Become a wireless ISP: for £300 The Register
Feature While the learned are laughing at Negroponte's fantastic "futuristic" vision of a mesh of interconnected wireless LANs "like lilypads which you hop from one to another" a UK company has produced Mesh wireless technology which you can buy and install, today, for under £300.
Free Web-Mail Waning?
Two years ago, Mike Musgrove of the Washington Post noted that the number of free services in Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail were being cut back as MSN and Yahoo shifted their emphasis to focus on fees for premium services.
It's already a bit quaint to see $20 buying you all of 10 megs of storage. And more than a little silly to hear all the squawking today about GMail's ads, which, as we continue to point out, would pay for a FREE service that offers 100X as much storage as Hotmail's $20 fee bought you two years ago
Unsurprisingly, in the intervening two years, consumer interest in these services has only strengthened due to their power and portability. Free web-based email only appeared to be "waning" because the feature set wasn't worth the price. Now that the tradeoff is getting more favorable (thanks in part to declining costs for storage space), the ubiquity of web-based mail seems assured.
A Man With Greater Goals
I'm not idealistic enough to think it will be easy, but I am confident enough to know that I can make it happen. At this point in time technological concepts of blogging and social networking services are being recognized as powerful forces. Technological software such as Google's services, Blog.com, Friendster.com, and others are moving toward the integration of those concepts. And technological hardware like wireless connectivity and broadband internet are providing increased access to that software.
