Filmmaker recruited for Google fight

AUSTIN (KXAN) - He is used to working on big productions and now the city of Austin has called on local filmmaker Robert Rodriguez to help catch Google's attention.

Wednesday Big Gig Austin added a brand new You Tube video to their site starring the movie man himself telling Austinites to nominate Austin to be a pilot community for Google Gigabit - an ultra-high-speed broadband network.

Google said the goal is to deliver Internet speeds up to 100 times faster for up to 500,000 customers.

The competition for the faster connection is growing by the day as the March 26th deadline to apply draws near.

The invitation is open to all U.S. cities, states and counties. Now that Google believes they can put the power at people's fingertips the search engine company is counting on communities to come forward with ideas on how to use it.

"I know there are 10,000 of you out in Austin that want this," said Chip Rosenthal, Co-Founder of www.BigGigAustin.org and Chair of the Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission.

Big Gig Austin's new Facebook page has been picking up speed. It went from 600 fans to more than 1500 in 24 hours.

Wednesday night folks showed up at city hall to give city leaders more ammunition to build their case.

"Richard Florida wrote about Austin in The Rise of the Creative Class back in 2004 that we are number one in creativity,that we have a highly educated workforce," said Dave Porter, Sr. Vice President of Economic Development for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

Joe Faulk, IT Division Manager for the Austin Public Library System, offered some perspective on what the community could do with more speed. He said the interactive options would be endless if we had it during the recent snow.

"Well what if that info almost instantly could be fed into a place and people could comment on it, and then later on whenever you were at a location in Austin there was an image where that picture was taken," said Faulk. "You could actually got notified of that image and could actually pull up that image and see it in snow."

Google said they will accept applications through March 26 and make a decision later in 2010. Once the community or communities are chosen, the system will be built as soon as possible.