(via balencourt.com)

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With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones. The kit includes an in-shoe sensor and a receiver that attaches to iPod. A new Nike Sport Music section on the iTunes® Music Store and a new nikeplus.com personal service site help maximize the Nike+iPod experience.
from apple.com

Interesting move! If one needed to guess a while back the type of device Nike shoes would be connected to, the choice would have been between a PDA or a mobile phone. Just add Bluetooth to the shoe, connect both and off you go. The phone had the clear advantage, since it is something people take along all the time, even when running. A runner takes his MP3 player too, of course, but until recently that was more like a single purpose device. Now Apple is positioning it as a convenient storage and visualisation device you happen to carry on you all the time. Key advantage: ubiquitous!

It also shows why it’s going to be hard to displace the iPod from its dominant market position. Apple is capitalizing on the device’s ubiquity to link it to other products and services. And because it’s a proprietary system, every link-up is another lock-in. As your shoes and your car and your stereo and your clothes become iPod-enabled, it becomes ever more difficult to abandon the little sucker.
from roughtype.com

So now there’s an attack from a less obvious contender to that Holy Grail of Ultimate Mobile Device. Let’s take a look at that crowded space:


The axes are as follows:

• the more to the left, the closer a device is to its owner, and the more it is carried by him/her. A desktop PC is far, a laptop is closer, but a mobile phone is the closest. I haven’t included embedded/implanted devices, but that would be even closer.
• the higher, the more functionality. On the bottom we see single purpose devices like a Walkman CD player, a traditional landline phone, going up we see the iPod (music, agenda, video), the PDA that is a general purpose device with smaller horsepower, and on top would be the PC/Mac, that is a fast general purpose machine.

You see all types of devices that used to be single purpose (mobile phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera) trying to move up and to the left, trying to get a piece of that so valuable real estate: the consumer’s breast pocket or purse. Most phones can now take pictures and sync with the agenda/email box, some PDAs can be used to make phonealls and store images, and as of recently cameras are getting cross-over features: storage device, Wifi, agenda. MP3 players either expanded to heavy portable media devices (like the Archos) or to enhanced media devices: pictures, movies. The deal with Nike shows that Apple is also aiming for something else: ubiquitous personal connected storage device. Add to that phone functionality, and you have a killer device: the “iWhat?”.

One remark: the four types of devices are not all equally crucial to its user. What is the most painful functionality to lose? I guess for most people it’s this sequence: phone, PDA, MP3, camera.

• It’s OK for most users to have a crappy camera in their phone, but not to have a camera with a crappy phone. We don’t expect to see the individual nostrils of our subject in a 1 megapixel picture, but would hate to have a fancy Nikon camera with a mobile phone that does not allow e.g. texting (SMS).
• A PDA is crucial for those with a heavy agenda, but the base PDA functions (agenda, to-do, contacts) are easily taken over by the phone or the MP3 player. If you ‘re a PDA manufacturer and you only have devices that have no MP3, no Wifi, no phone, … tough days ahead!
• I can see MP3 players adding Bluetooth and Wifi soon. This allows them to add a handsfree kit and a portable keyboard and voila: you have an awesome phone/PDA/email/IM device.
• Cameras have always had less incentive to include extra functionality, although it’s starting. The first Wifi models have already come out, allowing one to empty those 4GB flash drives without taking the card out or connecting a USB cable. It makes no sense for pro and semi-pro camera’s to add stuff like PDA or MP3. Anything with an 18-55 lens will never be an “ubiquitous” device, and if the owner can spend over €1000 for a camera, he’ll already have a phone and PDA if he needs one. For mid-price camera’s, I think that photo-related features (image stabilizer, …) are more relevant than an on-board agenda.

