AnchorFree, the free ad-supported WiFi service in San Francisco, has tapped into MySpace to promote their free Wi-Fi service (and build community). It’s working.
Literally over night their 1-day-old profile went from 1 friend (Tom) to 80 friends, says AnchorFree Communications Director, Denis Hiller. And that was yesterday. Today, AnchorFree has 185 friends.
AnchorFree Wireless provides popular shopping districts with free wireless Internet (Wi-Fi) access in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Currently, consumers can access the Internet free of charge in over 400 restaurants, shops and cafes across 6 Wi-Fi Hotzones. They also are one of the bidders for San Francisco’s city-wide cloud.- Marina District, Chestnut Street:
Free Wi-Fi Internet Access is available in San Francisco’s Marina District along Chestnut Street between Scott and Fillmore Streets. - Cow Hollow, Union Street:
Free Wi-Fi Internet Access is available in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow area along Union Street between Fillmore and Octavia Streets. - Pacific Heights , Fillmore Street:
Free Wi-Fi Internet Access is available in San Francisco’s prestigious Pacific Heights District along Fillmore Street between Sacramento and Bush Streets. - Castro Street:
Free Wi-Fi Internet Access is available at the heart of San Francisco’s world famous gay and lesbian community, along Castro Street between Market and 19th Streets. - Downtown San Francisco, Union Square:
Free Wi-Fi Internet Access is available in San Francisco’s popular downtown Shopping District along Union Square.
Downtown Palo Alto at University Avenue also has free Wi-Fi available along University Avenue between Webster and High Streets.
AnchorFree is donating half of its proceeds for one year from its Castro District free Wi-Fi Hotzone to LYRIC House (Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center).
Will “free”, ad-supported WiFi have legs? Some say it’s trending that way. Location-specific advertising might target demographics more cost/effectively than mass media say its supporters. And there’s always the value added component of games, music and videos. How long would it take to download a movie at 100 Mbps using 802.11n?
Loading the access point with payload will be the ticket, predicts Glenn Fleishman. Will Digital Communities be more of a marketing Joint Venture?
A variety of “free” or “shared” hotspot models and applications are developing, especially around the inexpensive, Linux-based Linksys WRT-54GL. The Consolidated Hacking Guide for the Linksys WRT54GL has the inside info. Here are three commercial spinoffs using the $60 WRT-54G platform:
The Association For Community Networking and CivicSpace has developed their own community LAN package. Here’s a list of applications and features with links to handbook pages. CivicSpace says it features a flexible and powerful Content Management System (CMS) capable of running all kinds of websites. It comes with a WYSIWIG editor and it is said to be simple to use.
- PlaceSite (above), provides local chat room, message forums, and profiles of other people sharing a hotspot. PlaceSite creates digital community services by, for and about people who are together in the same physical place. A modified Linksys WRT54G access point serves up caf -specific content from the PlaceSite server and transmits that page to the person’s browser. Meetro, a similar concept, also gives people who share an access point a way to meet online.
- WiFi Planet explains The Fon concept. The Fon hotspot network provides members with free software that turns their Wi-Fi routers into thin clients. The software, written in Linux, works on the popular WRT54GS and lets operators set how much time they’re willing to share and detect how much bandwidth is available, configuring the router for use as a hotspot accordingly. Fon does the centralized authentication, authorization and accounting functions.
- A Sputnik-Powered Linksys WRT54GL and WRT54GS can come pre-flashed with Sputnik Agent firmware. Then they can work out of the box with Sputnik Control Center or you can use SputnikNet to centrally manage and authenticate users on a distributed Wi-Fi network, changing splash pages and other parameters at a variety of locations.
Community Tools
- Blogging – All the features you would expect in a top tier blogging tool (WYSIWYG editor, trackback, image and file upload, syndication) plus peer moderation and peer publishing tools. You can give every user on your CivicSpace site the ability to post and manage an individual blog.
- Forums – Create as many discussion forums as you want. You can even enable your forum to accept and send email messages just like a yahoo group.
- File storage – Attach files to any post as easily as attaching files to emails.
- Photo Galleries – Create and maintain as many photo galleries as you want. You can even give users access to mantain their own personal galleries and comment on any picture.
- Polls and Surveys – You can easily create polls and surveys to collect information from your users and reach consensus.
- Social Networking – Users can search for other users with similiar profiles, add them as buddy list, and track their participation on the site.
- Contact Management with CiviCRM – Currently you can dynamically create a user registration form to collect all manner of constituent information. You can import contact data from CSV files, search your database of contacts, and set permissions to access them. A much more powerful and easier to use Community Relationship Management system (CiviCRM) is currently in development and has replaced current Contact Management in December 2005. It will have a much more powerful data model that will make it possible to use CivicSpace as your main donor and volunteer database and will feature simple but powerful searching, permission, data importing / exporting, and reporting tools. More information on the project is can be found “here”.
- Mass Mailing – Our current solution allows you to create multiple mailinglists, manage subscribers, and send thousands of emails at a time. Our improved version is based on functionality in PHPList will support bounce tracking, open rates, tokens, and HTML templates.
Visiongain, in their new report “Municipal Broadband Networks: Market impact and implications, 2006-2011“, says 400 cities and regions are thinking about installing municipal wireless networks worldwide, and 100 are doing it right now. Some 40 community LANs are operational in the United States — and that number is expected to double this year says Visiongain.
.gif)
