Own your own aircraft carrier for only $4.5m. Is this the ultimate gadget, or what?

Snowcrash, anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent analysis from Glenn Wi-Fi Networking News: My Rebuttal to Qualcomm's Strawmen : Jeffrey K. Belk, senior vice president of marketing at Qualcomm, makes many excellent points in his open memo (republished on Alan Reiter's blog)

Their is consensus though that the current lack of roaming between networks is hurting the WiFi hotspot model. Unless you go to the same venue repeatedly (and can expense the cost), subscriptions don't make any sense to this observer.

One of the most interesting points is in the comments. It compares the cost differences between a 3G card for your laptop and a WiFi card. WiFi is so cheap now that people will buy it as an experiment.
[from: JB Wifi]

A lot of people in the west have been wondering what people would actually use their camera cellphones for. Of course the Japanese don't actually have this conceptual problem, they just get on and use the technology. Then we have reports of people using them to photograph the whiteboard before leaving the meeting thus proving that there is actually a business use. Anyway, I was waiting for the Matrix:Reloaded to start last night and we had a Kodak advert followed by a cellphone-camera ad. I started thinking that maybe we have this whole thing back to front.

In the future, every camera will have a built in cellphone.

Because of course you will want to show other people the photo you've just taken. Of course, you will want to post the photo to your website. But before any of that can happen you have to take a decent photo in the first place. Which means megapixel CDDs, flash and optical zoom. [from: JB Ecademy]

Buffalo are coming up with a hotspot AP designed for free hotspots. The Register : FREESPOT equipment differs from vanilla 802.11b technology in three important respects. There's pop-up technology so users are greeted with an advert of the day when they first log on and a 'privacy seperator' in access equipment prevents consumers sharing their hard disk contents. Last, there's a timed access facility so WiFi access is only available when a business is trading.

Meanwhile, Toshiba working with BT Openzone in the UK has another model. This is the area Toshiba is targeting. Its £400 public wireless LAN hotspot needs an broadband connection - which is where Tosh's reseller channel comes in, says business development manager Gary Evans - and then connects into a BT Openzone-powered wireless ISP which takes care of authentication and support. All the site owner has to do is sell £5 scratchcards valid for 24 hours access at any Tosh hotspot. Having bought the scratchcards from Toshiba at a third off, the site could discount them or even give them away as an incentive to get you to use their coffee shop instead of someone else's, say.

The analysts can't seem to work out what to make of this with reports ranging from the usual X big by Y years hype to shock horror reports that nobpdy will ever be able to make any money. The more sensible comments are that the market is veering towards ad hoc useage rather than subscriptions. [from: JB Wifi]

Simon Woodside : Wi-Fi for rural communities: from open, to internet, in three acts

Simon also hosts the wireless longhaul mailing lists. This is full of people bridging communities in Nepal, building infrastructure in Ghana and other such projects. [from: JB Wifi]

Mercury News | 05/23/2003 | Kazaa claims 230 million downloads For those who don't know yet, Kazaa is the leading music sharing software. By comparison,

Kazaa's success even dwarfs the most highly publicized software introduction in history -- the debut of Microsoft's Windows 95 computer operating system. It sold 40 million copies in the first year, making it the fastest-selling software ever.

Which leads to an interesting thought. Why hasn't Microsoft produced its own version and bundled it with XP? Surely they can't pass up such a successful product category?

And given the sheer scale of the success, you have to think that the RIAA is tilting at windmills trying to stop it.

Music uploading and downloading via Kazaa is a great way of using broadband bandwidth continuously. Which has another side effect. It costs the ISP too much in upstream bandwidth fees.
They generally share bandwidth between subscribers at anything up to 50:1 contention on the assumption that we were all doing web and email only. That assumption is beginning to look rather less definite leading them to impose bandwidth caps or payment per Gb. [from: JB Ecademy]

1. Don’t go it alone.
2. Get your ‘Elevator Pitch’ right.
3. Find a mentor and work closely with them.
4. Concentrate effort on getting your first customer.
5. Grow organically.
6. Watch your cash like a hawk.
7. Avoid litigation. ‘Don’t litigate, negotiate.’
8. Know when to grow.
9. Enjoy it.
10. Make sure your people enjoy it too. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Times Online has copy of today's supplement produced in conjunction with UKOnline on Broadband for Business.

I guess it will be useful to someone, but it looks like a lot of fluff to me. They are at least raising questions about ADSL and recommending SDSL. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

BeyondBricks Mailing List
An open list for discussion about the Beyond Bricks SIG.

List home: http://www.ecademy.com/mailman/listinfo/beyondbricks [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I was just reading a piece in The Register about flexi-working for contractors and IT staff. I noticed that there was an ad from bCentral at the bottom.

So has anyone any experience with bCentral? care to tell us about it? [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I'm trawling for suggestions of news sources that are appropriate for the Beyond Bricks SIG.

- What news sources-websites do you read regularly for this area?
- Are there any weblogs that are specifically aimed at this area?

Tell me what you find, and I'll try and add it to Dailenews. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Register : UK Internet firms lack "business brains", according to first national IQ test of small business entrepreneurs. The UK's "dotcommers" came second to bottom in the test - only managing to beat those in the retail sector.

