Maryland Business

By: Robert J. Terry

As Facebook status updates go it was pretty typical.

“Another all-nighter,” it read. “I’m a slow writer. With high standards.”

But this post came courtesy of Baltimore’s “Google czar” — Tom Loveland, CEO of Mind Over Machines and a tech industry leader in the region. So his status update sent a signal that the city’s heavy lifting in its bid to become the home of a multimillion-dollar broadband network financed and built by Google was in the home stretch.

Google’s deadline for the RFI, or request for information, from interested cities is tomorrow. After the final blitz of i-dotting and t-crossing is complete, the coalition of Baltimore high-tech entrepreneurs, city agencies, businesses and nonprofits will have to sit back and wait.

They’re feeling pretty good about the case they’ve put forward.

“We didn’t just stress ‘how badly we want this,’ we built a concise, logical and detailed case for why Google should want us,” high-tech entrepreneur Dave Troy wrote on his blog today.

Among the assets the Baltimore group is highlighting, according to Troy’s post:

• A city-owned and operated conduit system running under the streets, which would enable Google to deploy a network faster and at lower cost.

• A pledge from billionaire financier George Soros (whose Open Society Institute has an office here) to support a Google investment with programs to help bridge the digital divide, a push endorsed by city schools CEO Andres Alonso in an early Web video testimonial.

• Talks that are underway with Bob Kahn, a co-inventor of the TCP/IP networking standard, on new ways to archive and share municipal data.

Local organizers were heading to City Hall this afternoon to give a final review of the RFI and then hold a possible “button-pushing ceremony” to transmit the document electronically to Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Stay tuned, we’ll post more when we know it.