I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Chicago with “nothing” to do from 1-5; so I go with the T-Mobile day pass, pony up the $9.99 and suddenly I’m connected again. Yay productivity! But… I hate Starbucks, with a passion. The reason I ended up here is because I didn’t know where else to go and couldn’t really find a hot spot without… a hot spot. I could browse the web on my phone, but that’s sort of a pain… that’s right I don’t have an iPhone… or even a cool enough substitute. Checking my Gmail ad nauseum is about the only thing my web connection on my phone is good for (that and my Lopico mobile marks, of course). So here’s what I want: I want to send a text of my zip code to some web service that will come back with a listing of nearby spots with free wifi (doesn’t have to be exclusively free, but that’s what I’d prefer). Each spot on the list comes with a unique ID next to it in the list. I text the ID back to the service and it responds with contact info.
Biggest fall back of this idea: not everyone knows their zip code, especially travelers (like me today… though I think it’s 60604 or something close) who would benefit the most from the service.
Does it exist? Thoughts?
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September 11, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Pingback from The Daily JDA · Wi-finding
September 4, 2007 at 6:06 pm
jda
After a little searching through Simple Spark, I think I like hotspotr.com the best - m.hotspotr.com is not exactly what I had in mind, but avoids potential text messaging issues. I’ll give it a try sometime.