Easy Wi-Fi for App Developers

Posted on March 3, 2009

We just released a brand new product called Serengeti for iPhones and iPod touches.  Shockingly, Apple moved it through the approval process in just a few days, catching us quite by surprise!  We’re pleased about the app because we think it’s a neat workaround to the “Black Hole” problem that John mentioned a couple of posts back.  But, more significantly, it represents a new capability for us: Easy Wi-Fi for Application Developers! Serengeti is the first application that’s Easy Wi-Fi enabled. It embeds a small Easy Wi-Fi library which is used to ensure you have a network connection and log you into your Wi-Fi provider if it’s necessary.  Serengeti does this to streamline your web surfing, but it’s easy to think about the applicability of this approach for many other iPhone apps that benefit from Wi-Fi. Integration of the library is very easy.  The binary itself is small and simple to use.  Each user of an enabled application needs to have an Easy Wi-Fi online account so there is an initial process to link the application to the users account.  That can be done by showing a simple form for signup/signin or – more likely – by throwing the user…

Thanks a Million!

Posted on December 19, 2008

Devicescape passed a cool milestone this week: 1 million registered users for the Easy Wi-Fi application.  Of course, as I write this, I’m immediately reminded of the scene in Austin Powers where Number Two has to disabuse Dr Evil that his $1M demand is impressive.  In the web world, 1M is “no big deal”.  After all, Facebook just published their user base and it was something insane, like over 130 million! Still, in the world of Wi-Fi, we think 1M is a good number, and we’re certainly quite proud and even a little surprised.  It wasn’t that long ago that we were monitoring single digit daily registrations and logins. So, many thanks to all of our membership out there.  Your feedback, enthusiasm and, yes, criticism, has been much appreciated and truly helpful in making more and more out of our service. Now that we’re at this milestone, we’re thinking “what’s next?” and planning for the future.  We have lots of cool ideas in mind.  Please do try to drop us a line on what you’d like to see: leave a post in our forums, on the blog, or even PM us directly.  Thanks again.

Thanksgiving Statistics

Posted on November 26, 2008

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the US, and while I’m a Brit, I’m always happy to celebrate somebody’s holiday with them! So, for those who will be enjoying large meals and catching up with their family over the long weekend, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. And for everybody in our global community, whether you’re on holiday or at work, I thought I’d throw out some statistics about Wi-Fi usage, internet usage and Devicescape usage that I thought were interesting. Mobile Internet I was presenting at a JETRO Houston event last week where one of the many interesting things I learned from my co-presenters was that in the late teen to early twenties age range, more people access the internet through a mobile device than with a computer or laptop. And the next couple of segments in that chart weren’t far behind either. Japan has a great mobile data infrastructure to support this of course, and a lot of public access Wi-Fi networks, all of which help to make mobile access simple. The real surprise for me though was the low number of smartphone users (around 2% of mobile subscribers). I’m sure with the popularity of devices like Apple’s…

Devicescape 3.0 and Easy Wi-Fi

Posted on October 30, 2008

Hello Everyone, Those of you with mulitple devices using Devicescape may have noted some inconsistency in our naming convention.  When we first started with the Devicescape automated login product we wanted simply to have the product and the company name be completely consistent.  Hence, “welcome to Devicescape” and “Download Devicescape onto your device”, etc. Unfortunately we faced naming issues, first on the Nokia devices and next on the iPhone, and ended up deciding to use the “Easy Wi-Fi” product name for those platforms.  Now, with the Easy Wi-Fi application the most popular WiFi app on the Apple App Store (!) and just about every Nokia N and E series phone showing “Easy Wi-Fi” we’ve decided to rationalize all of our products under this name. It’ll take a month or so to make it through all of our clients and web site, but expect to see Easy Wi-Fi being the consistent name.  Hope you like it! So, while we’re on this topic, we made a few other changes too.  In line with this mission of making Wi-Fi, well, easy, we’ve decided to consolidate all of our various technologies into one product.  We haven’t yet released it, but this 3.0 version of…

Favorite Networks

Posted on June 15, 2007

The Devicescape community has been growing over the past six months, and more and more people are taking advantage of automatic logins at the hotspots they use regularly. But what are the top networks that Devicescape members are using? The top ten networks that we see our members using are: FON T-Mobile US/UK (tmobile) Boingo‘s CONCOURSE Network, USA Orange, France NTT DoCoMo Mzone, Japan (docomo) T-Mobile/T-Com, Germany BT Openzone, UK BB Mobilepoint, Japan NTT Communications HOTSPOT, Japan (0033) Airborne Access, Philippines Quite an international group, with networks from Asia, North America and Europe all represented (and the top 15 includes South America too). Of course, since FON is a worldwide network, the top 10 might include users from many more places. Tell us where you use Devicescape most often, or where you’d like to use it – leave a comment, or post something in our forums.

Taking to the Streets – Demanding Wi-Fi

Posted on May 15, 2007

Do people really want wi-fi? It seems they do. These people took to the streets of San Francisco to protest the cities slowing down of the planned roll out of the Google/Earthlink muni net that has been planned for sometime. Some have suggested this was a fake protest. BUT some, like muni advocate and expert Esme Vos of MuniWireless , feel that cities service their citizens by rolling out the free service and widespread access. Interested in this debate? Check out the varying sides and see where you land: Google offers S.F. Wi-Fi — for free – SF Gate – October 1, 2005 Details reportedly devil San Francisco muni wireless plan – MuniWireless Dec. 27, 2006 Making Radio Waves – SF Weekly – March 28, 2007 BTW: We, at Devicescape, think everyone wants Wi-Fi!