Too many topics, too little time

This is part of my weekly Irish Times column today on the excellent, now-annual 'E-Cities Report' from a team headed by Iona chairman Chris Horn:

Dublin has now slumped to second-last position in a list of potential “e-cities” when benchmarked against 13 cities of similar ambition, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce's e-city working group revealed this week…

…The only city to rank lower than Dublin was Prague. We come in just behind Dubai and Tel Aviv. And we trail all the other European cities evaluated: Copenhagen, London, Helsinki, even Milan – all cities in countries whose rate of economic growth we have trumped for years.

To say the results this year are worrying is tepid. They aren't even, in that favourite cliché of column-writers, “a wake-up call”. Quite simply, they are downright scandalous. For this State and this city, full of possibility in this area only a few years ago, this report is a tale of good opportunities squandered. We did once have a very good shot at being a model state in this regard, but dithering has led to a state of digital entropy that grows more difficult to redress with each passing month.

You can read the full column for free here, and download the full report and recommendations  here. As the report benchmarks Dublin against cities like London, Helsinki, San Jose, Milan, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and Washington, it might be of interest to people from those regions, too (BTW San Jose is surprisingly low in the rankings — a poorer showing than Washington).

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intersting, especially given the work in the u.s. of late