This looks like one of those surveys that sound nice but mean nothing until you notice it was organised by the Cranfield School of Management who have a pretty good reputation. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

How do you start a small business in the UK? And it's not "Buy a big business and wait" but allegedly to go to nationalsmallbusinessweek.co.uk [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

All-Party Parliamentary Small Business Group [APPSBG] Freelancer briefing: Background : The APPSBG is carrying out a briefing on freelancers. This will take evidence on-line and at a public hearing on June 11th 2003.

This seems to be particularly relevant if you're in the Hemel Hempstead or Hertford & Stortford regions. There's also an online survey. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

Distinctly strange explanation for why the latest generation of WiFi chips from Broadcom and Intel have no Linux support.

Linux-Kernel Archive: RE: Broadcom BCM4306/BCM2050 support : Don't expect specs or opensource drivers for any of these pieces of hardware until these vendors figure out a way to hide the frequency programming interface.

Ie. these cards can be programmed to transmit at any frequency, and various government agencies don't like it when f.e. users can transmit on military frequencies and stuff like that.

Hmm??? [from: JB Wifi]

Wireless-Doc (the Weblog) has some photos of using WiFi to access his weblog while walking through New York: started off at Battery Park (southern tip of Manhattan), and worked my way past the Verizon store across from Bryant Park, to Times Square. Cool! [from: JB Wifi]

I've just been talking to these people at the WiFi show. Myzones - The world's first intgegrated Wi-Fi Internet Service Provider : By subscribing to the MyZones service you can share your broadband connection costs. If you connect three other users and charge them £10 each, your broadband is free.......

They are providing some fairly standard APs that have had the firmware updated to work with a centralized Radius server run by them. This gives access control for Home, SME and hotspot access. The interesting bit is that they claim that this can be done using home level ADSL such as Openworld for the backhaul. Reading the BT T&Cs, it looks like this is perfectly reasonable for purely home use. However the quote above from their website suggests that you can sub-contract the access to get your money back.

Quoting from the BT T*Cs " 11.3 When we provide you with the service it, and any associated software, is intended for your use only. Therefore, you must not re-sell, transfer, assign or sub-license the service (or any part of it) or the associated software to anyone else. "

Hmmm? [from: JB Wifi]

BPO Solutions are at the WiFi show. They've just announced a mesh networking solution that appears to be written on top of Microsoft Windows and uses an MS Windows PC connected to virtually any WiFi hardware. I'm surprised that you can get deep enough into the MS networking stack to do any sort of mesh routing, but if they've managed it, congratulations. More as I find it out. Unfortunately there's nobody sufficiently technical at the show to give me the details. That's annoying as I'm left with a whole load of the usual questions about routing protocols, IP address allocation and so on. [from: JB Wifi]

You may have seen this report from Guy Kewney in The Register : David Hughes normally sells WiFi hotspots for BT. Today, at the WLAN Event, he predicted that WiFi was the future of the mobile phone, not just the laptop computer. And he said that voice applications would cover the country using hotspots.

This gets interesting for all sorts of reasons. Not least because BT Openzone is not covered by Oftel because it's not a telecommunications company. You might also want to check out VON 2003 (June 9th in London) where Jeff Pulver has a user group meeting on Free world dialup. This is a directory and relay system for VoIP using the internet. They currently have >25,000 people signed up. You can use a variety of hardware and software VoIP systems to play including MSN Messenger. [from: JB Wifi]

via: The Register :

The Cloud - the UK-wide broadband wi-fi network that's part of Inspired Broadcast Networks and Leisure Link Group - is to launch its service in more than 1,000 pubs in the UK later this week. ... Talking of pubs, BT also wants to bring wireless broadband to thousands of boozers across the UK.

So it looks as though BT will be the main initial WISP working through the managed service provided by IBN.

The monster telco is unveiling a new 'off-the-shelf' product developed in tandem with Toshiba that will turn an ADSL connection into a wi-fi "hotspot". The wi-fi "hotspot in a box" costs £400 or under £300 for the self-install version. BT is looking to flog the gear to pubs, restaurants, small hotels - even garage service stations..

This is really interesting and is one of the ideas we were suggesting last year. I don't yet know all the details and it will be very interesting to find out what what level of ADSL will have T&Cs that allow you to do this. Equally interesting to discover what the relationship is with BT post installation. Will you have to offer access via Openzone? Or will you be able to offer it for free?

Then we have this promotion.

And anyone who buys BT's Voyager ADSL wireless modem for the home from the Carphone Warehouse will get six months free Openzone 120 access, worth £60. ®

Openzone 120 seems to be a subscription service where you get 120 minutes per month of access for £10. I'm not at all sure I get who this is targeted at or what they would do with it. But it does mark the first foray of Openzone into tied deals between Openzone access and other services. I'm not sure if Oftel would let them, but I can see a lot of benefits in doing similar deals with Openworld and Retail customers to bundle some level of Openzone access into their broadband bill.

BTW. I haven't yet been able to find URLs with descriptions of any of this, whether on the BT Openzone or Carphone Warehouse sites. If you do find solid detail, do post it in comments here. [from: JB Wifi]