He’s often known as the “father of the Internet”. Today an Internet evangelist with Google, he discusses why Chicago entrepreneurs should take more chances, how he regularly speaks with Google engineers to identify the best ways of serving customers and what the Internet as we know it may look like a generation or two from now.

Vint Cerf Photo credit: Battelle Media

Not too many 60-somethings are completely fluent with the ways of the Web much less have spent more than half of their lives online. Of course, when you’re Vint Cerf and famous for being “the father of the Internet,” it pays to have had an early start in the medium.

Today the “chief Internet evangelist” for Google, Cerf in the early 1970s helped design networking protocol technologies that now form the architectural basis of the Internet. By many accounts, he even coined the “Internet” term.

Cerf was in Chicago in Aug. 2008 for a “fact-finding discussion” with Argonne National Laboratory CIO Charlie Catlett on topics ranging from energy to global warming to large-scale computing. While in the Windy City, he also made it a point to compare notes with the growing staff of Google engineers based at 20 W. Kinzie.

“Part of my job is to talk to the people who are dealing with technical problems and customers,” said Cerf, who in 2005 won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian award for distinguished Americans. “I get the opportunity to reflect on how well our systems are serving customers and share that with the marketing people in Mountain View, Calif. (where Google is headquartered) and whoever else will listen.”

A native of New Haven, Conn. who lived on the West Coast from 1946 to 1976, Cerf said Chicago doesn’t share Northern California’s approach to entrepreneurship. He noted that in Silicon Valley “it is not necessarily the end of the world” to fail in your first or second venture. He added that the climate in the Third Coast is not as forgiving.

“It would be healthy for the Chicago corridor to think and reflect a little bit on business success and failure and how it happens,” Cerf said. “[Don’t] necessarily jump to the conclusion that any specific failure is the result of incompetence by the part of somebody.”

While this sentiment may sound a bit utopian in these parts, Cerf’s hand in the invention of the most important information technology since cave painting gives him the credibility to make it. Regardless of any region’s business climate, the Internet makes geography less important when starting and running a business.

Nearly 40 years after cracking the online code, Cerf has a highly educated guess as to what the Internet medium will look like a couple generations from now. He added: “All the appliances you have at home and the things you carry around in your person, in the car and in the office will all be part of this online environment. We may not be very conscious of it as an entity.”

Bits ‘n Bytes

For those who can’t get enough presidential politics and electoral pontification, Yahoo! has unveiled a new version of its presidential election political dashboard. The service summarizes virtually every hypothetical scenario in November and updates in real time news, polls and prediction markets that are focused on the election.

There is also a blogging tool developed by BuzzTracker, which is a one-time Chicago-based company. Founded in 2005 by former Participate.com CEO Alan Warms, BuzzTracker in 2007 was acquired by Yahoo!.

The iVentures10 summer program for student entrepreneurs from the University of Illinois, Northwestern and Stanford will on Wednesday hold the iVENTURES10 Demo Day in Champaign, Ill. For more information about the program and five participating companies, visit here.

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