President Obama will be good for Silicon Valley

[Commentary] If polls can be believed, at last we are going to have our first Internet president. Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) has promised to take the strategies and technologies that drove his campaign and implement them across the US government. While we must now be vigilant about holding him to his promises, those plans, in three key areas, should be a boost for Silicon Valley's economy and innovation: 1) Transparency: Obama has vowed to bring a new openness to government information and access. This will require overhauling many of the current systems that agencies have in place to process and store information. And that means turning the government into an even bigger customer for new technologies than it is now. 2) Broadband: Access is fairly widespread by now. But what we don't have is "true" broadband. Other countries have far outstripped our investments here, and as a result they have broadband speeds to the home many times faster than what you find in the US. 3) Research: Obama has vowed to double federal spending on basic research. This is crucial, because we can't count on companies to fund it. And increasingly, universities are drifting toward research with practical applications for commercial reasons. The government needs to step in and renew our efforts to make sure we're achieving the kind of breakthroughs that will drive continued innovation.