We just released a brand new product called Serengeti for iPhones and iPod touches.  Shockingly, Apple moved it through the approval process in just a few days, catching us quite by surprise!  We’re pleased about the app because we think it’s a neat workaround to the “Black Hole” problem that John mentioned a couple of posts back.  But, more significantly, it represents a new capability for us:

Easy Wi-Fi for Application Developers!

Serengeti is the first application that’s Easy Wi-Fi enabled. It embeds a small Easy Wi-Fi library which is used to ensure you have a network connection and log you into your Wi-Fi provider if it’s necessary.  Serengeti does this to streamline your web surfing, but it’s easy to think about the applicability of this approach for many other iPhone apps that benefit from Wi-Fi.

Integration of the library is very easy.  The binary itself is small and simple to use.  Each user of an enabled application needs to have an Easy Wi-Fi online account so there is an initial process to link the application to the users account.  That can be done by showing a simple form for signup/signin or – more likely – by throwing the user to our signup/signin web forms directly from the device.  Pretty simple.

At this point in time we plan to approve any app developers who are interested on a case by case basis, before rolling this out more broadly.  Licensing is free.  If you’re interested, please get in touch with us at dsbizdev@devicescape.com.

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the US, and while I’m a Brit, I’m always happy to celebrate somebody’s holiday with them! So, for those who will be enjoying large meals and catching up with their family over the long weekend, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. And for everybody in our global community, whether you’re on holiday or at work, I thought I’d throw out some statistics about Wi-Fi usage, internet usage and Devicescape usage that I thought were interesting.

Mobile Internet
I was presenting at a JETRO Houston event last week where one of the many interesting things I learned from my co-presenters was that in the late teen to early twenties age range, more people access the internet through a mobile device than with a computer or laptop. And the next couple of segments in that chart weren’t far behind either.

Japan has a great mobile data infrastructure to support this of course, and a lot of public access Wi-Fi networks, all of which help to make mobile access simple. The real surprise for me though was the low number of smartphone users (around 2% of mobile subscribers). I’m sure with the popularity of devices like Apple’s iPhone that will change, but just think where those usage statistics are headed if you give people devices capable of a much richer internet experience.

Mobile Wi-Fi
Two very mobile Wi-Fi applications have been making the headlines recently: in car Wi-Fi (from Autonet Mobile) and the recent press flight Virgin America hosted to show off in-flight Wi-Fi access using Aircell‘s gogo service.

While I saw a number of stickers advertising the Autonet in-car Wi-Fi at the San Francisco Auto Show last weekend, I didn’t manage to find a signal to connect to so I couldn’t try it out.

Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Net News was one of the folks on the plane for the Virgin flight however, and he has written up a number of pieces about his experiences, including one live from the flight. I also exchanged some Twitter messages with him while he was on board about the fact that he was using ssh over the link and reported that it was very usable.

Devicescape Usage
It has been a busy couple of months at Devicescape since the launch of Easy Wi-Fi for iPhone and iPod touch in Apple’s App Store, and Nokia increasing the number of their S60 platforms that have the option to download it right there on the phone. With the many new users finding Devicescape Easy Wi-Fi for the first time, we’ve had a noticeable increase in the traffic on our forum (which we’re very happy to see), and also a lot of new networks being sent in for us to add support for.

We have almost doubled our network count (i.e. the number of SSIDs we recognize as hotspot networks) in the recent weeks, and while a lot of those were additional SSIDs for existing services, we also have a very steady stream of user requested networks that we’re working as fast as we can to add.

One interesting number I thought I’d share with you is that we’ve now seen successful connections from our rapidly growing user base at over 80,000 different locations around the world. Including cases where the user didn’t have an account to access the network, or we didn’t know about the network at the time, our users have visited over half a million different hotspot locations!

By locations here, we’re talking about access points actually, so the number of physical addresses is probably a little lower since many of the more popular locations, like airports and larger cafes, will have more than on access point installed to provide full coverage. But that’s still a lot of places!

Last week’s announcement of AT&T buying long term partner Wayport for $275 million cash illustrates the increased strategic role of Wi-Fi for service providers as they push out media-centric services to users.  With today’s robust Smartphone market and increasing consumer data usage, carriers are looking for way to offset huge cellular investments and pushing out longer term 4G deployments like LTE and WiMax.  Wi-Fi can provide excellent coverage indoors and in congested areas as a complement to cellular, at a lower cost of carriage.  Moreover, Wi-Fi provides a high-performance, low cost network connection for many different types of device and applications.

Much like the AT&T acquisition is a solid proof point to the co-existence of 3G and Wi-Fi, Devicescape has also experienced increasing consumer and OEM demand for Wi-Fi on handsets.  As more and more service providers embrace Wi-Fi in their strategies, the requirements are flowing down to handset vendors to integrate Wi-Fi and supply devices with both types of radios.  Importantly, the Wi-Fi has to be extremely easy to use and integrate tightly with the operators networks, as well as the traditional Wi-Fi locations of home and office.

This is all happening at a great time for Devicescape!  Our Easy Wi-Fi for the iPhone has been available for a few weeks at the iTunes App Store, and is generating a lot of interest among service providers and handset vendors.  The application has held the number 1 position for several weeks as the most popular paid Wi-Fi application at the store.  We’re seeing demand for versions of Easy Wi-Fi which integrate with one operator network exclusively, simplifying use for those users who only care about fast access to one network.