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News/Events

Spindale Mills building seen as high-tech center of the future
By SCOTT BAUGHMAN  Daily Courier Staff Writer

SPINDALE - Foothills Connect Director Tim Will wants to combine Rutherford County’s future industry with its past - and the old Spindale Mills building seems to him the perfect place to do it.
“Woodworkers and Weavers, Inc. has a thriving business in this wonderful building,” Will said during a report to Spindale commissioners Monday night. “Spindale Mayor Mickey Bland has come to me and told me that he’s ready to do whatever it takes to bring jobs back to this community, so I’ve been operating under that mandate. What we have in the old Spindale Mill building is a meeting of the two eras of Rutherford County. The history here is of thriving textiles, and because of Woodworkers and Weavers it is in this building. But the future, and we know that Spindale is going to come back, is located in these high tech industries. Thanks to the way it is wired, this building can do both things.”
The building is some 460,000 square feet of industrial space - a huge amount of real estate even in the era of the giant textile mills in the region.    But today, only about 60,000 square feet are used by Woodworkers and Weavers. What do they do with it?
“They have really found a niche market,” Will explained.  “The company has a website where you can submit a photograph of, say, a baby in a blanket. They will take that photograph and print it onto a tapestry. It is a really beautiful project, but the thing that makes it good news for the county and the city is that it has to stay here in America. It is all dependent on the color lexicon. I never knew this until I started discussing things with them, but color is culturally biased.  Yellow can mean something totally different in China than it does here in Rutherford County. In order to faithfully reproduce the photographs that people order, the company has to stay here and be able to get that color just right.”
In his efforts to pitch high tech industries on coming to the county, Will has been given the ability to promote high speed internet as one of the area’s drawing cards.
“Our contracting right now is focusing on getting ePolk to provide a certain amount of megabits, both download and upload, to a particular building in town,” Will said. “I would like that building to be the old Spindale Mill building for a variety of reasons.
First among them is the fact that it has the space.  There is more than 400,000 square feet waiting to be used in that building and we need to find some entrepreneur to come and fill it up.
Secondly, the owner of the building understands this desire to lease it out and he has said he is willing to work with the town on the project.
And finally, it is already wired for the high speed we want to bring to it.”
While the industrial section of the building is humming along - the company just added a third shift to meet demand for the product ­ the old corporate offices of Spindale Mill still sit empty.
“The owner has told me that he is more than willing for us to lease out these offices that they aren’t using and have some businesses grow around the industrial part of the property,” Will said.
“That’s great news, because those offices are already wired for Ethernet service and have the wiring, the air condition­ing and the power needs that we’d have that can easily be met.  It’s an exciting time to be here. But if you ask me, the economic future of this city is going to depend on the way that parcel of land across from Barley’s Taproom is developed.”
“What we have in the old Spindale Mill building is a meeting of the two eras of Rutherford County.”  Tim Will Director, Foothills ConnectCounty playing

Internet catch-up

Internet “

Broadband bypassing those who need it most
By SCOTT BAUGHMAN   Digital Courier Staff Writer
RUTHERFORDTON — With unem­ployment rates in the county soaring, a new broadband Internet-based job mar­ket might be leaving some folks behind.  And it will be the ones who can least afford it that get left on the wrong side of the Digital Divide.
 “The top 10 most sought-after jobs in the country did not exist 10 years ago,” said Tim Will, director of Foothills Con­nect, the business and technology center based in the Woodrow Jones Building.  “I can’t tell you where all this is going, but I can say this. If you don’t have access to broadband technology that you can utilize to find and then get these jobs you’re going to be left staring across that great gulf that is the Digital Divide.”
 As more and more parts of the area become lit up for broadband, or digital, Internet service, Will is seeing a signifi­cant pattern to where the networks are going.
 “There’s no doubt that it costs money to set up these networks,” Will said. “ What we are seeing, as we try and project where the networks will be in the county in the near future, is that in some ways they are following the popula­tion centers.
