Thanks to Simon who linked this clip in his friendfeed. It’s part 4 of a 5 part series of the closing keynote of Webdirections South 2007 so, while it’s not new news – it’s a good clip worth the watch.
Comments?
The Sydney Morning herald has this report on the group behind the Free Sydney Wireless group on Facebook which briefly covers their origins and calls out to the community to let the writer know of similar inititives both in Australia and elsewhere. It’s not new news, but nonetheless, repetition of past stories serves it’s purpose to reinforce the desire to have such services available.
The opening quote probably parallels feelings the world over:
With Telstra and Optus looking like they were never going to get their act together, someone else was always going to.
The reason perhaps is that these publicly listed companies are required to return a profit to their shareholders, they are not charitable trusts. Because of this I would imagine that any official and large scale support for a service with little to no chance of returning any revenue would obviously be a long time in coming so, it really is incumbent on the community to ‘give a little for the greater good’ and perhaps then we may see the big companies lending a little support.
Hope for this corporate support is not such a long bow to draw as, something along these lines has happened in Franklin Road, Ponsonby in Auckland every Christmas for quite a few years. As I understand it, the residents of Franklin Road started decorating their houses with Christmas lights, it became something of a neighbourhood competition and, after awhile the local electricity supplier came to the party to help fund the power that these magnificent displays used. Franklin Road has now become a staple in our Christmas diet with us loading the kids into the car and doing a drive by for the last 4 years to see the displays.
Do you think something similar may happen to the WiFi project(s)?
