One of the most interesting technologies coming along for the WIFI space, is the UMTS base station, which is basically a Wifi router with an UMTS card, that allows to immediatly connect through Wifi, from anyplace using this new hardware.
Over the last years, the UMTS speed increase and the price decreased, accompagnied by the fact that netbooks and notebooks sales have been booming, have caused the number of UMTS users to soar high, while the ADSL has been growing slower.
One of the main problems associated with the UMTS cards, is that only one pc was able to connect to the internet (with standard solutions) which creaed a bottleneck into the utilization of the service, in case you needed several machines to access the web.
Now, it is over, with these UMTS WIfi access base, you can just take the device with you, and connect a wide number of PCs to the internet enjoying the mobility and speed of the service.
Where I used to live, very hard and rush people, there was a saying about the importance of your head, that was more or less like: "your head is to think and not to wear a hat". This sentence can be applied to the idea that I have discovered in a video published at youtube, that is as simple as effective.
It goes more or less like that: 1. You buy all the access points (small ones) that you can. 2. You go to an intense transit point of people. 3. You configure all the WIFI ssids to reflect an advertising sentence. 4. You configure the initial page of the access point to forward users to ad page (before allowing free access).
And Voila. You have advertised services and products to people that will remenber the action for a long time.
The example showed in the video, is an experience with SIXT in an german airport. They have implemented several wifi with all ssids named with advertising for SIXT. The initial page of the visitor is aswell filled with SIXT adverstments, which people are looking before starting to navigate.
What a good and simple idea. Or at least it seems to me. What do yout think?
This is almost the title of the song that was a kind of the hymn of hippie movements in the sixties, but in this case, it is not about about hippy but more about geeky .
As read on YAHOO the San Francisco Underground train is testing a new innovative service that will allow its users to actually use WIFI while travelling on their trains.
The connection is not yet in production but rather in tests, and the users will have to manually pick the connections, but I think that it will be a question of time, before everything starts to evolve in more confortable service for the user.
:-0, when I first read the news, two things jumped immediatly to my mind, I don´t know if correct or no, as I have never used the San Franscisco undergound, but that can be created by my previous experience in other ones around Europe.
When you go in the Underground, you are usually at rush time, that means that everyone goes as fast as they can, to actually jump into the train before you, in order to find the last available free spot, in the wagons. Once inside, you don´t have, barely, enough space to shake your ears, so to actually think in using a Laptop or a Wifi-enabled phone, seems to me a rather interesting challenge.
The second aspect, is that the distances are rather short/medium, so, do you really need a connection while travelling for a couple of minutes? Are you getting to the point of addiction where you can avoid being without an online connection?
At this point, more than one will already start to think that I am mixing news :) but, there is a rather interesting news as well, from the Canadian Government (Yahoo), suggesting to its employees to actually shutdown their blackberries after 18:00 until 9:00 in the next morning, and during the meetings, to actually decrease the level of stress.
Where are we heading? Do we really need all those connections? Do we really need to be able to connect to internet, from the train, the bed, the WC, ... our dreams? Is this going to far?
One thing is to be able to have a good and regular connection, from our work, our home, but do actually need to be everywhere, everytime connected?
This remembers me, that when I first started to work, I actually was very happy when my employers gave me my first cellphone, I felt so important, just to discover, how much you can be emprisonned by the technology that makes you available without limitations...
Where does the freedom ends and the prison starts?
So as the hippies where looking for freedom when going to San Francisco, are we doing the inverse path when revisiting San Francisco?
With the rise of cheap and affordable printers, in the last years, the printing business of the major hardware manufacturers, has been responsible for a big portion of their results, due to the fact, that although the printer prices have been falling, the ink cartdridges and laser toners, has been rising. The margin in the pinter ink/toner can be as high as 70% and there are a lot business models based on this oversized margins.
