All the stuff I need is on my desk

Anyway, again, I’m still here. Midterms are done so I guess there goes my excuse for not posting. The cafe is still hanging in there and the Free WiFi Project is slowly growing. I need to really pound the streets in order to get some more nodes out there but finding the actual time during regular business hours is pretty tricky.

In other news I started yet another company, this one is named Campus Cards. We specialize in business cards for students. Cool idea, eh? That’s what I thought. I think that student business cards is a pretty untapped market segment so we’ve got a pretty good chance of doing well. The cool thing, in my opinion, about Campus Cards is how I set the site up to use fillable PDFs embedded in the page. Students fill these out and then pay through PayPal and I get a nice email with a PDF attached which is all ready to hit the printing press.

I started Campus Cards when I, in my position as “Director of IT” (yes, that’s in quote because I really just look after the website) with the School of Business at the U of A, was asked to look into helping our students get business cards. Realistically there are no printers around that will give you less than 250 colour cards for less than $30. Even if you find someone who is willing to do meet that price point you are still going to get dinged with design fees when your print ready art isn’t perfect and also shipping if they aren’t local. At Campus Cards we are offering students across Canada 100 colour business cards for between $15 and $20, inclusive of all GST and fees, and shipping is free.

This is sort of a unique opportunity. Doing the cards manually is time consuming, but I’m doing my best to streamline the process. Outsourcing isn’t really an option because of shipping costs. That’s one thing you can count against globalization: small transactions won’t survive international shipping fees.

Anyway, back to work at my new “home office” in the condo I recently moved into.

First off, this thing was cheap. We shopped around and found a cutter from US Cutters on eBay (don’t buy from their website). After negotiating my own shipping the end price door to door was around $505. Not too shabby for a 36″ vinyl cutting monster.

The cutter itself is about 50″ long and it comes with a stand. Along with the tiny little cutting blades there is a pen plotting attachment that you can use to draw with.

We’ve cut a few things already, mostly stuff for Rob’s farm as you will see in the pictures.

Applying vinyl is pretty straight forward as long as you think things through in advance. It’s really sticky and once it’s on whatever surface you are using it’s not really coming off without being destroyed.

Anyway, with the amount we spent it’ll save us a fortune in sign making costs. Since cutting a few yards of vinyl ourselves will cost about $4/yard and having a shop do it would cost 10 times that.

An article was published in today’s Journal about the Free WiFi project I started.

An Old Strathcona cafe owner hopes to blanket the area and eventually much of the city with what’s apparently Edmonton’s first free wireless Internet network created by a private group.

Eric Warnke of Free WiFi says the group has set up at least seven locations since June from which people can access the Internet with laptops, cellphones, new iPods and other equipment…

Read the whole thing

I am starting with Whyte Avenue, where my Internet Cafe is located. I have 20 Open-Mesh routers that need deploying. I will be going to different businesses along the avenue where I feel the network needs a boost and asking them if they will help out.

If a business hosts a repeater they will get a mention on the website. If they host a gateway they will get a specific ad on the front page indicating they are helping out.

In order to generate money I’ve put a simple 160×600 skyscraper ad on the right hand side of the splash page. For $75 a month an advertiser will get equal rotation on the front page. These are just rough numbers to start. As traffic and advertisers grow I’ll make adjustments. Right now the most important thing is to get people to carry my routers.

My buddy Mack was visiting with me the other day and we were doing some crazy brain storming into the future of a free network like this. We both think it has amazing potential and I can’t wait to see this thing explode.

Here are a bunch of pictures of me opening them.

The setup was really simple, just like the Meraki routers. Basically you need to plug in on of the repeaters to an internet and power connection for 5 minutes so it updates and then the WLAN lights will start flashing, this means it’s ready to rock. Then you just log in to Open-Mesh.com and add the router’s MAC or IP address to the network and BOOM, it’s broadcasting.

To expand the network you just add more routers and place them around. A repeater doesn’t have an internet cable connection, it just picks up the closest wireless signal from the same network and rebroadcasts it. A gateway has an internet connection and therefore a stronger signal.

Right now I have one router sitting in the window at my cafe. I’ll make another post soon to explain why

There are limitations, for example if you put a PDF with ‘.thumb’ in the directory it will try to link it as an image. This is ok for me because I’m controlling what goes in the directories. I suppose I could add a check for it later if I need to.

<?php

/* This little snippet takes the directory and looks for any files with ‘.thumb’. Then it takes out the ‘.thumb’ to link to the big image. Then it makes a nice little list. */

$dir = ‘gallery/gallery2/’; /* Point to the right gallery directory */

echo “<ul>”;

if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {

while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) { /* Loop over directory */

if (strpos($file, ‘.thumb’)) { /* Look for the .thumb */

$filebig = str_replace(’.thumb’,”,$file); /* Remove .thumb for our big files */

echo “<li><a href=\”$dir$filebig\” rel=\”lightbox[1]\”><img src=\”$dir$file\” border=\”0\”/></a></li>\n”; /* Make the list with both file names */

}

}

closedir($handle); /* Finish */

}

echo “</ul>”

?>

Things have changed a little bit since then. Nexopia does friend searches from other services but there isn’t any real reason for someone to come to Nexopia and spend time building a complex profile.
Enter Data Portability. DP is

DataPortability is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

With major sites like Digg, MySpace, and now Facebook introducing new methods for data portability it won’t hard to move yourself across domains. Throw in OpenID and you’ve got a good formula for letting new users come to your site quickly and efficiently.

My recommendation for Nexopia to start growing again is to keep an eye on these major players and when they open themselves up you should be waiting with a “1-click sign up” where your entire profile is created without you touching it.

