The New York Times’ Robin Finn has today this profile of New York City Wi-Fi entrepreneur Marshall Brown. Brown’s start-up, Wi-Fi Salon, won a contract to provide Wi-Fi to NYC’s well-visited public parks, and his efforts seem to be more a labor of love than a money-making venture.
“People ask me, ‘Why the heck are you doing this? There’s no business model for it,’ and I tell them, ‘That’s exactly why,’” he says. “We’re very much at the ‘Gee whiz’ phase of this technology.” But he predicts that by 2007, 100 million WiFi devices will be in use.
Brown thinks in terms of big scale Internet access, but he also believes the value of connectivity is truly local.
“The first end of Internet expansion was about globalization,” he lectures - yes, he spent five years as a teaching fellow at Harvard - “but this second phase of wireless Internet is going to be about the Internet made local.” His niche: for example, “What we’re going to enable by installing our portals in the parks is for people to get more in touch with where they happen to be.” Cool.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:04 PM|Comments(0)
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