Incidentally, I now use a device that is all 4: my Nokia N91 is not only a phone, it has a 2-megapixel camera, a 4GB hard drive for MP3 and MPEG4 movies, 802.11G Wifi with browser and email and synchronizes with my Outlook. So I can tell you the 4 main issues with universal devices:

1. weight and size: that’s an awful lot to cram into one package
2. stability: you need an OS that can run several applications at once. Apparently, that’s not an obvious task
3. single point of failure: when it fails, you have nothing left. Your phone is gone, your contacts are gone, your music is gone… Back to the stone age. The most common cause of this brings us to the last and most important issue:
4. battery: I pity the battery. It’s surprisingly small for that big phone, and when one uses the MP3 player often, the odds of it lasting longer than a day are very small indeed. And when it dies … (see 3.)

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I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public

Description

The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.

PRO

* both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network.

CONTRA

* If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.

Scenario 2: first the private

Description

The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PRIVATE zone. On one of the wired Ethernet connections, the other router is connected, that serves the PUBLIC zone. Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.

PRO

* the PRIVATE network is closer to the bandwidth than the PUBLIC, bandwidth trolls only come second
* the 1st router can be configured to give less priority to the network port that the PUBLIC network is connected to.
* in case of abuse, you can just switch off the 2nd router and your PRIVATE network keeps running

CONTRA

* all traffic goes over the PRIVATE network, so a skilled hacker might try to hack in to that (would be hard with a good firewall, but anything’s possible)

Another scenario might be (if your ISP supports it) to have 2 routers each taking a separate IP address from your ISP and working in parallel (instead of in series). Disadvantage would be that you could not give lower priority to PUBLIC or higher to PRIVATE so you might again be abused by bandwidth trolls.

Next to that, we also need routers that are bandwidth-limit conscious: let’s say that I get 25 GB from my ISP. I might want to configure that once the PUBLIC network has taken 10GB, it is cut off or limited to 256 Kbps. Or I could limit the PUBLIC throughput to 1Mbps (so I have a guaranteed 5Mbps left for INTERNAL use). Or limit streaming and BitTorrent traffic …

So if someone would come up with a double Wifi access point, that serves 2 different and separate Wifi zones (one on channel 6 and one on channel 11, say), with differents security (authentication) settings, that supports traffic shaping, bandwidth limits and abuse detection, and maybe even offers a Wifi VPN like Google was planning to, that would be the ideal router for municipal Wifi. Just glue those Linksys’es together!

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(1) Method and system to provide wireless access at a reduced rate:
Methods and system for providing wireless access at a reduced rate. In one embodiment, access to a WAP is provided to an end-user at a rate subsidized by a first entity. The first entity includes advertisements in an end-user view.
which sounds like a Google (secure) proxy that modifies passing-though HTML

(2) Method and system to provide advertisements based on wireless access points:
Methods and system to provide advertisements in a view of an end user accessing a wireless access point. The advertisements are related to the WAP based on a predetermined criterion.
aka contextual advertising for Wifi

(3) Method and system for dynamically modifying the appearance of browser screens on a client device:
In one embodiment, a connection of a client device to a wireless access point is identified. Further, the appearance of a screen presented on the client device is modified to reflect the brand associated with a provider of the wireless access point.
aka the ‘captive portal’

on cre8asiteforums.com via seroundtable.com

What troubles me here is the way patents are being used:

• “don’t be evil” version: Google is just filing some good and/or obvious ideas, just so that the next guy won’t do it and sue them for using their own idea.
• “be blatantly evil” version: Google is filing the patents to make sure no one can do the same thing, to block the market with broad, mediocre patents

Patents are there to create a window of opportunity to develop an original and innovative idea, not to be misused by patent trolls.

I don’t like patents in software (although I’m co-author for one application – everyone has the right to change his opinion). It’s silly to have 20-year patents in a world moving that fast, and the US Patent and Trademark office does not have the best track record at deciding what is original or worth giving a patent to.