“The DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) areas are sticking to high population areas, but the high­end services like wireless access and fiber optic connectivity, aren’t as easy to get going.  Large developments and subdi­visions, though, are being built with this technology already in hand. Soon, our map might show all kinds of high speed connectivity in the mountain­side, but hardly any down in the valley where (most of ) the population lives.”  Connectivity, or lack of it, will have an impact on which jobs can come to the area — or which jobs the area will find.
“It’s not a question of sitting in a cubicle anymore,” Will explained. “I have several ten­ants at the Foothills Connect incubator that are telecommut­ing to all over the world.
“ There are networking system operators who use our high speed connectivity because they can’t get it elsewhere. When you are a systems administrator for the hundreds of servers that this company is maintaining — any slight delay of 30 seconds or more causes big problems.  “The security software involved automatically locks down because it assumes there’s a hacker trying to access the network and cause problems. If your basic Internet service in the area is too slow for that, companies won’t want to come here and they won’t want to hire people from here to telecommute.”  But even beyond hackers and security problems, the lack of connectivity will affect the qual­ity of workers available to new high tech firms.
 “When we get the new state back-up data center, high-tech companies will begin looking seriously at Rutherford County,” Will said. “The question is, will we be ready for them? That Digital Divide will affect the hidden poor. And by hidden poor I mean those people who are still languishing from the job loss of the textile industry.”
  He added, “Probably some 9,000 people lost their jobs, and if you multiply that by the average three other members of their family that is like 30,000 plus people affected by that countywide. In a county this size, that’s huge. But, as new jobs come in, and higher aver­age salaries show up, they get lost in the shuffle. So, per capita the income of the county looks okay on paper — because the high-wage earners cancel out so many of the low-wage owners.”  And those low-wage earners are the ones left in the dust on the dirt road that won’t lead to the information superhighway.   “It will be especially difficult on those students who can’t get their homework done online,” Will added.   “They will be far worse off, as their parents might even be illiterate and so they won’t care about school. They won’t think they can get a high paying job and so broadband will be the furthest thing from their mind.    It will perpetuate the cycle of misunderstanding about the way this network should func­tion, and the poverty that goes with it.
 Contact Baughman via email at sbaughman@thedigitalcourier.com.

Technology changing education
By SCOTT BAUGHMAN   Daily Courier Staff Writer
RUTHERFORDTON — There’s always been an under­stood break between the haves and the have-nots.  As the world moves toward broadband this trend seems to continue, and it’s producing a Digital Divide.  “The way we share information has changed,” said Tim Will, director of Foothills Connect.  “Very soon, you’re either going to have broadband access to the internet, or you’re going to be out of the loop. The way the world talks about subjects and issues is changing. People are learning to assimilate informa­tion at a much faster rate.
 “Look at the textbooks that col­lege students are using these days. Almost all of them come with a CD in the back of the book that leads to a website with much more up to date topics about the subject,” Will said.
 “These books are making their way to all schools, and so you’re going to have students with broadband and you’ll have stu­dents without it. Education is to assimilate informa­tion at a much faster rate.  You’re going to see that via homework and test scores. For our kids, this will be the digital divide.”  But Rutherford County School officials are making it a goal to be ahead of the curve on this sea change in the way students study and learn.
“Improving the technolo­gy infrastructure of Ruth­erford County Schools is one of my top priorities,” said Superintendent Dr. John Kinlaw. “ We are working on numerous fronts to make this hap­pen. Increasing internet access speeds and capacity via improved broadband connectivity are a key part of this effort.
 “Efforts are under way to fully integrate technology into instruction, using ele­ments such as multimedia projectors for displaying web-based instructional content, interactive white­boards, and an interactive Classroom Performance System. We are also working to improve the technology skills of our instructional workforce.  “Each of these areas are vital as we seek to maximize the benefits of in-structional technology,” Kinlaw said.
 Funds to expand the county’s use of long-dis­tance learning and the North Carolina Virtual High School are already a line item in the 2007­2008 budget.
 “The current education system, nationwide, is based on brick and mortar facilities,” Will said. “Even the different market or even an entirely dif­ferent part of the world.
Education is about shar­ing knowledge, and stu­dents can conference with instructors from all parts of the globe — if they have the access to broad­band.”  The learning needed for today’s job market might have to come from new sources and outside the classroom or school build­ing.  “According to the U.S.   Department of Labor sta­tistics, the average kid in school today is going to have 14 jobs,” Will said.
