Our iPhone/iPod touch/iPad users and 5th Edition Nokia users got to see a new feature in their apps this week: Venue Information. I thought I’d take a little time to explain what we’ve added, and why it matters. And don’t worry if you use us on an Android device, or access our map via our web page, the same features will be coming to those places too soon.

What Is It?
For now, we’re collecting only some basic information about each venue:

• Its name
• Its type (via a set of tags)
• A rating (1-5 stars)

Obviously, we have a geocode as well. At the moment, you will see an address, but that is always generated today by reverse geocoding the coordinates. Over time, we hope to be able to collect addresses too and pin locations down based on that data.

How Do I See This Information?
You will notice in the map callouts, as well as for some rows in the history screen, that a new icon has appeared to the right of the information. Tap that and you will be taken to the venue information for that venue, if we have any.

 

If we don’t have any, then you will be taken to a simpler screen that asks you to tell us the name of the place, and set the initial tag (the venue’s primary type):

We’ll tell you all we know, typically just the network name (SSID) and perhaps the Wi-Fi operator. In the example above, you can see the network name is “Mama Art Cafe” but we don’t really know the operator (it is assigned to one of our Easy WiFi Network placeholder IDs).

If you’d like to help us improve our service, fill in the name and pick a type, then tap Save and your information will be added to the map. Tap the big red ‘No Thanks’ button if you want to skip this and return to the map.

WiFi Experience Rating
Our automated system for mapping Wi-Fi networks indicates, by means of the signal bars on the map pins, how likely you are to get connected at a specific location, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the overall WiFi experience.

Perhaps the location connects you every time, but is slower than a 300 baud dial up connection (anybody remember those?). Perhaps it is super fast, but there’s no where to sit down and surf. Or maybe it has everything you could ask from a hotspot (if you find one with free wifi and free beer, please let me know - that kind of location might need personal testing!).

Tap the stars to add your rating from 1 (no good) to 5 (great). If you’ve already rated a location, the stars will be red. If not, you’ll see the average of everybody else’s ratings in yellow (or no rating, if nobody has ever rated the place, giving you the honour of being the first to rate it).

Reporting Errors (or Abuse)
We strive to keep everything in our database as current as possible, and we have magical algorithms running all the time tracking changes and status, but every once in a while we suspect the information might become out dated (venues change names), or just have been entered incorrectly. For that we have a reporting mechanism at the bottom of the venue detail page.

Tap the button, tell us in a few words what’s wrong (and if possible what it should be), and classify the error so we can send it to the correct place to be fixed, and we’ll do our best.

As I mentioned above, at the moment the addresses are being reverse geocoded from the coordinates, and while they’re normally close, they don’t always match exactly. If you want to tell us the right address, we’ll be very grateful, but it will take a while for it to be reflected on the map. Rest assured, we are keeping all the information you send us like that safe in our database, and will make sure it does get added.

Your Venue
If you’re a venue operator, and would like to make sure we have all your information correct on our map, please ping us. We can be contacted via Twitter (@easywifi or @devicescape), through the comments on this page, via our forum or just email me directly (I’m john ‘at’ devicescape.com).

AT&T announced yesterday that they’re creating a WiFi “hotzone” in Times Square, NY.   While there is speculation that this might be linked to the upcoming launch of the 4th gen iPhone, which is rumored to make video calls only over WiFi, I think it’s simply indicative of the mega trend towards WiFi offload and free (or bundled) access.

There’s always been a lot of free WiFi around, but now we’re seeing it being embraced strategically by the big networks, in locations where many people are concentrated.  Corporate altruism?  Perhaps.  More likely a way to push out good services, especially multi-media, to users without devastating the cellular infrastructure or requiring billions of new dollars in new investment.

It’s great to see WiFi pushing to the fore as a strategic complement to cellular.  Our recent WiFi report highlighted that users understand 3G and WiFi and want them both, together!  But, it’s clear that WiFi as a service complement will only work if it’s as reliable and easy to use as cellular, and that’s where WiFi still has a long way to go.