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(…) urban dwellers are trading their lonely, cramped living rooms for the real-life buzz of BEING SPACES: commercial living-room-like settings, where catering and entertainment aren’t just the main attraction, but are there to facilitate small office/living room activities like watching a movie, reading a book, meeting friends and colleagues, or doing your admin.
from trendwatching

When I look at some providers of flexible office space in Brussels:

• Quartier Latin: €50/m²/month
• Regus Rue des Colonies: €50/day for a meeting room
• Brussels enterprise centers: m Brussels Village, Dansaert: offices between €350 and 500/month
• Alliance, NCI, …: no pricing on the site – but they look really expensive

These places are generally offering too much (e.g. a private office) for a price that is too high. Let’s see how they do it in New York:

Paragraph (”providing an affordable and tranquil working environment for writers of all genres”) occupies a 2,500 square foot loft space near Union Square, divided into a writing room and a lounge area. The writing room has 38 partitioned desks, while the lounge area contains a kitchenette, a large round table and smaller café tables. There’s a refrigerator and cabinets to store members’ food and beverages, as well as a microwave, toaster oven and coffee maker. The space has a laser printer and wifi throughout, and is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
from spingwise.com

Members pay between 70 and 110 € per month. That’s exactly the sweet spot. The above initiative, aimed at writers, could be sponsored by a publisher. If it were more general (not only for writers), an ititiative like that in Brussels could be sponsored by vendors like Apple, Microsoft, Ikea, Skynet/Telenet.

Via FactoryJoe I also spotted a more ‘grassroots’ initiative: Brad from CodingInparadise rents out space in his house to self-employed developers and writers:

Members have access to free WiFi; a beautiful garden; support in setting and achieving work goals; a full kitchen and attached coffee shop; a healing space with massage therapists; and more.
We are a non-profit co-op with low, monthly rates. Feel free to drop by the space on Mondays and Tuesdays to try it out for free up to four times. We are limited to five total members, so act quickly!

That’s even nicer: an office environment with a personal touch. No one has an office with excess surface in the Dansaert neighborhood, and feels like filling it with bright, young freelancers (and me, of course)?

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• I just had a wonderful dinner (fish – sea bass, I believe)
• I was waited upon by the lovely Marie
• The AB cafe & restaurant are smoke-free and that makes a big difference
• there is an open Wifi-spot here (”Petra Netzwerk” – on Plazes)

All four things add up to a splendid evening!

Technorati: wifi – brussels – anciennebelgique

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Also I am pleased to announced today that we have obtained the support of two significant ISPs for FON. In America Speakeasy has said that they welcome FON and in Europe, Glocalnet and FON have signed an agreement so Glocalnet sells its services FON ready and the Swedish foneros will soon be able move around Stockholm and other cities with their WiFi enabled gadgets.
from blog.fon.com @ Feb 5

So the terms are “support” and “welcome“. That does not sounds as a signed contract but more like a “OK, we won’t make life hard for one another”.
In an interview with Reuters, Martin changes the wording:

Toward that end, Fon has signed up GlocoNet, the second largest ISP in Sweden, and U.S.-based Speakeasy of Seattle.
Varsavsky said he also holds out hope of convincing potential adversaries among established ISPs such as Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom AG, AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. of working with his “foneros.”
from today.reuters.com @ Feb 5

Now it’s “signed up”. That’s a different issue, it means that there should be a bunch of papers with signatures. Onfortunately, Speakeasy does not recall signing anything:

Speakeasy is the only national ISP I am aware of in the U.S. that encourages sharing their connections. (Update: Speakeasy says there�s no deal.)
from wifinetnews.com @ Feb 5

With a follow-up story the next day:

On the other hand, he mentions several times in his blog and in news stories the word agreement, support, bargain, revenue sharing. Speakeasy has no agreement of any kind with Fon, which would tend to contradict any sense that Fon was sharing revenue with them (unilaterally?) and thus argues that Varsavsky was trying to broaden his appeal by mentioning a U.S. ISP.
Question for Google, Skype, Sequoia, and Index: Did Varsavsky claim a Speakeasy contract? If so, did you do due diligence? If not, will he disclaim his statements?
from wifinetnews.com @ Feb 6

Which leads Om Malik to comment the following:

Seems to me that FoN made a bone-headed move on day one of their very public life.
gigaom.com

and Mark Evans to something along the same lines:

In fact, Speakeasy claims FON is replicating its strategy called NetShare in which individuals could generate revenue by sharing their wireless connections. Looks like a big P.R. fiasco for FON.
evans.blogware.com

So, in the first week of being a solidly funded company, supported by some really big names, FON can start to explain that they claimed something that was not really there. I can only hope that the SpeakEasy ‘deal’ did not play a role in the FON valuation process.

