster speeds will only add to the interactivity of those online environments — making a college education more accessible. The kids who most benefit from this are not living in FiOS areas; they are in poorer areas where ISPs try to avoid or delay launching high speed services. I know, I live in one of those areas. The government needs to step up to improve this access divide.

Medical Care Improvements

Broadband also can save on medical costs and improve access to health care. A release issued today highlighted radiologists’ frustration with quality of care. Ninety-four percent of radiologists surveyed blamed missed or delayed diagnosis on the inability of medical imaging systems to communicate with information systems of physicians and hospitals. Delivering radiological scans via broadband requires fat pipes and rapid speeds, but the benefit to patients, insurers and doctors would be many: fewer scans, faster delivery of images where they are needed, and lower costs associated with the process.

Telecommuting Expansion

Another benefit of better broadband would be the ability for people to telecommute. This has far-reaching benefits, from fewer cars on the roads to increasing a family’s resilience in the face of economic uncertainty. As a telecommuter, when I change jobs I don’t have to sell my house, uproot my husband’s career or leave the network of friends and family who support us. The more people who have that flexibility, the less traumatizing job loss can be both for the individual family and for a particular region.

Those are a few of the reasons the government should care about broadband access. Broadband can help promote an educated citizenry, could help lower the costs of providing health care and could increase workforce flexibility and decrease traffic. So while older generations of legislators might deride the web as a series of tubes, the truth of the matter is those tubes could be the lifeblood for citizen access to education, information and services. We need policies and funding to make sure broadband reaches everyone, and we need it today. It would’t be a bailout. It would be an investment.

The New York Times’ Claire Miller attended a Churchill Club function to fete Twitter co-founder Evan Williams last night. In an onstage interview, Williams talked about many different aspects of his micro-blogging service, which now has 6 million subscribers. First of all, wow — that is an impressive jump in the number of subscribers.

More importantly, Williams talked about why he chose not to sell to Facebook when the Palo Alto-based startup offered to buy it for $500 million in stock. “It definitely made sense — the strategy we talked about with them — but it wasn’t the right time.” Or the right price. Here’s why:

Facebook offered $500 million of its stock, or roughly 3 percent of the company based on an inflated $15 billion in valuation. In October 2007, when Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, it valued the social network at $15 billion. Since then various different reports have emerged which point to a more somber valuation of $5 billion. Three percent of $5 billion actually works out to about $150 million. Given that Twitter was valued between $80 million and $120 million in its last round, the monetary incentive just wasn’t there to sell to Facebook.

More importantly, Twitter’s rejection of Facebook shows that the fast-growing social network has a new headache: Using its stock as currency to acquire companies that can play a meaningful role in its future isn’t going to work.

Google recently announced an extension framework for Chrome, adding the ability to run extra software in the browser. It’s a feature many had long considered missing from Google’s browser — and one that has been key to Firefox’s popularity. But with the Chrome extensions, Google is doing much more than just playing catch-up with Firefox. An extensible browser is the missing piece of a much bigger puzzle: By tying its App Engine to Google Apps (more details in the App Engine blog), the company has delivered a complete ecosystem for cloud ISVs.

All software ecosystems need four basic things:

1. A platform — A complete cloud platform is distributed, ubiquitous, and works both offline and on. App Engine lets developers build the server-side portion and not worry about scaling. And Chrome’s extensions let coders build a cross-platform user interface that leverages the Gears framework to work even when disconnected.
2. Rich APIs — All those apps can use authentication, chat, OpenSocial, calendaring, Checkout, search, mapping, and other Google services. That makes it easy to build rich apps with familiar components.
3. Administration — Google Apps lets an administrator purchase, provision and manage permissions for an app. Deployment is easy: Once you’ve found the app you want in the Google Marketplace, just click the “add” button, then install the Chrome extension.
4. A market — Google Apps has 10 million active users and is signing up some 3,000 new companies a day, according to Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise.

With the Chrome extensions, Google has made it possible for ISVs to launch ready-made niche applications for the cloud. It’s the same thing Facebook did with its API and Salesforce did with AppExchange; in Google’s case, ISVs now have a turnkey channel that can reach small businesses easily.

The ability to let Apps customers buy third-party software isn’t quite ready yet. “Now, Google Apps administrators can also deploy several new Google applications hosted on App Engine to members of their organizations with Google Apps Labs,” said Pete Koomen, product manager for App Engine.

So for example, a dentist’s office could use Google’s Docs suite for word processing and spreadsheets, but also buy third-party apps from Marketplace — one for patient scheduling, and another for invoicing. They’d all work smoothly together, online and off, using the Apps/Docs/Chrome ecosystem.

With Google looking to find revenues beyond advertising, monetizing those 10 million accounts has got to be a big priority. Selling third-party applications can’t be far off. Of course, these apps will work with any browser. But they’ll likely work better with Chrome and its extensions.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

Two of the biggest challenges facing our society — economy and climate change — are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to solve one problem without fixing the other. To eternal optimists, these challenges also offer opportunity and we are seeing that with major investment interest in alternative energies from folks as diverse as energy baron T. Boone Pickens to former Vice President Al Gore.

The cleantech movement is vital for our little corner of the world. If today’s broadband pipes are the 21st century highway system, electric power is the engine that keeps the traffic moving. From expensive data centers and large central offices, to routers and switches and all the way down to our iPhones — every single device depends on electricity. If we want our technical nirvana, we need to figure out ways to reduce our energy footprint.

We will explore some of these themes at Green:Net our one-day conference that will be held in San Francisco’s Golden Gateway Club on March 24, 2009. At the conference we will look at how software, the web and communication networks will help companies shape the future of our electrical system, deliver transportation infrastructure, create social movements and help reduce carbon emissions.

A team led by Katie Fehrenbacher, editor of our Earth2Tech blog, has helped put together the agenda for this conference. Here are some of the topics we are going to be exploring at the conference:

• Dotcom to Greenboom
• The Green Web Effect
• Green Data Centers: Low Carbon Diets for Your Data Center
• The New Networked Car
• Power Grid 2.0

Among our scheduled keynote speakers are:

• Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet, General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners and proponent of Enernet, the energy network.
• Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Saul Griffith – Co-founder of Makani Power, Squid Labs, Potenco and Wattzon, and MacArthur Prize Winner
• Jonathan Koomey – Professor, UC Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Dr. Albert Esser – VP of Data Center Infrastructure Group, Dell
• Rob Aldrich – Principal, Energy Efficient Solutions, Cisco
• Bill Vogel – CEO, Trilliant
• Andy Tang – Director of Smart Web, PG&E
• Sunil Sharan – Smart Grid Director, GE
• Erin Carlson – Director, Yahoo for Good, Yahoo!

In days to come we will be updating the list of speakers and will update the conference web site accordingly. The event will also include a startup launch session, which will introduce 10 up and coming startups that are leveraging digital technologies for green aims. Speakers from companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Cisco, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Foundation Capital, JP Morgan, GE and Pacific Gas & Electric have also been added to the event schedule.

You can register for the conference at the conference web site, which also details information about schedule, speakers and the venue itself.

See you in San Francisco in March 2009!