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Thursday, August 22, 2002
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Starbucks has added Wi-Fi to some 1200 stores. Coffeehouses are a very productive environment for me; there's the right amount of activity to keep things from being too sterile to think, and yet it rarely engages me, so I don't get too distracted either. Plus, I meet some great people in coffeehouses. Sometimes, it's a long conversation (people with Macintoshes often talk to each other at length), othertimes it's just a brief, pleasant interaction, like the guy yesterday who noticed I was reading parts of a discarded newspaper and, as he was leaving, brought me the rest of it. A good coffeehouse is one where they start making your favorite drink when they see you, and tell you that you can pay some other day if you've forgotten your wallet: by those standards, Madison has a number of good coffeehouses.
I hope that T-Mobile, their provider, has the right to offer a combined subscription that works at places beyond Starbucks. Here in town, for example, the early adopter coffeehouses went with Cafe Connection. It'd be great for consumers if you could buy one subscription for wireless, and then go to Starbucks, or the Cafe Connection shops, or a hotel or airport concourse, and find that the network recognized you.
Via the San Francisco Chronicle:
Starbucks hooks up 1,200 coffee shops to the Net
