An organization intended to get more older Americans online launched Tuesday, backed by tech giants like Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, and Microsoft.The Project to Get Older Adults onLine (GOAL) will work with aging groups in order to communicate the importance of getting more senior citizens on the Web.

Backed by such industry heavyweights as Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), Facebook and Microsoft (NASD: MSFT), a new D.C.-based organization officially launched on Tuesday, with the goal of getting more seniors to adopt broadband services.

The FCC's top broadband official helped launch a new initiative Tuesday aimed at encouraging more older adults to utilize the Internet. The initiative, known as the Project to Get Older Adults Online, will work to help promote the adoption of broadband services by senior citizens.

Granny, get your Google.That's the message from a new organization that aims to get more senior citizens online. Only about 35 percent of seniors have broadband service, compared with 65 percent of the entire adult population. That means they are missing out on everything from chat time with grandchildren to lifesaving tele-medicine.

Broadband offers many benefits for older U.S. residents, including telemedicine, increased contact with family and friends, and shopping without leaving the house, but they subscribe to the service at a much lower rate than other people, some advocates for the elderly said Tuesday.

Helping senior citizens recognize the Internet's relevance to daily life is key in encouraging them to adopt broadband, representatives from groups for aging adults said Tuesday during a news conference. Consumer Action, Older Adults Technology Services and others formed Project Goal to promote broadband adoption to older adults. While 65 percent of Americans have adopted broadband, only about 35 percent of those over 65 have, said Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative….

Get Older Americans Online -- is launching April 6 with a press conference at the National Press Club and a speech by Federal Communications Commission senior broadband adviser Blair Levin.

Mississippi Winn has 54 friends on Facebook. She enjoys all the benefits that having a broadband connection and joining a social network provides: communicating with family and reconnecting with friends. One interesting thing about Mississippi: she’s 113 years old! Yes, Facebook is now an online community of not only the young but also a rapidly growing number of older adults.Today, I’m launching a new effort to promote broadband adoption by the older adult community. Project GOAL (the Project to Get Older Adults Online) will help work with aging organizations to communicate the importance of getting our older community online. It’s clear that having high-speed Internet at home can offer older individuals so many benefits: telemedicine, the convenience and savings of shopping at home, entertainment, health information, and of course social networking! Yet, only 35% of older adults (65 and older) have broadband at home – and the numbers drop considerably in even older age brackets.

Applications for the second round of U.S. broadband stimulus funding are starting to become publicly available on a federal website.Approximately 870 applications had been posted to the database as of Saturday, according to Stimulating Broadband, a website dedicated to tracking broadband stimulus funding.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in March announced $150 million in grants for 12 projects extending access to rural broadband Internet - including four that affect North Dakota users. Overall, such projects have received $1.05 billion in public and private funding.

A far-reaching grant proposal for federal stimulus funds to link the Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey area via a broadband high-speed Internet network was submitted last week by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, a diverse coalition of public and private entities that see high-speed Internet as critical to the future of the region.

And an annual population survey in 2009 by the Census Bureau found only 55 percent of Mississippians use the Internet, whether at home, at work, at school or elsewhere.That's low. The lowest in the country. The next lowest is Alabama, and it's five percentage points higher than Mississippi.

Managers at the Peñasco Valley Telecommunications Cooperative in Artesia joke that it’s cheaper to relocate rural families to cities than it is to bring high-speed Internet to the desert.

BOISE, Idaho — A central Idaho Internet company will use $2.4 million in federal stimulus money to build eight broadband towers that will deliver high-speed Internet access to businesses, hospitals, schools and homes in five rural counties.