I joined some Boston technology colleagues and a few West Coast interlopers for Red Herring East this week. The formal agenda is here, but the informal discussion was this: Is technology innovation on North America’s eastern coast different?

Admittedly there are a few problems right off the bat with this question. First, different than what? The implied contrast of course is that center of the tech universe known as Silicon Valley. “East coast” is the next issue: As any chowder-eater knows, Boston is one thing and Manhattan another. Pity the speakers from Canada and Raleigh-Durham who had the job of reminding the rest of us that there are also vibrant entrepreneurial communities north and south of the Amtrak corridor.

Setting aside niggling details like those, however, we gamely entered the fray. Paul Sagan of Akamai claimed, in an ironic twist on the Getrude Stein remark about Oakland, that there’s no ‘here’ here – not enough of an after-work social fabric to engage young tech venture workers. [However, as an ardent fan of MITX, I can tell you that there are lots of events in this area to draw tech folks together. Perhaps they just like the Red Sox better.]

I offered that if American innovators are the descendants in many cases of European immigrants – those who chose to get on the boats and go to an unknown new world – then Western entrepreneurs are frequently offspring of those who were then venturesome enough to jump into a covered wagon to check out the other side of the Rockies. Maybe that makes our California cousins even bigger risk-takers.

The point at which I got startled out of my own tired assumptions about innovators in North America was when an audience member suggested that there’s a funding gap in some regional markets. The most thoughtful response to this came from a VC panelist added to the roster too late for me to note his name. He said there’s no funding gap, as there should in fact always be more companies seeking funding than the number that win it. “That should be the case, otherwise we’re saying that every company that wants capital deserves it, and we know that’s not true. The gap we have in the East and may eventually have elsewhere is a founding gap. When we let future entrepreneurs come to the US to complete advanced degrees at MIT, but then deny them legal residency afterwards, they found their businesses elsewhere. That’s the biggest innovation problem we face here today.”

The problem with East coast innovation, whatever that is, is that it hasn’t gotten worse than California – it’s that many other places have gotten a lot better.

Dateline: Madrid

Yankee Group’s focus on disruptive connectivity technologies has led us to regular research on WiMAX, the so-called fourth-generation of mobile network architectures. The WiMAX Forum is a non-profit association formed to complete the standard, assure interoperability, and hammer out other market issues to support its adoption. Today I’m snacking on tapas in Madrid at one of the Forum’s quarterly week-long meetings around the world to get a sense of the state of play.

I worked on a communications standards body 20 years ago. It hasn’t changed much: the same geeky, acronym-rich environment bogged down a bit by the democratic process, but powered by the shared passion to create something useful. It might not mean an end to world hunger in our time, but getting mobile broadband to emerging countries is a very worthy endeavor in my book. Communication means economic and political empowerment.

It’s not going to be easy, though. The challenges are less with the technology which can be bent to do pretty much whatever we want and more about the business models in place today and the potential threat from truly seamless broadband. I was fascinated by one discussion between two teams, one charged with designing global roaming support, and the other conceiving the future applications of the architecture. When a network provider in one region has licensed content for subscribers who roam into another network with a competing arrangement, or none at all, is the content blocked? Who pays who and how much?

Content owners must think globally about distribution deals now; political boundaries will be almost impossible to maintain in the Anywhere Network.

Dateline: London

Yankee Group VP Camille Mendler’s excellent Anywhere Tour presentation on Generation Me and the consumerization of technology in the enterprise just concluded; she’d talked about the maturation of a self-possessed young workforce accustomed to getting what it wants and very much at ease with rev after rev of consumer electronics products.

We had launched into lively Q&A incited by her remarks when one baby boomer spoke up. “Isn’t this a repeat? Isn’t this like the way the PC came into the corporation from the edge followed by the local-area network? The last two major innovations in technology have both been forced on to the central IT organization against its will. How’s this different?”

Too true.

Corporate IT will once again be fighting the impression in the organization that they’re on the job to stop things they can’t control. The difference is that this battle is unfolding even faster than the last two, and on many more fronts inside the company. And the risks are bigger, given that every MP3 device is just an unauthorized hard drive. IT has to respond quickly and more nimbly.

Camille’s presentation drew from an upcoming Yankee Group report (clients: look for Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management shortly) on the pressures building on traditional IT teams from employees expecting to be able to use all their personal electronic toys at work and impatient with the imposition of limitations on support. I like the report’s ideas about how IT can best cope with the onslaught. How is your firm’s IT team coping with the explosion of smart phones, MP3 devices, cheap storage sticks, third-party e-mail retrieval, and all the other unapproved tools we depend on each day?

Dateline: Toronto

The day before our Anywhere Tour reached Toronto to talk about the impact of convergence and competition on connectivity in Canada (lots of Cs there), the local news was all about Bell Canada (BCE) being on the block and the pursuit to acquire it being joined by yet another private equity firm, Onex. On a cable TV financial show, I talked a bit about the implications. In the global connectivity revolution, traditional regional incumbent network operators face declining fixed line revenues and the emerging appetites of a new kind of consumer, emboldened by new connectivity freedom but just as reluctant to spend for media as always. What BCE really needs is more scale which could come from a merger with another Canadian operator, such as Telus and relentlessly creative consumer marketing to pick up their mobile revenue.

The same day, I met with Virgin Mobile Canada CEO Andrew Black and his leadership team, who are building a Canadian Virgin brand on top of a white-label mobile network. They bring deep experience from the brand world and an intense focus on making their retail strategy work for the Canadian consumer.

Revolutions change the power structure. Will the Anywhere Network be led by firms that understand the consumer better than the network itself?