<Saturday, June 28th, 2008> [Vincent]
Go boingo!
I'm sitting at Newark waiting for my plane to board. There is obviously a weather problem somewhere, as I'm surrounded by unhappy people and screaming toddlers. Who needs a nap?
I fired up a browser hoping that one of the free sites offered by the overpriced wireless provider would be weather. Much to my amazement, there was an option to get 15 minutes of free wifi in exchange for watching a 15 second ad. You can only get 4 free blocks, but that's an hour in exchange for watching one minute of ads. That's a better ratio than tv.
update: This only appears to work from the iPod, and I imagine the iPhone. This must be a promotion to try to get iPhone users to sign up for boingo since it's bound to be faster than the phone network. To get it working from a Mac, you have to spoof the User Agent. iPhoney does that handily.
.:.
This reminds me of Bill Gate's predictions in his book "The Road Ahead", written in 1995. He predicted that bandwidth would get cheaper to the point of perhaps being free. He also predicted that advertisers would start to pay people to receive their ads.
This looks like a combination of those ideas.
--Marvin (2008.07.09) |
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