This is something we think about a lot at TechCrunch, because so many conferences have bad connectivity, and we need to make it perfect at TechCrunch50 next year. There’s a real business here if a large company can get it right and is willing to put a guarantee in place to conference organizers. They can charge almost anything – I’m sure Loic would have paid €200,000 if that’s what it took to get proper Internet for attendees. If they can build a reputation for reliability, and are willing to back up that reputation with a liquidated damages clause for failure in the range of, say, 5x the fee they charge, then I imagine every conference that could would hire them.

Src: TC

It’s a simple business idea: build a company around guaranteeing internet connectivity in large conferences. You can have your own gear, cables, etc., put a little bit of magic into the connectivity and guarantee that the internet works – I’m sure this future company would become world famous and a trusted brand globally within a year.

Image: Travelin’ Librarian CC:BY-NC

Risto Koski, a colleague from Nokia, and I were having a deep discussion when he naturally suggested that why bother making phones with both WiFi and cellular connectivity (now being called dual-mode).

Y’see, you could just have a WiFi phone and when you wanted to make a call, just go around looking for a WiFi access point.

Of course, if you are a regular 21st century person, this suggestion should shock you. You must be thinking: Who is going to be looking around for a place to call from?
(via Lifeblog)

It’s not that awkward now is it?

What all these start-ups assume is that users are never offline.

This is where wi-fi comes in. It is only when wireless net access is everywhere that these companies can even exist.

But, say experts, this freedom to connect will not just make it possible for lots of new companies to get going. It could also have a profound effect on the way companies are run and what they have to do to ensure they keep their customers.

Touch?©.

Also in the news this week (short clips, haven’t simply had the time to blog about these):

• The Futurice guys have struck a deal with the largest commercial television network MTV3 with their discrete photosharing service Kuvaboxi. Kuvaboxi seems to be now an official part of MTV3 offerings. Congrats!

  How do I know them? I did my Master’s thesis in close co-operation with these guys.

• Ex-CEO of Nokia, Mr. Isokallio, launches the first open WiFi in Helsinki center in co-operation with Fujitsu and a restaurant chain (source – in Finnish). With this he wants to show that it does not require a lot of money to operate a ubiquitous WiFi network, but more a will to do so. This is something I’ve been ranting about previously quite a bit – for example; here, here, here, here, here and here. Man, talk about being obsessed about WiFi :) Anyhow, my point is: Pity the fools who don’t see the value in this and a big thank you to Mr. Isokallio for doing something about it!
• The head of US copyright office has actually said that the current copyright term is too long! Is this the beginning of the end to large media companies bullying consumers?

Oh, and the Finnish Curling team is in the Olympic finals playing at the moment…

There’s also this other website I found through Antoin’s website; FON. There’s some sort of a plan to liberate the online world, like Antoin put it. It’s an attempt to build a voluntary public network of WiFi hotspots and enable connectivity for more people.

Now why are these people doing this? The simple answer to this is of course because nobody else is doing it. Telcos are complaining that they are losing money by extremely competitive domestic markets (especially in Finland) and are looking for different content channels to create more money, but I don’t understand why they haven’t looked deep enough into setting up proper WiFi.

WiFi is going to be tomorrow’s network for sure. The reason is that it enables quick and reliable access for devices requiring internet connection. I got the following idea while reading Barabasi’s Linked;

Internet in itself is a huge network of millions of nodes. You could also define the nodes on internet by people, websites or whatever. Let’s examine the network through people as the nodes. Internet enables peer-to-peer connectivity around the world between any two people who wish to connect, right? But this is only valid when they are both online. You need to be online to be able to connect and talk to somebody else and this of course makes perfect sense.

Then you can take the people in the real world who create another network of nodes. If you wish to connect to some node/person, you need to be around them or then you need a device that will somehow connect to them across another network – this is why the traditional phones have been so successful. WiFi is going to be to regular computers what the mobile phones are to traditional landline telephones.

Mobile phones became so popular because you could be reached wherever you wanted to be reached. The true mobile internet is not (only) about being able to surf the web through your phone screen, but taking the social innovations from the normal internet world (as we know it) to the mobile lifestyle. This is where the WiFis and device vendors, who take advantage of this, come in. These two parties are the ones who are able to connect these two networks and make them constantly connected to each other (meaning the same node), breaking the barrier for connectivity that has forced people to stay infront of their computers, if they wish to be online and connected.

You may say that we can be connected through GPRS, etc. but all the people who have used these technologies to connect to the internet probably agree with me that these are still the prototypes of methods that will be the ultimate ways to be connected. Secondly, the devices that we are going to use will change dramatically to make use of the already invented social innovations, such as IMs, VoIP, etc. And I don’t see any reason why there isn’t going to be any possibility to make a euro or two in this field if somebody took the proper iniative. The telcos of course don’t want to invest money as there is no immediate return for their investment and device vendors arent’ creating the devices as they don’t see the possibilities to use them. Nevertheless, a good example of this is Nokia’s 770, an internet tablet that does exactly what I’ve been talking about – it connects these two networks over the WiFi.

ps. This is a very quickly written piece and I believe there is a lot of room for improvement, but I felt that I had to get this down somewhere before I forget the keypoints I wanted to make.