If you are running a large company, then the costs (Printer running costs I, Printer running costs II ) for running large amounts of printing can be affordable, but if you are a small entrepreneur, then you could have a problem, as even if you try to cut on printing, you still have to send proposals, to document legal matters, to fill public templates, and a lot of other information, that even in the case you don't want to, you are forced to print.
A couple of years ago, finding compatible replacements was a difficult mission, as the retail usually is locked by the big providers and will avoid to sell other products that could create a conflict with their major provider. Now with the internet, finding those cardtridges and toners, is much more easy, and the cost of search has fallen radically, you just need to take a browser, point it to a search engine, and here you go.
CartridgeSave is one of these online services that will help you save some money when each dollar/euro/pound counts, they have a large stock of products, printer ink, toner cartridges , fully compatible with the official printers with top quality and very reasonable prices, for the main hardware manufacturer. For now, they are only serving the UK market, but who knows, if in the near future the rest of Europe, could not be served.
The range of products is quite remarkable, you can found from just about any technology and brand, from ink cartridges to laser toner cartridges, Solid Ink, Paper. All the main brands are available for all the the major models of printers, even the ones of older models, so HP, Epson, Canon and lexmark toners/inks are there available without any problems at all, and quickly delivered to your location in the UK.
Either you use them, or another online provider, take the prices as example and make some basic business case for the usual amount of printer ink that you are spending annually and will easily found that at least a 30% of printing costs can be cut down just by doing some online search.
I have found a nice article by Glenn Fisherman with his considerations about the WiFi technology during 2007 and about what can be expected during 2008.
Most of the points that are being considered by him have already been discussed in OpenNetworks. Wireless cities seems to be an interesting point, as although the trend started earlier than 2006, through open communities, the results are really quite deceiving, as most of the experiences commented, have been almost all of them dropped due to poor interest from subscribers. Are users not interested at all by accessing to the internet by wifi? Or , are users looking at other technologies to perform this?
I think that the answer is more closed to the second option, as the mobile industry, have been progressing quite impressively with the average bandwidths inside the cities, where you can now easily have bandwidths from 360 Kbps to 7,5Mbps, in one terminal that have been evolving as well quite fast to become more attractive for the activity of internet surfing.
What is the advantage of the WiFi then? Probably the bandwidth, but in short distances. Although some mobiles are still coming with WiFi enable, the truth is that I am doubting that the WiFi will be becoming a major player in this field.
If you talk, of the WiFi at home, I think that there , we are yet to see impressive surprises, as more and more devices are starting to bring built-in WiFi chips, that will allow the creation of multimedia home networks, allowing that all the multimedia content that can be used in a medium family can be exchanged between medias without any problems, from the mp3 to the hi-fi, to the computer, to the Tv, etc... One single broadband connection shared by a combinations of PCs and laptops.
Siempre que puedo, me gusta, hacer búsquedas por Internet sobre el tema del WIFI, y ver un poco lo que sale. Es como una especie de voyeurismo presente y futuro, que realmente muchas veces no aporta nada, a no ser la sensación muy desagradable que estube perdiendo mi tiempo. Digo perder mi tiempo, porque una cosa que no me gusta, es hacer copy/paste de noticias de otros sitios WEB, sin aportar nada de relativamente útil o darle un cuño personal. El otro dia, he encontrado una pequeña noticia donde hablaba sobre el precio de una sesión WIFI en el aeropuerto de Barajas (url=http://www.tuexperto.com/2007/01/31/%c2%bfcuanto-cuesta-conectarse-a-internet-desde-el-aeropuerto-de-barajas/]¿Cuanto cuesta el WIFI en Barajas?[/url]) ...[
Haciendo una revisión de las estadÃsticas de acceso a opennetworks, que en los últimos tiempos ha estado subiendo de forma significativa, me ha dado por mirar las estadÃsticas de lectura de las noticias por categorÃas, y me he quedado sorprendido por los resultados, porque ?
Pues porque he verificado que hay un tema en concreto que no tiene nunca ningún tipo de acceso o lectura ...
.