 “Gone are the days of picking a company and working for them until you retire. And so, too, should an education sys­tem predicated on that be gone.  “Too many times we are churning out students who have been trained to work in an economy based on the industrial revolu­tion from the 20th centu­ry,” Will added. “That was a huge watermark in the history of the world, but that industrial economy died in the year 2000. We have seen the effects of that death right here in our neighborhoods with the loss of textile manu­facturing. Economies don’t run like that any­more, so we need to pre­pare kids for the world they’re going to face.”  Sharing information for students is also becoming easier — for those who are connected.  “The entire curriculum at MIT is online now,” Will said. “And there are those in the former Soviet Union who are working on taking all of the diplo­matic documents that they used to use, translating them one at a time and posting them online for people to review budgetary constraints are often based on how many pupils are coming into that building. But the future is going to be LD (long distance) learning where students do their work via a computer at home or somewhere out in the field.  “Even when I was in school, back in the stone ages, the information in our text books for the computer field was out of date almost before the ink was dry on the pages. We couldn’t learn it from text­books because the subjects were too new.”  Today, almost every subject can be taught like that.  “Aside from those CDs that come in text­books now, you have the publisher’s website,” Will explained. “It won’t just lead you to new chap­ters or footnotes, it will lead students to ongoing discussions and blogs ( journals) that will open up whole new areas of learning. Who better to learn economics from than a real world econo­mist? And, you can pos­sibly learn from one who lives in and learn from. It is sort of, really, another watermark in the annals of history.
 “ hen the alphabet was first invented — it was hoarded and kept secret by the nobles and the rich and the ruling elite. They could learn and profit from the past because they had it recorded,” Will said. “Well, once it was released, and then the printing press came, everything just went into overdrive. The first book printed, the Bible, gave rise to the Protestant ref­ormation and then the renaissance. Now, we have the next revolution.”
This change, like the others won’t come cheaply. “It will take money to set up the Broadband connec­tions, there’s no question about it,” Will said. “ The question we now have is, where will it come from?
Large developments like Queen’s Gap are being constructed with the capabilities already there, what about the rest of the county? Is it not in the best interest of the county government to make sure that our students have the best education they can?
 “I think we can infer that from the fact that about 40 percent of our taxes go toward education. So, is it in the best interest of our students’ education to have the best Broadband network available we can?
I suppose that is an open question, but it is one we must answer, and soon,” Will said
Contact Baughman at sbaugh­man@ thedigitalcourier.com.

Building a broadband bridge
By SCOTT BAUGHMAN   Daily Courier Staff Writer
Even in the digital world, there are the “haves” and the “have­nots”.    In this case, the field is going to be split between those who have broadband Internet access and those who do not.    It’s called the Digital Divide.
 “ The high-speed revolution is going to affect every aspect of our lives,” said Tim Will, direc­tor at Foothills Connect, the business and technology center with headquarters in the Woodrow Jones Building.
 “County and town officials have been working with com­panies to get them to bring these connections here, but we are often told about how it isn’t easy to do it. However, if we look at the big-time new devel­opments in Queens Gap and the like, we see that those homes and neighborhoods are being built with the high speed capabilities already set up.
“Pretty soon, you’ll be able to look at a map of the county and see the mountain developments are wired up and the valleys — where your population density is highest — aren’t lit yet. That’s going to be the real digital divide.”
 So, there needs to be connec­tivity, but what are the real world effects from this new high speed Internet age? What will it really mean for those who aren’t connected?
 “It’s going to change every­thing,” Will explained. “ This is sort of like when Gutenberg invented the printing press. If you don’t have broadband access — it will be like not being able to purchase books in Gutenberg’s time. You’re going to be left so far behind.”
But aside from knowledge, Will also said the digital divide could affect physical well being by its impact on the health care available in the county.
“Rutherford Hospital is the second largest employer in the county,” he said . “ They are tak­ing their first big steps toward upgrading with their latest digi­tal imaging technology for X­rays and CT scans.
 “Dr. Jerald DeLaGarza, who is on the board here at Foothills Connect, has been really involved in helping people in healthcare understand how important this is for the field.
