Mediaboss Marketing

2 hrs.

John Roach

What would you do if had if you had an Internet service that could download a 2-hour movie in about 5 seconds?

You could, of course, watch a bunch of movies. City officials and investors in Chattanooga, Tenn., hope you have some other creative business ideas that take advantage of its 1-gigabit-per second Internet.

That is, the city has an Internet that is 20 to 200 times faster than what's available to customers anywhere else in the country. They want innovators to figure out what to do with all that speed.

If you think you've got some ideas, hurry up and submit them to the Gig Tank competition. There's $300,000 in seed investment and prize money at stake. The deadline for entries is March 1.

There are two tracks in the competition one for students and another for entrepreneurs. Organizers expect more than 100 entries, Jack Studer, a partner with VC firm Lamp Post Group, told me Wednesday.

On the student side, ideas range from collaborative teaching and learning projects that involve high-definition video streaming to applications that take advantage of all the data stored in the cloud.

Entrepreneurs with business plans in hand are heavily focused on healthcare applications such as telemedicine and ways to share massive files in real time.

"An MRI is a couple of terabytes of data so you can't really share that in real time unless you've got some pretty massive bandwidth from point to point," Studer noted.

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'Gigabit' ideas wanted for superfast Internet