Free WiFi clouds will need a revenue stream. Two possibilities include advertising and subscriber content. Mass media and direct mail uses demographic maps to target messages but HotSpots don’t provide such a capability — until Lee Gomes showed everyone how to do it.
Wall Street Journal writer Lee Gomes mapped his San Francisco neighborhood using NetStumbler. Then he overlayed the hotspots with demographic information.
In the end, I counted about 3,000 wireless networks in my ZIP Code. The 2003 population of 94110 was 75,000, meaning we have one Wi-Fi access point for every 25 people.For my project, I had borrowed from my neighbor Brian Warner, a famous programmer in the Python computer language, a small GPS receiver that plugged into my laptop and recorded the locations of all the networks I was seeing. When I was done, I made a map of them. (See map.)
With a lot of help from the folks at ESRI, a mapping-software company, I added to the maps a bit. For instance, I calculated per capita wireless ownership by census tract, and then mapped it. I also mapped average household income. It’s no surprise the two are highly correlated.
In fact, the more affluent parts of my ZIP Code had nearly 10 times as many hot spots, per capita, as less tony areas. It’s the old-fashioned digital divide, updated to the age of wireless.
[Via WiFiNetNews]
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