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McDonalds Wi-Fi overcooked? author Doug Mohney couldn't be more on target with his assessment that people won't necessarily flock to McDonald's just to use their WiFi while they suck back a heart attack, er... I mean, BigMac.

Seeing how good ole' ev found himself in a Starbucks not too long ago for that very reason, Mohney might be a bit left of center after all.

And hold on - is billing really an issue? I keep coming across the terminology "turnkey solution" here and there. Is it possible that providers are already thinking about his billing-issue gripe?

Regardless, it does fly contrary to the basic value proposition of their other high-tech offering, the SpeedPass. Wasn't the point of that device that you can get in and out faster, not hang around longer?

posted by Brian @ 7:56 PM 0 Comments

Couple of good articles/links/resources that I came across recently. I always want to share simple links and make some notes about how I found them useful. Perhaps there's a better way to accomplish this than through simple posts like this one. On the hunt....

WirelessAdvisor.com - Cellular, PCS, and wireless phone service information.

Techdirt:Negroponte Focusing On WiFi

posted by Brian @ 1:46 PM 0 Comments

It was sometime last week that I spent 30 minutes reading and re-reading aloud the most interesting piece of online literature which I'd seen in weeks. The reference to the article was poached from this 'blog's benefactor [thank you ev].

World of Ends
"What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else"
by Doc Searls and David Weinberger ¶

Here's a preview of how the article begins in case you're too riveted to this page to even consider leaving it (or just too lazy)

Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We're not going to do that again.

Not surprising is how this quote reads just like one of my favorite exchanges involving the inimitable[ ;-) ] Dr. Zoidberg

Fry: "What are we gonna do?"
Farnsworth: "Duh, I know. Let's play the lottery!"
Amy: "No! Let's buy internet stock!"
Zoidberg: "On Margin. Zoiby wanna buy on margin."
Hermes: "Look at me, I'm invisible!"
Fry: "Wait a minute. I know what's going on here. You've all become idiots."
Bender: "Hey, let's all join the reform party!"
All but Fry: *yahoo, hooray!*

Get it (while you still can) in an audio clip from www.gofuturama.com's recap of Episode 3ACV07 - When the Earth stood stupid

posted by Brian @ 3:23 PM 0 Comments

Absolute Hilarity!

Not 30 minutes ago, I was on the phone with Cingular in Chicago and they told me that they had zero information about when they would specifically carry this hardware.

Then I came back to the office and found this article, Cingular Introduces Upscale Nokia 3650 Handset for Work and Play; New Color Imaging Phone Takes Advantage Of Cingular's GSM/GPRS Network within 5 minutes of browsing around Yahoo.

The little people in the trenches are always the last to know about anything - universal truth #986513

posted by Brian @ 11:54 AM 0 Comments

I've always thought that file sharing was a logical extension of the power of the internet/web to bring people together and communicate - it makes sense that people will come together over common interests and exchange ideas. It just follows that ideas often take the form of files.

Regardless of this, I've always been fundamentally against software piracy. I used to work in retail peddling audio recording software, and there were hundreds of little companies generating incredible software plug-ins for doing DSP software for the major platforms. This was in the nascent days of Napster and the like, and it was far more common to see people sharing copies of these software plug-ins in newsgroups.

In the end, the rampant piracy put all of these great little software entrepreneurs out of business - because no one had to pay for their software. Maybe they were at fault for not engineering their software securely enough, but hey - in a very real sense they were still victims of intellectual property theft. Today, the world is worse off for their absence - no new developments, no new patches, no innovative plugins, no new businesses in this area - end of story.

That being said, I can't help but take a look at articles like this one on
Yahoo! News - Does File Trading Fund Terrorism? and just think to myself, "Are these people crazy?" Despite all my belief in capitalism and the power of putting your money where your mouth is, when someone like

John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, did say there seems to be some connection between illegal copying and organized crime, in that many of the groups profiting from illegal copies are highly organized and can have international distribution networks. Organized crime often supports terrorism, he suggested. "These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations," Malcolm said.

