A strange little announcement from Starbucks yesterday about its Wi-Fi service: It's hard to figure why Starbucks was compelled to announce they'd crossed the magic 3,100 store threshold--why was 3,100 such an important number? They added stores in five states that apparently had no or little service before, including Indiana and Wisconsin, which doesn't seem quite newsworthy either.
The release says that service rolled out in August 2002, when it actually started in May 2001 and went official later that year. The company has erased the entire May 2001 to August 2002 experience from their minds, despite the several hundred stores that had access during that time, including the doomed branch in the World Trade Center at which my friend MIke Daisey was working that morning and managed to get far away in time.
The most interest part of the Reuters story prompted by a press release was that subscribers to the service--they don't say how many--use a T-Mobile hotspot on average after 9 a.m. for an hour eight times a month. That's great market insight.