UnWired!
Anyone else been waiting for Wired to change their mag like this? ;-) I have! But bleh. It's just an insert. Damn! I want to see this on the Cover. :-D
In May's issue, Wired goes nuts about WiFi, which is great. It's a kick ass technology! I get a little ruffled when people pan mobile tech and 3G for it, but still its definitely got some paradigm changing properties also and I dig its grassroots feel. Personally, I can't wait for Negroponte's Wireless Lilypads (a.k.a Mesh Networks) to come about... once college student's learn how to get them running, watch RIAA go nuts as suddenly fileswapping goes out-of-net. :-) But that's last year's mag. This month's (Un)Wired mag really gets the Wireless religion:
The wireless Internet has arrived -- and now the sky's the limit.
We stand at the brink of a transformation. It is a moment that echoes the birth of the Internet in the mid-'70s, when the radical pioneers of computer networking - machines talking to each other! - hijacked the telephone system with their first digital hellos. Or that jaw-dropper a decade later when the FCC official whose job it was to track the growth of communications networks suddenly realized that his neat tabulation of local and long-distance had been made moot by the unforeseen rise of local-area networks: an unregulated, unmonitored, uncontrollable phenomenon of the upstart PC industry that would soon shake the telecom world. Or the arrival of the Web browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.
This time it is not wires but the air between them that is being transformed. Over the past three years, a wireless technology has arrived with the power to totally change the game. It's a way to give the Internet wing without licenses, permission, or even fees. In a world where we've been conditioned to wait for cell phone carriers to bring us the future, this anarchy of the airwaves is as liberating as the first PCs - a street-level uprising with the power to change everything.
The technology is Wi-Fi, and it's the first blast in a revolution, called open spectrum, that will drive the Internet to the next stage in its colonization of the globe. Like the Net itself, Wi-Fi was confined to technical circles for years before exploding into the mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the past two years, it's become one of the fastest-growing electronics technologies in history.
...
Wow. Someone at Conde-Naste has been drinking the Kool-Aid as well. Rock.
There's also a variety of other articles along the same lines, covering everything from how-to's for your wireless network, to a sort of Wireless Electronic Fetish, to the obligatory "we don't need no stinkin' 3G" article, to Cometa and Palm's efforts and more. It's all VERY American centric (the top 25 companies to watch includes only 1 company outside the U.S. and it's in Taiwan. LOL) but interesting nevertheless.
Maybe some more later after I digest it all.
-Russ