Word: vivato
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...Spokane to meet the people behind its audacious experiment, principally a guy named Don Stalter, CEO of Vivato, the high-tech start-up that supplies the technology to make it possible. Stalter didn't found the company; it began with a Hewlett-Packard engineer named Skip Crilly, who lived in the hills outside Spokane and couldn't get anybody to run a high-speed line to his house. Like any good engineer, he thought outside the box: maybe he could get the speed without the wiring. The standard wireless Internet technology, wi-fi, was cheap and fast, but it worked...
...world playing 25,000 games around the city. Scoring and scheduling are a nightmare of confused people scurrying about, carrying little slips of paper with numbers on them--exactly the kind of problem technology is supposed to eliminate. So somebody had the bright idea of sticking one of Vivato's prototype wi-fi transmitters on top of Spokane city hall and flooding a few blocks of downtown with wi-fi, thus allowing all the scoring to be done online. The setup was about as ugly a piece of jerry-built hackery as you're ever likely to see--the workers...
Well, almost everyone. It was the city's computer gnomes who first noticed that people were still using that Vivato antenna. Because the city never turned it off, it was still up there, pumping out free wireless Internet, and people were logging on. "All the time we're watching, there were always 10 to 15 people on the network," says Garvin Brakel, director of management information services for the city of Spokane. "It was unadvertised, unknown, but people were finding it regardless...