Life in the Wireless City
The session Life in the Wireless City provided some good insights to the future wireless network in San Francisco and how the rolls of the joint venture Earth Link/Google are being played out. There were some really specific questions to the panel from the attendees about privacy and health issues. The answers for some of these questions was pointing to hopefully valuable experience Google will get from a smaller free city WiFi.
Google is currently working on a free Wifi this summer for the city of Mountain View to gain experience of user interaction as a preview of the much larger San Francisco WiFi that is going live in 2007.
Another issue was the positive benefits of having service providers knowing the location based information of its users for context aware services for content like finding the cheapest gas station in the city based on your current location.