Broadband Penetration: 7 Ways to profit from our biggest infrastructure need
David Fessler emphasizes the need for a dramatic increase in US broadband connectivity, a factor which may prove decisive in surviving the tough times ahead: “Connected Nation’s research states that every 7% increase in broadband adoption could result in the following benefits: Job creation of around 2.4 million, Annual health care cost savings of $692 million, Annual fuel savings of $6.4 billion, 3.2 billion fewer pounds of CO2 emissions per year, 3.8 billion hours saved by accessing broadband from home, $134 billion in direct economic impact.”

IT has the power to green the world
Ted Samson of InfoWorld discusses a study citing technology’s crucial role in cutting down global greenhouse gases: “Using technology to dematerialize the way people work and operate, replacing high-carbon physical products and activities (like books and meetings) with virtual low-carbon equivalents (e-commerce/e-government and videoconferencing) could deliver a global reduction of 0.5 GtCO2e in 2020, according to the report.”

JetBlue’s reservations staff embrace teleworking
It’s the details that spell the difference between success and failure, and ComputerWorld New Zealand’s Louis van Wyk shares some corporate strategies that make telecommuting work. One such approach: “Innovative US airline JetBlue Airways has embraced the concept of remote working and does so on an impressive scale. All 1,500 of the company’s reservations team are home-based and between them handle 35,000 calls a day.“

A resilient suburbia 2: Cost of Commuting
In his blog, Jeff Vail makes an analysis of peak oil’s possible effects on workers in suburbia: “There’s a number of take-aways from these graphs: 1) these numbers are higher than average cost of commuting, 2) to the extent that they’re accurate, commuting is VERY expensive, 3) the majority of the cost of commuting is the base cost, not the gasoline, 4) for most suburbanites, the ability to afford life in suburbia is more a function of the shape of the overall economy (e.g. the earning power of suburbanites) than it is a function of gas prices in isolation.”

Why the downturn can be good for digital nomads
Mike Elgan lists six trends that favor mobile workers in his article on ComputerWorld: “Economic downturns, painful as they are, have a tendency to force new priorities on everyone. The cost savings and efficiencies inherent in the digital nomad lifestyle can become irresistible during recessions, and so the trend in that direction is accelerating.”

Nation needs a workplace rethink
Shifting our focus to the East, Steven Crook assesses traditional corporate attitudes in the Taiwan Journal: “According to a 1995 study by Yen Jin-ru, a professor in the Department of Shipping and Transportation Management at National Taiwan Ocean University, Taipei City Government would save between US$75.3 million and US$271.4 million per year on road construction if just 5.9 percent of rush hour trips were replaced by e-commuting.”

APAC CIOs wary of social networking
Web 2.0 isn’t very popular with the Asia Pacific region’s key decision-makers, as reported by Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia: “Conducted by Springboard Research earlier this year, the study found that over 90 percent of the CIO-respondents said they had no plans to use blogs, wikis or social networking tools in the next 12 months. Nearly 470 IT decision-makers from Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore took part in the survey.”