Looking into the Future of the Net
Tuesday, March 8, 2005, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Andrew Odlyzko is the Internet's great contrarian; The New York Times reports he “wrote research papers as early as 1998 debunking claims that Internet growth was so fast.” He's bursting bubbles of Internet TV business plans now, starting with the observation that music on the web is primarily downloaded while industry expects to sell it streamed. His lessons come from pure mathematics (he's a world-class number theoretician whose work was crucial to solving Fermat's theorem), the history of earlier bubbles including the building of the railroads and telegraphs and almost everywhere except common opinion. Matt Davis of Yankee is one of the most respected analysts predicting the immediate future.

---

Steve Cherry, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum

Steven is a senior associate editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, covering the Internet and telecommunications, and related topics in networking, computing, digital media, intellectual property, and public policy.
Before joining the IEEE staff, he served as executive editor of magazines at the Association for Computing Machinery, where he founded netWorker magazine. His writing has appeared in such magazines as Internet Week, Computer Shopper, and Internet World. He holds a B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from the State University of New York at Geneseo. When he’s not wallowing in technology, he’s scaling rock walls at places like Yosemite, Red Rocks, and the Gunks.

---

Andrew Odlyzko, Director, Digital Technology Center, University of Minnesota

Andrew Odlyzko is Director of the interdisciplinary Digital Technology Center and an Assistant Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota. Prior to assuming that position in 2001, he devoted 26 years to research and research management at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs.

He has written on a variety of subject, from pure mathematics to economics of ecommerce. He may be best known for the first debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every 100 days, the myth that inspired so much of the Internet bubble. All his recent papers as well as further information can be found on his home page at <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko>.