Here at Devicescape we’re very energized by this trend as our specialty is automating the WiFi experience.    We completely support the AT&T network so that iPhone or AT&T home broadband users, and users with free Starbucks-card WiFi accounts,  can get logged in quickly on their devices.  Even better, all the locations which don’t need accounts (like Barnes and Noble) are part of our Easy WiFi Network, so everyone gets instant connections there without doing anything.

Over the coming months we’re going to see more and more networks going free.   3G offload?  Amenity for venues?  Anti-churn?  Whatever the reason, it’s good for users!

iRiver announced today that they are using Easy WiFi to provide global hotspot connectivity for their eBook readers!  The announcement showed the iRiver Story as a first recipient.

Of course eReaders are just one category of emerging WiFi devices, but a good one for Easy WiFi.  The devices typically don’t include web browsers and need to be simple for all types of people to use.  Manually logging into public networks is so incredibly painful it’s doubtful users would really subject themselves to it.

Easy WiFi gives iRiver’s users the capability to choose the WiFi providers they want, and be logged in automatically.  And, since Easy WiFi supports thousands of providers all over the world, iRiver get a single solution for a global market.

Eye-Fi announced today that their new X2 cards are being upgraded with Easy WiFi!  If you don’t know Eye-Fi, they make super cool SD storage cards for digital cameras which contains a WiFi chip that can automatically upload your photos to the web.

What this means for users is that they can now upload their pictures all over the world, at the many hundreds of Easy WiFi Network locations!  Imagine being able to share your photos quickly, have “endless storage” because your card is never full, and have a web backup in case you lose your camera.  The Eye-Fi card does all that!

We’re very excited to be working with Eye-Fi.  Aside from a great product, it’s an amazing example of what Easy WiFi can do.  An SD card is a challenging environment to say the least - despite the lack of UI and limited resources, Easy WiFi still allows the X2 card to access a world of WiFi automatically.

Congrats to our partners at Eye-Fi for this groundbreaking new product!  Learn more at eye.fi.

We just completed the Q1 survey for our quarterly WiFi Report, where we probe into the opinions of our membership about WiFi.  I thought I would share a few of the interesting findings.

Check these charts out (sorry for the squeezed font size):

Bit of an obvious response, perhaps, given that the survey was done to the Easy WiFi membership, but it’s still a big datapoint for device manufacturers.  With so much attention on 3G connectivity it’s great to know that there’s such demand for WiFi.

So, if users want WiFi enablement, what types of devices do they use today?

Today it’s a PC and smartphone market.  What’s in the shopping wish-list though?

The iPad is a runaway hit with almost 59% of respondents wanting one!  This could have something to do with the survey being conducted right at the peak of the iPad launch, of course.  Number 2 is for digital cameras.  Interesting.  Having lost an SD card full of vacation photos last year I love the idea of photos being stored up on the web!

Check back later for more insights.  If you’re interested in getting a copy of the WiFi Report you can request it here and download older reports immediately.

First the good news: Easy WiFi is back in the Apple App Store.  Yay!  Now the bad news: Easy WiFi is out of Nokia Ovi  Huh?!

Yes, it’s been quite interesting recently with these App Stores.  In the case of Apple, we’ve been out of the store for a while, reworking the app and resubmitting to conform to their every changing policies.  Still, we’re very happy to be back and looking forward to getting some real development done that adds value in a future release.

For Ovi, distribution was halted because of a policy change for products containing encryption.  Quite draconian.  We’re not alone in being impacted, and it’s probably going to take a month or two to sort out.  Meanwhile, Nokia users can download the app directly from us at www.easywifi.com/download.

Although we’ve been quiet for a while, there lot’s of new development activity at Devicescape.  There will be a bunch of new releases coming soon, and you’ll see them first on Android.  See if you can guess why!