The image quality is much bet­ter than the regular analog, or film X-ray,” Will said.
“First of all, doctors can now zoom in on the image because it is digital. The software involved means there are all kinds of applications that doctors can use now to manipulate
that image to see all kinds of data about the patient.”
Doctors have seen that the real draw, though, is the ability to transmit the information cre­ated by new scanners.
“The broadband change is already affecting us in many ways,” said Dr. DeLaGarza, a local pediatrician. “Sometimes on weeknights or weekends it is difficult for me to get an X-ray technician to the hospital to review images. With the digital technology, when I need some­one to review one of those CT scans I can have it sent to someone who is ready to review them, sometimes in a different state.”  The potential exists for even more ease of use with the digi­tal images.
“ When we were educating doctors about the benefits of this, I contacted a spinal clinic in Florida who already used the technology,” Will explained.
“The clinic has about 30 doc­tors there and they have been using these digital X-rays for some time. Their system is already so integrated and wire­less, that they can have the images sent to their cell phone or PDA (personal digital assis­tant, such as a Palm Pilot) and review the images — with zoom and all that — almost anywhere in the county. Imagine, they could be reading patients’ vitals while on the golf course!”
 While Rutherford county doc­tors aren’t quite there yet, they do have more options for read­ing the test results, once the rest of the equipment arrives.
“I can have the data sent from the hospital to my desktop or laptop at my office that is down Highway 74,” DeLaGarza added. “ This is not only easier for me and my staff, but it can often lead to a faster result for patients. I won’t have to wait as long for that information to come back.”

Dr. Jerald DeLaGarza reviews a digital X-ray on his laptop Friday at his offices in Rutherfordton.

 There are substantial cost sav­ings involved, too.  “When you factor in the price of gasoline and then paying the extra employees to meet you and the film itself, taking time to travel to the hospital to review even one X-ray can be pretty expensive,” Will said. “I have spoken to some doctors who estimate they can save about $100,000 a year if they don’t have to go through that with each patient X-ray.”
Finally, the broadband appli­cations for healthcare don’t stop at physical uses.
“A lot of medicine is about experience,” Will added.
“Doctors learn a great deal in school, no doubt, but any doc­tor will tell you that there are some things you learn better from actually doing. Well, the Internet makes it possible for doctors to have collaborative efforts with patients much faster than ever before.
“Medical journals, articles and first hand accounts of step- by­step procedures are now acces­sible in minutes, online. And most of these are complete with statistics, photographs and even video of the doctor and the operation,” Will said.
If you don’t have access to that technology, you won’t be able to get this information. I talk a lot about information technology when it comes to making money and producing jobs, but this? This can save someone’s life — right here in Rutherford County.”
 Contact Baughman at sbaugh­man@ thedigitalcourier.com

Fiber optic cable reaches Foothills Connect   By SCOTT BAUGHMAN   Daily Courier Staff Writer   RUTHERFORDTON — The Foot­hills Connect building in Rutherford­ton is lit now, but don’t expect to see it glowing after dark. It’s been connected to fiber optic cables, and those cables are now live.   “ This is something we’ve been working on since I arrived,” said Tim Will, executive director of Foothills Connect. “But it all really came to a head here in February. We had a strategic planning committee meeting and discussed what the county needed. We met about ten times between March and June and what came out of that was a recom­mendation for a county wide communications				internet system. Thanks to the hard work of Pangea over in Polk County, we have been able to connect this building to the fiber optic network and soon we’ll be connecting the county schools as well.”   A grant from the Golden Leaf Found­ation has already been approved to run the fiber optic cables from the Foothills Connect building in Rutherfordton   Please see Fiber, Page 2A below if(parent.contents && parent.contents.urchinTracker) parent.contents.urchinTracker('/eEdition/20070722/2/A02/0'); else if(parent.parent.contents && parent.parent.contents.urchinTracker) parent.parent.contents.urchinTracker('/eEdition/20070722/2/A02/0');
Foothills Con­nect   technical director Greg French proudly surveys the new fiber optic node that was recently ‘lit’, or powered­on, by Pangea.   The fiber optic cable will now be run to each of the county’s schools to provide ultra­high speed internet access for students and teachers.   Scott Baughman/ Daily Courier
