Net Aid scheduled to raise money for poverty

Newsday

Live Aid fed the hungry; Farm Aid helped the farmers. Now comes Net Aid to battle poverty.

Combining the power of the Internet, the United Nations and more than a dozen high-profile rock musicians, the core of Net Aid will be three overlapping concerts Oct. 9 in New Jersey at Giants Stadium, in London at Wembley Stadium and in Geneva at the Palais des Nations. The concerts also will be broadcast on MTV, VH1 and BBC television channels and on some radio outlets.

The star power organizers have scheduled so far is impressive: Pete Townshend, Celine Dion, Bono of U2, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, Eurythmics, George Michael and Jewel, among others. Some proceeds from the concerts are to go to help poor African nations and the refugees of Kosovo.

Live webcasts are to be broadcast as well, and Net Aid will launch its own Web site, www.netaid.org, on Sept. 8.

Net Aid has been established by equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. and the U.N. Development Program to fight global poverty. The creators hope the Web site and the concerts will entice visitors to the site to link up to various chartible organizations and agencies around the world.

"We wanted to find a new defining moment for the Internet," said Don Listwin, an executive vice president of Cisco. "Net Aid is a new Internet model for social change that will combine cutting-edge technology with the world's best artistic talent. It will use the largest scale Internet technology ever deployed to tackle one of the world's largest problems."

The site will be capable of handling 60 million hits per hour and 125,000 simultaneous video streams. Listwin says the goal is to rack up 1 billion hits.

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