U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has laid out his plan for a huge economic stimulus package, with a broadband rollout, an Internet-based smart energy grid and alternative energy a major component of his plan. The giant stimulus package could cost close to $1 trillion, with investments in communications and energy infrastructure forming a major chunk of government spending. The president-elect has called the economic situation in the U.S. a “crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime,” hence it is no surprise that this economic stimulus package is quite unlike any other in the past several decades that the US has seen.

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OpenNet recently won the NetCo segment of the NGNBN. The consortium comprised Canada’s Axia NetMedia, and Singapore’s SingTel, SPH and Singpower Group. Although it might have been painted as a close “two-horse” race, I doubt if there were ever any questions as to who was going to win the bid. With the government putting up $750m to fund the NGNBN NetCo passive network, it could not afford to place its bets on the Infinity network, which would have faced stiff, cutthroat competition from SingTel, had the latter not won the tender.

And now that SingTel’s consortium has won the bid, the long term outlook for StarHub doesn’t look pretty. StarHub’s franchise lies with its cable network and its strong programming line-up. It keeps customers and prevents churn by using its exclusive cable infrastructure to tighten its stranglehold on the telecoms market with strong triple & quadruple play packages.

StarHub stock price to date (source: UOB KH)

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In its short lifespan since its launch, Google’s Chrome is already starting to have an impact on the internet and the webapps landscape. As I mentioned in an earlier post, SaaS developers and cloud computing enthusiasts would be the greatest beneficiaries of Chrome’s quantum leap improvements in browser technology.

Indeed, the whole idea behind a blazing fast Javascript engine is not about the speed of the browser, it’s about providing a powerful platform to execute web apps. This idea was captured quite succintly by Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript:

Speed, after all, is not an end to itself. The reason browser performance, especially JavaScript performance, is important is because it allows developers to create Web applications to rival traditional desktop programs in speed and sophistication. “The more browser makers who take performance to the next level, the likelier people will build Web apps that can replace desktop apps,” said Eich.

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I have already downloaded, installed, and set Google Chrome as my default web browser. Even though it is still in beta and there will definitely be bugs to be fixed, I am extremely excited about Google Chrome.

Why?

It’s not just because Chrome has been tested to be 42x faster than IE7 and 9x faster than FF3, it’s because I believe that Google Chrome is the first functional web applications platform. With Chrome, web developers will be emboldened to challenge the boundaries of web applications development, now that they are secure in the knowledge that their programs will have a powerful platform on which to be executed and run.

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