Ubiquity Breeds Utility

"In the late 1980s, Dartmouth College was the most wired campus on the planet, running 10Mb Ethernet into every dorm room. Today, Dartmouth is the most unwired campus on the planet, with 560 access points covering 200 acres. At a recent conference here, Larry Levine, the head of computing services, challenged attendees to find a single spot on campus and surrounding areas that did not have 802.11 coverage. Even the boathouse, adjacent sections of the Connecticut river, the ski lodge, and sections of the ski slope are covered!

If you wanted to know where wired communications were headed in the late 1980s, all you had to do was go to the Dartmouth campus and look at their homegrown email application, Blitzmail. As any regular user of Blitzmail will tell you, it included a server-side address book and remote private and public folders before almost any other email application. Watching a regular user of Blitzmail, you could have predicted the rise of LDAP, IMAP, and most importantly Instant Messenger - Blitzmail was so fast and so ubiquitous, that people used it for IM-style back-and-forth conversations long before IM became popular in the larger environment.

At the conference, I looked for similar insights regarding wireless networks on the Dartmouth Campus. A few observations:

Instant Messenger for voice - Just as with IM, the older folks are having trouble dealing with the interruptions. Eventually, you can see this device ending up in a hearing-aid form factor.

Portable Devices Completely Dominate - 90% of the students on campus have laptops, and 98% of the incoming class of 2007 purchased wi-fi equipped laptops. Wi-fi PDAs are everywhere.... One generation from now, you will hear the phrase, 'Daddy, what's a desktop computer?'

Voice is just an app - Dartmouth is issuing VoIP handsets to students for $50 each, and voice is just a low-bandwidth and not very interesting application. Long distance calls are indistinguishable from short distance calls.

Location based services emerge - Students here are already running calendar applications that alert them of their next appointment based on their current location and estimated travel time. People can walk up to a printer and hit "print," with the computer automatically routing the job to the physically closest printer. At UCSD, students with PDAs can see each other walking around campus, projected on real time maps and offer to get together, go eat, etc..

Newspapers have zero value - With laptop in hand and ubiquitous wireless, I had Google News, Weblogs, EBay, CraigsList, and more, at my fingertips. I stepped over the newspaper and kept going.

Better surfing through chemistry - With iPaqs and laptops connecting us all together all the time, low battery life becomes a real drag. The tipping point will come when one of these devices can last an entire day or two of intense use, and recharge in just a few hours. This is the single biggest limiting factor to ubiquitous wireless devices.

Prepare to be Googled! - While sitting at the conference listening to a lecture, I had the surreal experience of watching the person sitting in front of me pull up my bio on the August Capital web site. It used to be that we'd Google companies and people before we met them. With wireless PDAs, it won't be long until people will Google-scan each other in real-time, as they meet them.

The wireless revolution is possibly over-hyped, but don't tell that to the good folks at Dartmouth. They have gained wireless ubiquity, and are completely re-thinking how they use cellphones, PDAs, computers, newspapers, instant messenger, printers, power outlets, and most importantly, their time." [VentureBlog, via Smart Mobs]

This is the shfited future to which I keep referring, except at Dartmouth, it's already here. I wonder what kind of impact this has on Dartmouth's librarians? How long will it be until the rest of us catch up and this becomes our present?

"The basic premise of School of Rock - little kids jamming classic metal tunes - was partly inspired by a strange CD called The Langley Schools Music Project, a cult-fave mid-'70s recording of primary-school students chanting tunes like David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' in moving, melancholy ways....

[Scott Rudin] also supported [Mike] White's proposition that he be a first-time director on the script. Why? 'It sucks to be a screenwriter,' says White. 'You're the party planner, and then once the party starts, you get sent back to the cave to keep writing.' Paramount, however, told White to do exactly that. Rights for rock music essential to the story line would boost the budget into the $30 million range - cheap, but too big a sum to hand to a novice....

