Word: vivato
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Half the suggestions the city people came up with were news to Vivato. "They sat down and said, 'You know what we're using this for?'" Stalter said. "They're listing the applications. We had no idea. We don't know what the meter maid does all day." Now fire fighters can download the floor plans of burning buildings while they're on the way to the scene, right down to the room where the oily rags are stored. In the next few months the city is planning to give fire fighters clip-on webcams that can stream video back...
...more if there's free Internet access to be had. They check their e-mail. They linger. And while they're lingering, they spend money. Light bulbs started appearing over people's heads all over town. Why not make downtown one big wireless zone? The city geeks, the Vivato geeks, the 180 Networks geeks and a local business group called the Downtown Spokane Partnership got together and created the Spokane HotZone...
...hang on a minute. How are companies like Vivato going to make money by giving away all this access for free? Vivato's technology appealed to Spokane not only because it's hugely powerful but also because it's absurdly inexpensive. You can get a Vivato transmitter for under $10,000, plus maintenance and bandwidth costs. "It's something like the Internet in the mid-'90s," Stalter says. "Remember when everything was free? You put it in, then you ask yourself how you're going to make money." His idea is eventually to flip Spokane's HotZone...
Will people actually pay for wi-fi? Can Vivato pull money out of thin air? Maybe not with prepaid cards, but, as Stalter says, the technology is way ahead of the applications, and over time alternative revenue sources are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. I thought of one myself, when I got back from Spokane. Parking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., is so tight, it took 45 minutes of circling the block before I found a space. I spent that time doing a thought experiment: What if Vivato lit up my neighborhood with wi-fi? Then...
...this idea past the folks at Vivato. They love it. But won't everybody converge on the same prime spot as soon as it frees up? Not if you fork over extra to get notified, say, 30 seconds earlier. "You pay a premium for that!" says Kevin Ryan, Vivato's V.P. of marketing and business development, his eyes gleaming with invisible wi-fi light. "You're the platinum customer...