Beijing Summer Olympics: Before Olympics begin, Net's already a winner

The first javelin has yet to be tossed at the Beijing Summer Olympics, but Bill Barney already knows the biggest winner: the Internet.

"This is going to be the Internet Olympics," said Barney, chief executive of Pacnet, a Hong Kong deep-sea fiber-optic cable network operator.

He should know. Barney, who announced this week that his company is the largest investor in a consortium that includes Google to build a new trans-Pacific cable, keeps a close eye on the increasing traffic jams caused by Internet users.

"It's the new killer app, which is video," he said. He expects Olympic history to be captured on video cameras - or even cell phones. And sports fans will be sending those images to friends and family across the globe.

Barney figures he'll be able to know which countries are scoring gold medals simply by monitoring traffic. If Team Romania does well in gymnastics, he expects to see a spike in activity between Beijing and Eastern Europe.

Chinese authorities, who are also grappling with a domestic Internet boom, are gearing up. China, with some 210 million Internet users, is expected to have the world's largest online community this year.

"They've been ramping up for the last four months," Barney said. "We can't install capacity fast enough for the Chinese. They are just chewing through bandwidth."

HIGH-TECH HOMES: "Smart Homes" are coming to downtown San Jose.

M3Pods will give future homeowners at Three Sixty Residences the ability to control their lights, cameras and all the other electronic action in their high-rise condos from anywhere in the world.

"It's everything in a box," said Blake Tablak, principal with the company. "It's the future."

Tablak said last fall he offered the device to Charles Young, director of Mesa Development's San Jose project, which is building Three Sixty. Young, he said, liked it and decided to offer the option in the company's 23-story high-rise that will be finished in spring 2009.

"Mesa is the first," Tablak said.

M3Pods are developed by the company of the same name, which is headquartered in Atlanta but set up an office in San Jose a year ago.

With the M3Pod you can flip the switches for your lights, security system or even program a TV show to watch when you get home. You can also play music from your home collection on a cell phone or a PC with speakers anywhere in the world.

The devices, which will add $8,000 to $13,000 to the cost of each condo, are wireless gadgets that work via radio frequency and provide access from a browser, which can be your cell phone. The units at Three Sixty range in size from 800 to 3,440 square feet, and in price from the high $500,000s to more than $2 million.

nissan maxima 2009