I think Martin needs a good PR/Communications manager sitting next to him in interviews, to avoid him of getting carried away.

Technorati: fon – wifi – vc – venture

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I’ve looked at the models and tools of providers like FON and WifiDog/OpenWRT (any Linux), and I’ve done some testing as a provider myself. We’re not there yet.

Wifi checklist

For grass-roots municipal WiFi to really take off, we need the following:

Technorati: free – wifi – municipal – grassroots

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The goal of Wireless Oakland is to prepare Oakland County and its workforce for the jobs and technology of tomorrow. In conjunction with the Emerging Sectors Initiative, it will enhance Oakland County’s ability to attract and retain high-tech and nanotechnology corporations.
(…)
The seven Pilot Projects (Royal Oak, Pontiac, Troy, Birmingham, Madison Heights, Oak Park, and Wixom) will be started by the end of 2005 and should be completed during the first quarter of 2006. County-wide wireless internet coverage is expected in mid to late 2007.
from co.oakland.mi.us

The county insists private companies will provide wireless Internet access for free, but participating companies will be able to charge fees for certain services, such as faster connections. Oakland officials also said providers could sell advertising on the system as a way to make it profitable.
from detnews.com

from Mike Thompson – Detroit Free Press

Technorati: municipal wifi

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FON is based on the premise that with wifi now being 54MB on cable and DSL platforms of 1MB or more that wifi users are only taking advantage of 3% of their capacity on the average or in other words wasting 97% of their capacity. At the same time what users want is for their laptops, PDAs, wifi phones, and soon wifi enable ipods, wifi enable digital cameras to access to everyone else’s wifi so they can walk around cities taking pictures, listening to music, playing games on wifi playstations, etc. And this we accomplish by turning millions of wifi installations into a unified wifi FON network with a standard interface to accept all kind of wifi enabled devices.
(from martinvarsavsky.net via productdose.com)

The initiative is positioned as a ‘movement’ more than an enterprise, which is probably a good idea. FON needs some degree of grassroots cooperation for this, so a very corporate profile would be scaring people away. On the FON registration page they distinguish between 2 types of subscribers:

• BILL: (Bill Gates’ model: make money with your WiFi broadband connection by charging non-FON members that use it).
• LINUS: (Opensourcer model, share your WiFi broadband connection in exchange for using the WiFi of all the other FON members).

He certainly gets the way marketing is done in these blog days:

But at least we won´t be broke idiots as it happened to many during the bubble as we are spending exactly O euros in advertising and very little on all the rest. In FON so far there´s a lot of talent among the people who work there, but no money spent on marketing. Blogging has turned the equation of being a big success or a big failure into being a small failure or a big success, I like this new risk profile and will do whatever I can to turn FON into a big success.
(from martinvarsavsky.net

I’m interested to see where this is going!

Technorati: wifi – telecom – fon – wireless – municipal – varsavsky – blog

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Free-hotspot.com announced the Top 10 European cities for free wireless Internet access:

from free-hotspot.com via De Standaard Blog

According to that hitparade, Brussels only has 1 (one) entry in its database. I am very aware of that, because I’m the one that entered it last week. I don’t see free-hotspot.com’s database expanding to the dozens or hundreds of open hotspots that exist already now all over Europe. They use the ancient DMOZ model of data processing: you submit an entry, hope it gets processed within the X days and then never find the time to update it if anything changes. This might work for the first couple of entries they get in the database, but does not scale well.

