Anthony Townsend, one of the founders of NYC Wireless and now a research director at the Institute of the Future, posted an article about how the discussion surrounding municipal wireless networks does not address three important issues:Anthony Townsend, one of the founders of NYC Wireless and now a research director at the Institute of the Future, posted an article about how the discussion surrounding municipal wireless networks does not address three important issues:
- Guaranteeing citizens’ role as content providers
- Finding a balance for location privacy
- Enabling the Internet of Things
Anthony has proposals for what cities can do to make it easier for people to become content providers for their city and county networks, how to balance privacy rights and encourage the creation of the Internet of Things. He says that the RFPs put out by cities are totally inadequate for this future. Read his post here.
The Internet of Things
Much has been written about The Internet of Things. Read this BBC article and this piece in the International Herald Tribune. Indeed, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has published a report on the Internet of Things in 2005 – to view the executive summary, click here.
More wildly entertaining and imaginative is Bruce Sterling’s keynote at ETech (download as an mp3 file):
Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer, looks ahead to a world of ubiquitous computing. A world where you can use Google to find your socks in the morning. He also talks quite a bit about the importance of how we choose to name the technologies and trends we are developing. This program is an edited version of his keynote at this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. You might also want to check out Sterling’s blog, Beyond the Beyond. (27:00)
Go to the O’Reilly website to download the keynote.
When building a small hot spot test model called St. Pete SmarTown‚Ñ¢ in the downtown St. Petersburg Florida, we fortunately seconded guessed your three important issues before offering services. Your understanding of local participation, user privacy and Internet things were issues we prepared for or just learned through trial and error.
Addressing your first issue of “guaranteeing citizen’s roles of content providers” we built a small local splash back portal that offered real time information, specials and advertising focused mainly on local businesses. We even added video blogging commercials, a local blog, partnered with the local newspaper and TV station. WiFi is the local wireless Internet and we wanted to make sure the main content and advertising was community supported.
In addressing ”find a balance for location privacy” we lucked out by separating our authentication and search information data bases from the very beginning. Concerned about privacy, we outsourced our authentication, gateway and customer service to a company called Single Digits. They already have seen every flavor of privacy concerns through their authentication services and basically offered a variety of options allowing what ever level of information or lack of information we required. Once on line we separately tracked general local portal important for our advertisers. This method gave us the ability of gathering enough information for our advertisers while balancing user privacy.
We see “enabling Internet things” as application specific and a continued work in progress. The recent Earthlink/Google combo in the SF RFP is something we immediately saw as sensitive when combining authentication, gateway, radio AP, user devise and a local web based portal. If you connect the dots you basically know where someone is and what they are looking for. Adding push to this you can watch every step and push what you want to the person until they feel they are being followed and eventually just turn off the services like many users did in the Netherlands. Not to say that there are not applications that need to do this. There are life saving applications in public safety and telematics such as collision avoidance detection and hundreds of other location based always on emergency applications. The other side of our SmarTown model is ProjectSafety, focusing on safety first applications that will require a lot more use of always on enabling Internet things.
Our organizations have separated their focus but understand that the final service needs require a combined public/private service model we call Community Network Integration (CNI). We look at applications that are non-obtrusive like location splashback portals giving general local information and emergency applications needing to know exactly were a person or vehicle is. We are constantly balancing privacy and safety with safety first being the primary network application. This was a great article that is starting to show just the tip of the iceberg in understanding the importance of WiFi applications in our communities. I hope these comments were useful.