The T Mobile hotspot at Starbucks works well. I'm working in Washington, D.C. this week but my hotel doesn't have in-room DSL and my dial-up is whacked. I checked on free community wireless access points but D.C. isn't a hotbed of wi-fi activity apparently. Lucky for me the local Starbucks had a T Mobile hotspot. So, I went in, fired up the laptop, and signed up for a free 24-hour trial. After that, the account turns in to a pay-as-you-go deal ($2.99 for the first 15 minutes and $0.25 per minute after that). They also have monthly plans but I'm not going to use it that much.

The signal and transfer rate were better than I get at home on my setup. Pretty cool.

For me, Starbucks is kind of a weird scene. I'm not a coffee drinker so I rarely go there. But it worked. I snagged a Grande hot chocolate and proceeded to get some serious transactions done while listening to retro Christmas tunes and watching the hip crowd enjoy their mochafrappawhathaveyous.

11:10:44 PM    

I'm back. A year ago I gave this a shot and decided it would be cool to investigate for personal as well as corporate use as a knowledge management tool. My thirty day license expired and my attention span turned elsewhere.

But then I saw Ray Ozzie's weblog. And I noticed several other technology leaders were getting into it. The straw that broke the back was a group on Yahoo dedicated to blogging as a Knowledge Management tool. That cinched it. I persuaded my co-worker Tom Pierce to download a copy of Radio and now we're both ready to see if we can get a critical mass of folks at the firm using it.

Will my interest wane as it did a year ago? Or is this the beginning of a substantial change in how we communicate at the company? We'll see.

8:24:07 PM