Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wi-Fi Location Finder For WAP Phones

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 05:44:46 -0400

Wi-Fi Location Finder For WAP Phones
 Contributed by derek on Mon, Oct 6 2003

One of the big problems for road warriors who seek public Wi-Fi is the Catch-22 of
finding an Internet connection when you haven't got an Internet connection. Mobile
phone based solutions are the obvious answer.  Now, the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose work
we generally applaud, has launched a WAP-based tool for finding hotspots. The
tool, which can be reached from WAP-capable terminals at
http://www.rcrnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=15348 http://wap.wi-fizone.org is,
unfortunately, quite crappy. The first page offers un-necessary information about
the site, but the actual search only begins on the second page where users select
a country. Searching for San Francisco, the third page asks for the state. The
fourth lists the first 9 California cities alphabetically ending in "more..." It
took me about 16 clicks to bypass all the cities listed alphabet prior to San
Francisco. Okay, so now I'm 19 pages into the site, the 20th lists some of the
hotspots in SF, but all T-Mobile sites are conspicuously absent. Jeez, that's bad!
When I managed the team at Disney responsible for building the WAP applications
for ESPN, ABCNews, GO.com, etc. We observed the modicum that you lose 50% of your
customers with each click that separates them from their answers. Using that
assumption, and assuming that 100% of people will use this application, after 20
clicks, 0.000095% of your original 100 will remain. For goodness sake Wi-Fi
Alliance, at least categorize the cities by starting letter (a-c, d-f, etc.) and
get the database more complete.

====================================================================================

Wi-Fi Alliance releases Wi-Fi locator app for WAP devices
October 06 12:32:00, 2003

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The Wi-Fi Alliance released an application that allows
wireless users with WAP-enabled mobile
devices to locate more than 6,000 Wi-Fi ZONE locations.

With the application, users set up a bookmark on their WAP-enabled devices
pointing to the Wi-Fi ZONE WAP site,
http://wap.wi-fizone.org. On that site, users can search by country, state and
city to locate and download Wi-Fi ZONE
locations in the area selected.

Membership in the Wi-Fi ZONE program is free to providers using Wi-Fi-certified
equipment.

http://www.rcrnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=15348

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