Google "fiber-hoods" draw startups to Kansas City

Google Fiber, live now in Kansas City, is a fiber optic network that connects users at significantly faster web speeds, up to 1,000 times faster than standard Internet services. Since the service is rolling out to residential rather than business customers first, hackers and tech enterpreneurs are buying and renting space in the neighborhood. To anyone who's lived in the Bay Area, the cost of KC real estate is a trivial startup expense. The real question is, will enough new uses for this kind of speed be generated by the KC startup community to attract the Sauron's eye of Valley VC?

This Anderson Cooper piece is fascinating- although the lack of diversity in the short piece is a little disturbing! Well, it is Kansas, I suppose. And it's not like the Valley is a model of diversity itself.

The catalyst is Google Fiber, the search-engine giant's fiber-optic network being tested in the Kansas City area that advertises speeds of up to a gigabyte per second — a rate that massively exceeds the average Internet speeds at homes hooked up with cable modems.

A few homes away from the "Home for Hackers" is the headquarters of the Kansas City Startup Village, which was started by local entrepreneur Matthew Marcus and where Mike Farmer, founder of mobile search app Leap2.com, has his offices. Farmer said Google Fiber brought attention to Kansas City's startup culture, "because it sort of ignites the imagination about what you can do with that sort of bandwidth capability."

So far, a look at the Startup Village map shows just a few houses. But because this community is being created by immensely tech-savvy pioneers, its growth is being documented in real time and if you're considering jumping in, you can keep an eye on its development. For a young person with an idea that needs a lot of bandwidth, free housing in Kansas City could be a dream come true.

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