Fiber   Continued from Page 1A   south to Chase High School and East Rutherford High School, and then north to R-S Central High School. But Will and the Foothills Connect group already have a plan to run the fibers even further.   “Right now there are about 30 miles of fiber in the county,” Will said.   “After we expand to the schools we will have about 70 more miles. And what we want to do after that is run the fiber from each of the schools out to all of the fire departments around them. We also have talked with Pangea about running the fiber up to the fire departments around Lake Lure. After the fire departments are connected, we can set up wireless Internet towers and the whole county will be able to connect to the Internet wirelessly, with DSL like speeds, for free.   If you want something faster than that, it will be available for a fee.”   The particular provider for this wireless Internet service hasn’t been decid­ed yet, but if the wireless network Pangaea connects county By SCOTT BAUGHMAN Daily Courier Staff Writer TRYON — Bringing the information superhighway to Rutherford County is a process that actually begins in Polk coun­ty, with a little non­profit company called Pangaea Internet. And like their namesake, the company is trying to connect the far cor­ners of the globe. “I like to think that the Interstate Highway system is a perfect analogy,” said Ron Walters, executive director of Pangaea. “And the railroad is also a good analogy for the way the Internet affects cities today. It is the umbilical cord for the economy. But one of the best things about our operation is that people aren’t seeing this on their tax bills. We’re a non-profit company funded by grants and other interested partners.” And Pangaea’s mission these days is to run fiber optic cable throughout parts of Rutherford County, Polk County and almost anywhere else there’s an interest­ed party and some funding available. But running fiber through the country­side or up and down existing roads isn’t like pulling telephone cable or electric lines. “Fiber is a very different material,” said Stu Davidson, operational director for the company. “It is an entirely different process of connecting things together. You’ve got to have the right equipment and the right skills to cook the fiber and join it together. This isn’t a metal wire at all, so when you need to splice it you’re really melting it and joining it to other pieces. It is very labor intensive and requires a specialized set of skills.” And so what will happen when that project is finally completed? Well, Pangaea’s main focus right now is getting Rutherford County Schools connected to the Internet with fiber optics. “ We’re really just making our first connections into Rutherford County,” Walters said. “And our focus is on the schools at the moment. If we’re able to connect some businesses here and there, that’s good, but the schools are our goal.” Plans are in the works locally, with groups like Foothills Connect, to link up fire depart­ments and emergency services to the fiber network and then branch out locally so homeown­ers can wirelessly connect to the web. But no details are firm just yet. Still, the company has made serious inroads in the region with more than 90 miles of fiber already installed, and having gathered some $2 mil­lion in grant money for funding the project. “Our easiest selling point is the speed of a fiber optic con­nection,” Davidson said. “ When we show people our speed test, comparing the Pangaea connec­tion to DSL or cable Internet, it is usually three to four times the connection speed that they have at the moment. One of the things about the DSL and cable services is the variance between the upload speed — sending things back up the pipeline to the Internet — and the down­load speeds. Those networks were built really with a one-way traffic model because 10 -12 years ago the Internet was much more about downloading than it is today. People have new digital cameras, for one, that produce much bigger and better digital photos they want to share with friends and fami­ly. Fiber has no limit on speed, it is really only limited by the electronics you put on either end. Also, cable and DSL are limited by the traffic on the net­work, whereas fiber has no problem with that.” Walters takes a more demon­strable approach to explaining the speed changes. “ Think about when you go to work everyday and you are try­ing to get to the Interstate,” Walters said. “ You start out on the city streets, the tiny cramped ones along with tons of other drivers. By the time you finally get to the Interstate, you’re having a good speed. But getting there can be a real prob­lem. With Pangaea, it is like you start out right at the on ramp.” Applications for the high speed Internet are almost too numerous to list, but Walters points out medical technologies like digital x-rays, telecommut­ing jobs and data centers as some of the biggest draws. “So many times people tell us that what they have now meets their needs,” Walters said. “But, the Internet is growing expo­nentially and web sites are changing everyday. If you sit still and do nothing, it will all pass you by — and it’s moving at the speed of light.” Contact Baughman via email at sbaughman@thedigitalcourier.com. Scott Baughman/Daily Courier Ron Walters, executive director for Pangaea Internet, points to a map of Rutherford County showing the firm’s progress in bringing fiber optic cable to the area.   