A bigger headache was clearing rights to all the real-life tunes Dewey and his charges sing, play, and quote from, as well as golden oldies on the soundtrack that bridge transitions. 'That one little AC/DC reference?' says Linklater. 'A fortune.' A keyboard solo from the Doors' 'Touch Me' was pricey too.... And a special overture was needed to persuade the surviving members of Led Zeppelin to let Linklater use 'Immigrant Song' for a scene after the band nails an audition. While filming one of the climactic concert songs, Black led a crowd of extras in extemporaneous begging chants. Linklater sent a video of it to the super group - and they said yes. The nod was especially sweet for the director, since he'd been denied permission to use a Zeppelin song over the final scene of Dazed and Confused a decade ago.

Freakishly, the one artist whose tracks couldn't be fully cleared for the School of Rock soundtrack CD was...Jack Black! You won't find 'In the End of Time,' or several of Professor Dewey's other tasty impromptu 'flavor nuggets,' as Black calls them, on the disc. Reason? Black has a binding Tenacious D deal with Epic Records, he says, and they wouldn't give him up at a decent price. 'Once you've signed a record contract, they haunt you for the rest of your life. I even said [to Epic], Don't worry about my cut. And they said, 'Hey, that's not the problem.' They need their cut.' " [Entertainment Weekly, October 17, 2003 issue, p.26, too bad there isn't an OpenURL I can use to point you to the article online]

So in other words, Epic blew the chance to get Jack Black's music a wider audience on the School of Rock soundtrack, thereby making more money off Black's music in the process, because the company asked a ridiculous fee to allow it to be on the soundtrack. And these are the people complaining about declining revenues??

Free Hot Spots Pay Dividends

"At first glance, it might not make sense for profit-making businesses to give away, rather than charge for, wireless Internet access. But a growing number of hotels and restaurants have found that it pays to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access. This perk attracts customers and provides a real bottom-line payback for a relatively small capital investment, according to free-Wi-Fi pioneers.

Cities and community development organizations across the country have embraced free Wi-Fi to boost economic development and attract visitors to downtown areas. A handful of small airports in the shadow of large hubs offer free Wi-Fi to attract travelers....

Operators of free Wi-Fi hot spots are capitalizing on the boom market in Wi-Fi-enabled notebook and handheld computers. Gemma Paulo, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR in Scottsdale, Ariz., estimates that shipments of notebooks equipped with industry-standard 802.11b chips or cards—which offer a raw data rate of 11Mbit/sec. at a range of 100 feet indoors and 300 feet outdoors—will hit 16 million this year....

Schlotzsky's currently offers free Wi-Fi in 30 of its 600 company-owned or franchised Schlotzsky's Delis. Wooley says he figures that the free Wi-Fi results in an additional 15,000 visits per restaurant per year by customers who spend an average of $7 per visit....

(New franchisees will be required to offer free Wi-Fi, Wooley notes.)...

Schlotzsky's has even bought high-gain Wi-Fi antennas that transmit the splash page as far outside its restaurants as possible, Wooley says. One Austin outlet beams its signal into dorm rooms at the University of Texas, and another beams it into a competing Starbucks. This high-tech guerrilla marketing campaign to grab the eyeballs of potential customers is less expensive and potentially more targeted than buying a 30-second TV commercial, Wooley says....

Customer service and satisfaction at a relatively low capital cost means that free Wi-Fi will continue to proliferate at the expense of the paid model, according to Schlotzsky's Wooley. 'I think pay Wi-Fi is going to go away,' he says. Panera's Shaich agrees, saying hotel and restaurant customers will eventually come to expect free Wi-Fi access." [ComputerWorld]

We're going to have a real problem if patrons can get wireless access everywhere but the local library. I finally just outright said it at the ILA conference - the question is no longer "will libraries offer WiFi;" that is no longer up for debate. The question now is when, and that's a decision to be made by each library in its own due course. Some will go down this road next year, while others will tread more slowly and take 2-3 years to get there. But get there they will, and it's a Martha Stewart "Good Thing."

"For your enjoyment, here are the copies of my letter to the New York Times as it appeared in my outbox, and as it appeared in print today. I'm pretty much done with this issue, but it's fascinating how, according to the Times, my very own originals are now just 'variations' of what they printed. Also note the non-capitalization of their version of the Act's name, as if it really has something to do with patriotism, instead of being an atrocious acronym." [librarian.net]

The correction appears on Jessamyn's blog, not in The New York Times newspaper.