I believe more in the Plazes.com model: you ask your users to install a simple launcher and every time the user connect to a new network, it prompts for the name and coordinates of the place. If it’s a ‘Plaze’ where another user has been before, it automatically recognizes this and asks for nothing. It then maps all these (wired/wireless, private/public, free/for-charge) locations onto a Google map. That is a scalable model: an auto-updating, grassroots-generated, minimal-effort map of hotspots. It already has 8 open hotspots for Brussels. If WiFi on-the-road is of any value for you: Plazes! It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Technorati: municipal – wifi – brussels – hotspot

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As usual, Silicon Valley is way ahead of us:

“When I’m working at home, I wind up heading over there (Ritual Coffee Roasters) three or four times a day,” programmer Angus Durocher said in an e-mail interview. “The walk over there helps clear my head, flirting with the staff helps ensure I don’t lose all verbal communication skills, and at this point, I’m not sure I can survive without their coffee.”
from Cafe 2.0: After the Gold Rush

Because this should not lead to a bar full of laptop surfers not looking or talking at each other, there are even initiatives to limit that:

“We thought about what if you could use technology to reduce the zombie effect or to promote (people) to be more conscious and less alienated from their neighbors,” Savage said.
Wi-Fi users in a certain cafe would encounter a login window when they first sign on, which would prompt them to enter a Friendster-like profile that would let other cafe dwellers know when they were in that cafe.
from A Tool To Wake Up WiFi Zombies

Check out Plazes.com for another social geolocation project, one that already works now!

How is a public hotspot different from your home WiFi router setup?
Typically there are things that you want to avoid: 1 user gobbling up all the bandwidth with streaming video, people using BitTorrent (kills your upload bandwidth and as such your quality of service), people sniffing other people’s PCs to see if they can find a security hole. So you need bandwidth management, a better firewall, and maybe also a homepage when the user first starts up his browser. This is called a ‘wireless captive portal’.

Even if the standard consumer WiFi router does not do this yet, there are ways to make them better suited for the job – by upgrading the firmware. Most customized solutions seem to be based on the Linksys WRT54 (and later products), because they are really small Linux-based computers that can be easily upgraded to a modified firmware. (Great thinking from Linksys! I just installed a new router and it’s the WRT54GS, just for the reason of upgradeability).

Here are some examples of software to enhance WiFi routers (mostly Linksys):

Sveasoft Alchemy (yearly $20 USD subscription fee)

Our firmware adds dozens of sophisticated features to these sub-$100 routers turning them into the equivalent of products costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. (check forum for features)

nocat.net (free)

NoCatAuth is our original “catch and release” captive portal implementation. It provides a simple splash screen web page for clients on your network, as well as a variety of authenticated modes.

WiFiDog.org

The Wifidog project is a complete and embeddable captive portal solution for wireless community groups or individuals who wish to open a free Hotspot while still preventing abuse of their Internet connection.

openwrt.org (free)

OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G. Instead of trying to cram every possible feature into one firmware, OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages

eWRT (free)

At the time of writing, ewrt differentiates itself from the other WRT54G distributions by providing a captive portal based on NoCatSplash and a writeable jffs2 filesystem for storing content.

dd-wrt.com (free)

DD-WRT is simply a project which is based on the official GPL Sources of Sveasoft Alchemy.

hyperwrt.org (free)

The goal of this project is to add a limited set of features to the last Linksys firmware, extending its possibilities but staying close to the official firmware.

SputnikNet ($19.95 per access point per month)

SputnikNet™ enables you to run a managed wireless network over the Internet. Simply plug Sputnik APs into broadband, and you’re ready to offer free, branded, or fee-based Wi-Fi service. SputnikNet is affordable: you can manage as many access points and wireless networks as you like.

PatronSoft FirstSpot (from $95)

FirstSpot is a Windows-based Wi-Fi hotspot management software (sometimes also known as hotspot access controller or wireless gateway) designed to track and secure your visitor-based networks or Wi-Fi Hotspots in a centralized way.

Technorati: wifi – hotspot – brussels – linksys

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