Some Good News Scott Baughman Technology gains in county … now, that’s some good news One of the things I like best about my position as “unofficial” technology reporter here at the Courier is getting the scoop on all the new things possible in the world today. Many of the things I thought were just the purview of fiction writers are stuff I get to talk about on an almost a daily basis as I study the ins and outs of the field. Take for instance my recent conversations with Tim Will at Foothills Connect regarding the broadband connectivity project for the whole of Rutherford County. He and I have talked about this whole idea many, many times before and I’ve even writ­ten a column or two about the plan. But these days it seems like it is much closer to reality than ever before. For those who don’t know the plan, the basic idea is this: A company called Pangea (from Polk County) has connected Rutherford County schools to a high speed fiber-optic network that will allow them to connect to the Internet with incredible speed. This is really great news for all of our students as it pretty much allows them access to the sum of human knowledge on demand. But it is going to be even bet­ter news for those entrepreneurs in our county because this fiber optic backbone is going to one day (and I mean one day SOON) power that kind of blazing Internet speed right to your home computer. The second step of the program is to string that fiber from the schools to local fire stations and EMT buildings. This will have the added benefit of providing high speed response time for those groups as the Internet connectivity helps with commu­nications in an emergency. But, the final step (which is happening now) is to connect the EMT buildings and fire stations to large antennas that will be a send-and-receive hub for home computers to wirelessly connect to the web at DSL level speeds.   And what’s the best part about all this? The DSL level of speed will be free. Yep — free! If you find you need higher speed you can purchase a higher speed, but for those of us paying $60 a month or so for DSL at home, a free alternative will be a wel­comed sight. So, how will this all help the economic situation? I could lay into you with all these statistics about connectivity, a knowledge-based economy, the new state data center and so on and so forth — but that all sounds a little boring right now. No, my best example to you is to point to another Foothills Connect project that is doing pretty well, a virtual farmers’ market, if you will. Many months ago my col­league Larry Dale wrote a great article detailing the plans to sell produce grown in Rutherford County to high-priced and high society type restaurants in Charlotte. Those chefs over there in the Queen City need melons that haven’t turned brown in the crate while being delivered from California (or, more likely, Mexico) and the farmers here in Rutherford County need someone to buy their melons. The Internet, specifically high speed Internet that allows for real time pricing changes and crop yield updates, is the bridge that crosses that gap between the suppliers and the consumers. And they’re making pretty good money at it right now. It can only grow upwards from there, and I sincerely hope that someday soon I can report to you in another article about expansion of that project. Next month, Foothills Connect is going to host Technology Symposium II. The first symposium is where this wireless access plan was created, this one is going to be about making the fiber-optics work better by con­necting in large rings to Henderson, McDowell, Polk, Cleveland and Burke counties. The long and short of it is, if we work together, we’ll all work better. And that’s some good news. Contact Baughman via e-mail at sbaughman@thedigitalcourier.com.			is in place, the possibility exists to bid out the contract for the coun­ty. But it wouldn’t all be about faster Internet.   “This network would be a way for you to have three operations taken care of at once,” Will explained. “The three needed levels are the fire departments/emergency medical services, the police departments and then the wireless Internet for the citizens of Rutherford County. This network will be fast enough to handle all three of those in stride. We know we have to get those fire departments hooked up to the fiber. Not yet, but soon, it is going to be required of them by the Department of Homeland Security so that they can have the response time they need for disasters.”   The miles of fiber won’t come cheap, though, and Will is hard at work trying to convince the Golden Leaf Foundation that the plan for providing Internet access is the kind of program that Golden Leaf is looking to fund.   “The main criteria that Golden Leaf has asked groups to consider is how their particular project will ‘move the needle’ for the people who live in Rutherford County,” Will said. “Well, if we can pro­vide everyone with DSL speed Internet — for free — that will certainly change lives around here for the better.”   Contact Baughman via email at sbaughman@thedigital­courier.   com.