CEDX

A new WISP Market Research Tool from Tom Evslin

Tom Evslin, in his Fractals of Change blog, announces a great tool for businesses and communities that want to assess their prospects for broadband deployment.  Organizations trying to judge whether there's market demand and where to build out can use this tool to collect data that will help them in their deployment process.  If an entrepreneur sent out a few street teams with laptops and cell data cards to local shopping centers in the areas that they were thinking of building out in, by asking prospects to fill in their broadband options and locations, it would be easy to find out where your best chances are to achieve sustainability.  Tom describes his methodology in these posts.  I for one will be watching very closely to see what kind of data is gathered.  Benoit Felten in his Fiberevolution blog has asked for contributions to a similar map.  Entrepreneurs would be wise to use these tools and keep an eye on the winners of the 700 MHz auction, to see what they do with their licenses.

Tom promises to release the tool so that folks can develop their own maps.  Turn that puppy loose, Tom!

Local Content means nothing without...

Delivery when and where it is relevant.  Lots of interesting initiatives are taking place now, but if you can only access local content from your house, or workplace, it does you no good when you're at the place that it's germane to, and that's the achilles heel of all these wonderful web 2.0 services.  They're only valuable when you're connected to them.  Right now, there's two mobile platforms that can make local content useful, and two networks to connect the content to the platform.  The former are the smartphone, and the laptop.   The latter are the cell data networks and wi-fi, in both hotspot and hotzone flavors.   As more dual-mode smartphones and wi-fi enabled mini-systems become available, that are not crippled by carriers like my Cingular E61 has been, relevant interactivity with local content will become more possible and popular.  The growth of public WLAN access, in whatever flavor will also drive this consumption, especially if presence applications make it easy to use multiple voice applications from a single device that has multiple radios ( both licensed and unlicensed or "open" spectrum )built into it.
 

GPS Based Advertising

I saw this post, and said, I'm ahead of Google, how can that be?  Each Hampton Jitney is equipped with a Wi-RAN unit that provides internet access to passengers and collects GPS locations of each bus.  See our Google Map here.  The system knows where the bus is, and digital signage can use this to present a customized message to riders of that particular bus or the bus fleet.  It's not ads delivered via radio, but there's at least twenty five to fifty people on each bus on each run that will see your message, even if they're not using the internet component of our solution.

Now I've Gone and Done It

Gerry Blackwell, writing in Wi-Fi Planet, has written a very nice synopsis of my entrepreneurial career to date, a pretty fair analysis of what's cooking with my various business ventures.  I sometimes refer to myself as the "Ralph Kramden" of technology, I do all kinds of nutty things, like putting Wi-Fi in a barbershop and on buses.  Throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks!  There's a couple of nits in the article, which may be my fault, as we conducted the interview while I was driving around between assignments.  Between all three companies that I have a hand in, there's fifteen employees altogether, and the Bluetooth onboard the Jitney is for internal apps, not public access.  But that may not be a bad idea, thanks Gerry!

Next stop, Wi-Fi on the MTA, hopefully!