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March 12, 2008

Wee-Fi: Find Me (Too Easily?), Phila.'s Cost of No-Cost Wi-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

MyLoki lets you tell your friends perhaps too much about where you are right now: Skyhook Wireless’s Loki service and developer’s kit allows embedded JavaScript in Web pages to extract your current location based on the Wi-Fi environment around you with your permission. A new offering from the firm called MyLoki lets you publish your location via a public Web page, a Facebook application, RSS, and a Web page. I’m not ecstatic about the granularity offered. The public page lets you publish your exact location, but nothing less exact, and no “buddy” privileges. You can publish your current city through the other means, but nothing more granular. A map badge for your Web site can show country, state, city, postal code, or exact location. Further refinement is clearly needed, as different people I know need to know where I am (or not at all) at varying levels of exactness.

Phila. pays $200,000 for Wi-Fi management: The Wireless Philadelphia non-profit that manages the incomplete Phila. network gets help from an outside consulting firm which works with the city’s chief information officer. The $200,000 cost in the current fiscal year is booked to the city, and the numbers weren’t hidden, it certainly wasn’t transparent that these costs accrued to the “no-cost to the city” project. The future of the network is uncertain given EarthLink’s stated intent to sell it; the city may buy it and contract with another firm for completion.

Posted by Glennf at March 12, 2008 11:43 AM

Categories: Wee-Fi

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