Well, I think that's just plain ridiculous. Terrorism indeed...

posted by Brian @ 10:16 AM 0 Comments

Now don't get me wrong: a part of me agrees that the new Nokia 3650 is a bit of a chick phone (not that I won't be one of the first people buying one *and reviewing it here) but it still irks me when idiots like this guy at Forbes.com take a good thing and just shit all over it.

posted by Brian @ 10:49 AM 0 Comments

A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog provides great examples and even has "The Rules", a section on guidelines for the unruly.

Inquiline is not going to become a reseptacle for all things blogging related. It doesn't make sense to catalog simply topics on a content management technique - the end result is simply too self-serving to bear. Ultimately, it's more about tracing netrails, capturing the path navigated through cyber-space, and recording the ideas generated from making those connections.

posted by Brian @ 9:24 PM 0 Comments

Here's the guys to get together with about guerilla WiFi : WiFi neighborhoods in Chicago.

posted by Brian @ 2:58 PM 0 Comments

Ok, this was about to drive me completely insane. Two points.

Point one. People who don't put meta tags in their homepages make it completely impossible to find anything you're looking for on the web. Meta tags make the web a web. If you don't follow where I'm going with this, don't worry your pretty little head about it - it's not worth your time to try, just skip ahead. Ok, if you can't then go here and Webmonkey will bring you up to speed.

Point two. The people at [ MobileWise ] Wire-Free Electric Power sure don't fall outside of the group in Point one. I had to search far and wide to come across the perfect combination of terms on MSN Search which resulted in finding a single infosync article covering this nifty little technology advancement.

MobileWise has come up with a way to cut the final wire chaining us all to our digital devices : the power cable. This is an advancement that I can't be more excited about. Transmitting electricity through thin air is nothing less than magic, even in the circles of society I run with, the technology obsessed. When you add a MobileWise chip to your device, you can charge the batteries in the item simply by placing the item on a MobileWise battery charging mat which uses an inductive field to supply the charging current to the device.

All I want to know is this : how do I retrofit all the gadgets I currently own with this little ditty? This technology is potentially massive in it's ability to impact convenience for makers of portable digital equipment. Finally, I can set my PDA down anywhere on a large workspace/mat on my desk, and it gets it's battery charged.

posted by Brian @ 9:16 AM 0 Comments

Where were you when Airpath Introduced WiFi "Hotspot in a Box"? I'm thinking that this plan combined with a coffee kiosk may be what we need at all those Metra stops. I'm thinking LaptopLane for Metra commuters.

posted by Brian @ 12:17 PM 0 Comments

Let's use this site as a launching pad to see whether there's existing supply (or a vacuum) that customers can leverage against.

I think our first target should be Metra stations. That's a no brainer!

posted by Brian @ 11:33 AM 0 Comments

This is a fabulous idea! Parking Pads can be a doorway into really branching out WiFi into a metro area - just think how a small station owner could use this type of service to differentiate themselves from their competitors. We'd really need to do some market research to see how many people would even have the techno-smarts to take advantage of such a service offering, but man - it's an exciting possibility!

posted by Brian @ 10:20 AM 0 Comments

Oh, I wanted to post the link to evhead up here as soon as I remembered, and here it is. I remembered - yay me.

The truth is that this guy's site is a myriad of usefull stuff, and I like following other people's netrails for a spell. You head in directions that you may not have otherwise found....

posted by Brian @ 3:05 PM 0 Comments

Definately the place to go for the ultimate in PDA-wear. Check out :VAJA - Innovative Leather Products for some light bondage for your PDA. They're not too pricey, and ooooh so hip!


Can you guess what this means? Yes, it's true - staff at inquiline has the stuffing for one of these on the way! I know; it's super exciting. The question of course is which one is it? Well, more on that later....

posted by Brian @ 1:51 PM 0 Comments