Sony’s WiFi-enabled Mylo device is getting free access to T-Mobile hot spots for a year, or until the end of 2007, whichever comes first. Katie Fehrenbacher points out that a year of T-Mobile WiFi costs about the same as the $350 Mylo.
Of course cities like my home town of Portland will have free WiFi in a few months.
WiFi-enabled devices include the Sony Mylo ($350), the Nokia 770 Web Tablet ($350), Microsoft Zune ($250), Nintendo DS ($129) and wireless iPods (?).
Embedded, location-based advertising devices could become mass-market items. If a Zune retails for $250, perhaps ad-subsidized Zunes will appear on Safeway and Target shelves for $99.
Impulse buy. Everywhere.
Newspapers might produce local multi-media content for WiFi-enabled devices. But maybe that’s our job.
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[...] Cyberjournalist says Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, suggests, in the The San Francisco Chronicle, that newspapers are hurting themselves by putting free content online and that, in order to survive, they should “embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers.” The reason is that newspapers can’t sell nearly enough ads to make that model work. Even the most popular newspaper Web sites are unable to sell advertising equal to more than 9 percent or 10 percent of their print-edition revenue; and this after years of investment online. It’s not that newspapers can’t sell advertising on the Internet; it’s that ads must be sold on a scale that is vastly higher — think Yahoo or YouTube — than the levels newspapers can ever hope to achieve. The challenge to newspapers today is how to realize the value in their news content… [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » Newspapers: No Free Lunch on November 15th, 2006