So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase

Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.

Twitter is Sticky

One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the Queensland Election in March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.