Hoser’s Perspective » Blog Archive » Wi-fi and more Google Gears

Despite all the April fools jokes that I could be posting and commenting on ( see Google’s Gday and the Techcrunch lawsuit) there was some great stuff posted today in the technology realm.

First, allow me to step outside of my regular platform technologies ramblings and discuss some interesting developments in wifi sharing. Personally, arriving at local restaurant or coffee shop and realizing that wifi is either subscription based, locked, or abnormally slow because 150 other people are leeching is extremely frustrating. Thus far, companies appear to be against offering free wifi in several locations and residents in the area naturally keep their networks locked to avoid leeching. Queue, Whisher (possibly a heavy-H for those Family Guy lovers), a service that offers a metered wifi service. This service allows you to charge for use of your wifi connection on a metered basis — by the minute for instance.

Naturally they have also built in a variety of other features including what may turn into location based social networking depending on your wifi location (Twitter updates have already been included).

This peaked my interest as we continue to see lackluster municipal wifi offerings and an overall lack of wifi enabled areas that do not demand subscription fees etc. Whisher has already seen some pretty good user acceptance and the model appears to be working for now. Hopefully more locations either 1. offer free wifi (ideal) or 2. take advantage of Whisher-type services and allow users to pay for the time that they actually use.

Second on my interesting releases of note today was the announcement that Google Docs has now been taken offline with the usage of Google Gears (Techcrunch coverage here). Docs continues to improve and although it is not quite there versus Word, this added off line feature is a major plus.

I’ve written about Google Gears before (FOWA 08 talk with Brad Neuberg & Gmail discussion) and really like the idea as it directly relates to the web as a platform. It seems repetitive to keep discussing Gears, but if you have not checked it out, please do so.