You might notice that the main Easy WiFi application is not currently available in Apple’s app store.  We actually removed availability of the app a few days back because the behavior wasn’t quite right on some devices and networks and we wanted to ready a new version.  Ironically, we got hit in the much reported “WiFi scanner” purge that Apple did yesterday, so Apple removed our already unavailable app!

Now, the Network version of Easy WiFi isn’t a WiFi scanner, although it does try to do smart stuff with WiFi on the iPhone OS, and this may have triggered Apple’s action.  Nonetheless, we’re working on a new version which should calm their concerns and it should be in process within the next few hours.  All being well, we’ll have a new app approved and available soon.  Watch this space.

As part of our continuing goal to improve Easy WiFi we’re running a survey.   If you’re a user of the Easy WiFi app on your device, or the web portal at easywifi.com, this is a good chance to tell us what you think!

The survey is brief and should take 5 minutes or less to complete.  We’ll post the results here in early March, but you can be assured we’ll take your input to heart.

Click here to access the survey!

Many thanks in advance,

Dave

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Devicescape and we haven’t had the chance to write until now.  On October 20th we announced our own hotspot network called, simply, the Easy WiFi Network. We launched a brand new web portal at easywifi.com to eventually replace my.devicescape.com and released a new version of the iPhone OS app via Apple’s App Store.  This week we followed up with upgraded apps for Nokia devices via Ovi, and a brand new platform - Android - on the Android Marketplace.  And, we produced new versions of the PC app for Windows 7 and a new version of the Mac app for Snow Leopard.  Whew!

This new version is a HUGE change for Devicescape.  For the last two years we’ve built a loyal following of users who use Easy WiFi to connect to their hotspot accounts.  We now support over 1200 different hotspot providers, ranging from commercial providers like AT&T to university campuses (go AirBears!)  Right now we’re managing around 400,000 connections per day with our little utility.  Pretty cool.  But, of course, we’re always thinking of ways to improve our products, so we decided to take it to the next level by going beyond connecting to helping people find WiFi and give them a hotspot network to connect to!

The Easy WiFi Network is the culmination of this planning.  On easywifi.com you can see a map of our network (the pins in blue are locations you can access)  and you can search around to see the coverage.  The downloadable apps do the same thing while you’re mobile, plus they will connect you automatically (semi-automatically on iPhone) when you’re in range of one of the Easy WiFi Network locations.  And if you have an additional hotspot provider, their locations will show up on the map and you will be connected automatically there too.

We’ve really turned Easy WiFi on its head.  Before, it was only useful if you had a hotspot provider.  Now, we give users free access to a large hotspot network, and if you have an additional provider we extend your coverage.  It’s completely personalized, just the way WiFi should be.

We’ll be blogging a lot more about the  Network now that we have some time to regroup.  It’s going to get very large: right now it’s at 160,000 locations worldwide and growing fast.  Read more about it at easywifi.com.

The Easy Wi-Fi multi network application (white icon) is temporarily unavailable in the Apple App Store.    It will be restored on or around October 20th.

So, why is it unavailable?  Well, we’re working on a big new release, version 4.  Due to the odd behavior of the App Store we can’t have the old version available while we also have a newer version with restricted availability.  We’re not quite ready for prime time on the new app so we want to get it out to our partners and friends who will check it out and give us great suggestions.  This forces us to halt broad availability and control access via Apple’s “promo codes.”

Sorry for the delay.  Meantime you could use another version of Easy Wi-Fi (they’re all extensible to any hotspot provider).

What does version 4 contain?  Well, it’s a secret!  But we’re quite excited as it adds a revolutionary capability that many of you have asked for.  Here’s a graphic from the app to tickle your imagination.  Can you guess?

Want to be among the select reviewers of the new app?  Send us an email request.  We have 10 promo codes available and we’ll allocate them based on the inventiveness of your guess on what’s in version 4 and the sincerity of your plea