Update: I changed the title to reflect the post and fixed some spelling errors.

Until recently my router only went a few feet past my building. It doesn’t help that I’m in an old cinder block building and the router was at the back. When I was still working for Nexopia I had schemed with a few of the engineers there about bouncing free wifi down Whyte Avenue using different repeaters. We came up with some grand schemes but nothing materialized mostly due to the time and cost restraints we all had.

Traditional wifi networks require the customization of each router, known as a node or repeater. I bought a Linksys WRT54GS router with plans for re-flashing the device with my own firmware. However after a lot of research I realized I didn’t have the technical expertise to do that. I could teach myself but it would take me a long time to become familiar enough with Linux to properly implement the router.

A while went by and I just kept offering free wifi to my customers in the cafe. Then along came Edmonton’s NextGen focus group on municipal wifi. Before I attended I once again opened up my research for free wireless networks and I stumbled across a company named Meraki and the idea of an open-mesh wifi network. I decided to order one of the Meraki Outdoor Pro repeaters.

I went to the municipal wifi focus group and we talked mostly about where to recommend the city implements free wifi. I was a bit turned off by the idea of leaving it up to the city’s IT department to make recommendations on how to implement this sort of system. If it’s anything like the U of A, it will be ancient, expensive, and unreasonably secure. I let everyone know I had already been considering this and I would be going ahead with my own experiment. This was met with a lot of encouragement because it’s exactly what the city needs to see in order to get something done. Perfect.

The idea behind a mesh network is that one plugs in a gateway node to a hard line to the internet. This node starts broadcasting a wifi signal. Any additional nodes that are given power within range pick up this signal and start repeating it. This is all automatic without any setup. You can only repeat a signal so far before the quality degrades, so every once in a while you’ll need to add another hard line. With enough nodes you can blanket whatever size area you want.

Meraki is a great concept… but with faults. They create neat looking wireless repeaters that have all the firmware pre-installed out of the box. Unpacking and plugging in my router was as simple as that, unpacking it and plugging it in. Then I logged on to their management page and put in my order number and it automatically connected to my device.

Meraki has one of the slickest dashboards I’ve seen for anything hardware related. It lets you map where your nodes and are track who is using it. As well you can introduce payment structures for people accessing your wifi if you’re greedy enough to do it.

Where Meraki fails is in letting their customers customize the product. Initially you were able to hack the devices however you want until Meraki decided to remotely update each device’s firmware and change their EULA. Read more here: http://www.virishi.net/from-happy-hacking-screw-you-story-meraki

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of creative control with the splash page for my router. The splash page is going to be how I justify deploying these nodes. If a few ads on a welcome screen can cover the cost of the hardware I’ll keep adding them. So far I’m going to sit on this one for a month and see what the usage is like.

Meraki pros:

• Simple to use
• Great tracking and management software
• Payment options
• Super easy to expand

Meraki cons:

• Expensive!
• Very little plash page customization
• Extremely vague on payment terms and what sort of cut they get
• Evil ad bar for regular versions
• Evil EULA that doesn’t let you modify their hardware

Since Tuesday afternoon there have been 42 unique users of the network, and only about 5 have been inside my cafe. The Meraki repeater is supposedly good for around 700ft., and I can get a connection well down the street in several coffee shops. Right now it’s suction cupped to one of my windows.

In the future I’ll be looking more into Open-Mesh.com, the open source wifi mesh project that is much cheaper and fully customizable.

The biggest complaint my customers have had is finding the cafe! Visibility is pretty limited so I chose to include a map on both the business cards and the flyers. I originally had a Google map pasted in there but it wouldn’t scaled properly so I ended up tracing it with the pen tool in Illustrator. The Starbuck’s and Wee Book Inn logos are popular landmarks here on Whyte Ave. A friend suggested I should have added the Princess Theatre as well but unfortunately they aren’t organized enough to even have a website, nevermind a logo.

The green is a major change! The cards used to have a bright red text on them (against the better wishes of my designer friends). Months ago I painted one wall of the cafe green and I want to continue to white/wood/green colour scheme.

Another major change in both flyers and cards is the amount of information. I had previously thought a minimalist look was pretty snazzy, and while it might look neat it’s essentially useless to anyone who picks up the card. So I included a long list of service we have and I highlighted the two I felt people use the most: “download anything”, and “type your resume”.

Download anything

I pride myself on having the best and most unrestricted computers on Whyte Ave. Other cafes or libraries really crack down how well you can use the computer and what you can do. I let my customers install whatever they want and look at whatever they want. This means someone can download all the file sharing software or porn (yes porn) they wish.

On the topic of porn: a great deal of my regular customers like to use dating and otherwise “private” websites. I have a very strict “I don’t care” rule as long as nobody else is being bothered, including staff, and most people are pretty modest anyway. The set up in the cafe is great for this. The computers aren’t super secluded so it’s not just a bunch of creepy people sitting in the back of the room. Instead each monitor is separated by the box and a good deal of desk space. This provides some good respect for the individual while leaving the cafe friendly and open.

Type your resume

Most of my customers don’t own computers, hence their visiting an internet cafe. There are a fair number of younger patrons who stop by the type up or print off a resume. With the number of (assumed) low-income young people living around Whyte Avenue and in the university area I want to encourage the continued use of the cafe as a cheap place to come in and type up your resume.

Along the resume tangent I have been considering offering a resume “doctoring” service where a customer drops off a rough version of their resume and I can take a look at it and spruce things up for them. Any pricing suggestions are welcome.

All that is left with the re-branding is to change the website and ordering a new sandwich board.