But a wave of privatization is washing across the continent, and things are changing quickly. The company acquired the patent, which would have expired in 1996 if not for a bureaucratic snafu, from a postal tracking mechanism invented in 1976. If BT manages to collect royalties, the Web will suddenly get very expensive. Williamstown, Massachusetts doesn't have much going for it besides Williams College and a scenic setting. Peabody's new company, Village Ventures, will seed start-ups in little college towns.
College towns are boom towns.
This year, the Industry Standard tracked 23 contests in the U.S. alone. For most of the '90s, colleges and universities were the customers that kept Apple from rotting on the branch. When the rest of the world was choosing the PC, Apple marketed heavily to the university market, making the Macintosh the standard in higher ed computing. Red Hat wants to use the same strategy to commercialize Linux open source software. Yesterday, the software company handed out grants to 10 colleges in the hopes of boosting Linux use on campus.