People looking to relocate or planning a sight-seeing trip to a metro area may be adding another item to their checklists: Does the city offer wireless access? -- Increasingly, the answer will be yes. This month, San Francisco and New Haven, CT became the two latest major U.S. urban areas to take another step toward providing Wi-Fi connections. They've submitted requests for proposals from technology companies and hired consultants. And Philadelphia -- the first major urban area to initiate a city government-led wireless program -- just announced that it has narrowed its search for an Internet provider to two finalists: Earthlink and Hewlett-Packard. The service will be rolled out in "mid-October," according to Dianah Neff, CIO of the city of Philadelphia. Indeed, approximately 300 U.S. cities and municipalities are now in various stages of wireless rollouts -- up from barely any just a year and a half ago. Greg Richardson, founder of Civitium, an Atlanta-based organization that assists cities in their Wi-Fi efforts, sometimes uses the word "crazy" to describe this phenomenon.
The rapid evolution of the enterprise software landscape is amazing. One of the most significant trends I've observed is the surging demand for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) driven by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs). According to the latest market study by Gartner, more than 30 percent of the increase in API demand will come from AI and LLM-powered tools by 2026. This illustrates the transformative impact these technologies are poised to have on leaders who innovate. The Gartner study paints a clear picture of the forces at play. Technology Service Providers (TSPs) are leading the charge in adopting Generative AI (GenAI), with 83 percent of the 459 TSPs surveyed reporting that they have already deployed or are piloting these capabilities within their organizations. GenAI API Market Development As TSPs help large enterprise customers integrate GenAI into their offerings, the demand for APIs to power these AI-enabled solutions wi