WiFi is too expensive when it's not free. Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6. Clearing $6/day in new profit from offering free WiFi is easy, clearing $30 a day in most locations is damned hard. Will more cafes do the math?

Here's the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. According to a market study coming out this summer, retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.

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(via WiFi Networking News) [Boing Boing Blog]

What a wonderful revelation. The billing, etc. needs of a 'not free' access point render it unprofitable, while a 'free' site is totally profitable. I've been saying that Starbucks would get a lot more WiFi traffic if, instead of having to pay $20 a month you could get free access for buying 6 lattes. Use a punch card or a smart card or whatever. They would more than make up for it in increased coffee sales.  11:41:45 PM    

Alan Kay. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." [Quotes of the Day]

Sir Barnett Cocks. "A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." [Quotes of the Day]

Franklin P. Adams. "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." [Quotes of the Day]

Wernher von Braun. "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." [Quotes of the Day]

The von Braun quote is one of my favorites, while the Franklin Adams one is on its way to being.  11:36:53 PM    

Michael J. Kurtz and seven co-authors, The NASA As .... Michael J. Kurtz and seven co-authors, The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Sociology, Bibliometrics, and Impact, preprint of an article submitted to The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. From the abstract: "The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers, has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search, access and read their technical literature. By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create Second Order Bibliometric Operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters which permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP) we develop an accurate model for world-wide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP."

In a posting today to the AmSci forum (not yet archived) author Michael Kurtz says that Section 9 of this paper shows that "the entire cost of the journals is tiny compared with the efficiencies gained by having full electronic access to the literature in a discipline. In astronomy, where essentially every professional astronomer has had total electronic access to the entire journal literature for five or six years, the value of that access, in terms of increased efficiencies of research, is about twenty times the total production cost of the core journals." [Open Access News]

Astronomers are ahead of the curve that all scientists, including biologists, will follow. I love the the point that the positive effects of universal access to the journal far outweighs the minimal costs.  11:21:17 PM    

Lawyers to sue Blair over war. Greek lawyers hope to indict the UK Prime Minister over the Iraq war with a suit at the International Criminal Court. [BBC News | Front Page | World Edition]

Of course, this is why the US and Bush refused to join the ICC. If they had, you can bet that they would be part of this lawsuit also. I am leery of the use of the ICC for such things as this but it will be something that has to worked out.  9:54:18 AM    

Comedian Bob Hope dies. Legendary entertainer Bob Hope dies of pneumonia, just weeks after celebrating his 100th birthday. [BBC News | Front Page | World Edition]

Now I have to get my son to watch all the Road movies. Even if he hates those old black and white movies.  9:49:29 AM    

Resistance is Futile.

Liz Lawley made a great post on in-class and in-conference back-channels over at Many-to-Many.

A key takeaway is that the back-channel will always exist.  You can resist or incorporate it into your activities to focus the channel.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Some really good discussion on the impact of new technologies on presentations. The speakers will have to adapt or lose the audience. A totally didactic approach may not work much longer.  9:45:58 AM    

Best Buy Will Carry Mac Products [MacSlash]

Of course, what products will make a big difference. Best Buy has good prices but are not the best place to find out why Macs are better. iPods would be nice but I have a hard time seeing computers being the main product sold. I would not go to Best Buy for such a big ticket item unless the price differential was huge.  8:50:39 AM    

Halo For Mac: This Fall [MacSlash]

Of course, by this point, who really cares. Bungie used to be the best game developer for the Mac but since they sold their soul to MS, they have fallen way behind. Halo would not be known at all if it had not been coupled with the Xbox machine.  8:45:40 AM