I'm a member of a group that will soon be placing several free wireless hotspots in urban areas. These spots will all be in outdoor public regions, mainly in parks or shopping/downtown areas. We're on the hunt for some cool or unique uses for wireless to promote these areas.
A few we're throwing around:
-webcams of city concerts or festivals
-web kiosks
-extending access to city bus routes for passengers of the buses
-adding gps to city busses and putting up kiosks showing where the busses are and when they will arrive.
-VOIP
Any other ideas? Nothing is too "out there" since that is what we're looking for! Thanks!
I like your idea better than mine. I was thinking of using some monitoring software that detects when someone is sending spam through the hotspot and fires a taser at them automatically.
"sf" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:
I always thought realtime stock quotes were pretty cool to see on a wireless setup. Especially the 'quote trend' which shows the last few minutes of buy/sell activity. Should look something like this, but with more quotes on one page. And the option by the user to add quotes you'd like to see:
doing just that for a while. The major problem is cost of the wired backhaul.
Outdoor is a problem because it's very difficult to see the PDA or laptop screen in the bright sunlight. Trees are a big help, but block
2.4Ghz.
Bandwidth hogs if you use a built in server. Each connection gets an individual stream. Imagine 50 users on one web cam server. If you do this, be sure to use a reflecting server to redistribute the video.
These are vandal magnets. Careful with the security.
I get car sick when I try to type in a car or bus.
Many metro buses already have this but there seems to be some kind of reluctance to publicly distribute the data. Same with freeway traffic information. Policies vary radically by state and county.
Visualize turning your outdoor hot spot paradise into a giant phone booth. You'll have people yacking (for free) on the phone all day long. Not a problem for outdoors, but a serious problem for indoor hot spots like coffee shops.
Bluetooth to 802.11b/g gateway.
VPN termination in the local wireless routers to eliminate sniffing.
Local weather station at each access point. Nothing fancy. Just temperature, humidity, wind speed, and maybe wind direction.
Local wireless diagnostic page. Tells user their signal strength, S/N ratio, and packet loss. Doesn't do much for Joe Sixpack, but really turns on the geeks.
TDOA (time difference of arrival) location tracking. We know where you are.
Locally generated streaming audio and video advertising "channel". Nobody will listen to it, but the local merchants may buy into it.
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