Internet Wi-Fi is the wave of the future
I recently checked into a Crowne Plaza hotel in Chicago, only to find that the IT department at my company had forgotten to include a Wi-Fi card so I could get on to the Internet. I could have connected to the telephone line offered via a port in the lamp in my room, but that was costly, and required that I already have an account with a US Internet provider. I explained my problem to the service desk at the hotel.
No problem, she said. She hauled out a free wireless modem kit, for which I only had to give a $100 deposit. Next she signed me up to a free Priority Card offered by the hotel. Using the card number gave me free Wi-FI access at any of the hotels in the InterContinental Hotels Group, to which Crowne Plaza belongs, thus waiving the $10 a day fee. Within minutes I was on the Internet, reading my e-mails. Now that’s service.
Such free and easy access will hopefully become the norm for international travellers. According to ABI Research the number of commercial Wi-Fi hotspots available around the world will add up to 143,700 by the end of this year, an increase of 47 percent over 2005.
About three-quarters of the sites are still found in North America and Europe, with the number in the Asia Pacific region growing very rapidly. “By 2011 the Asia Pacific region will surpass both Europe and North America in the number of Wi-Fi hotspots,” says ABI.
Europe is still the market leader with over 57,000 hotspots. One major driver of Wi-Fi hot spots is retail establishments. For example McDonalds has added hotspots to 17 per cent of its 4,000 locations.
The hospitality sector, that is, hotels and the like, have about 40,000 hotspots worldwide. ABI Research believes that voice over Wi-Fi will become a very attractive choice for many major hotel chains, both for their guests and for their staff. By 2010 the hospitality sector will offer more than 109,000 Wi-Fi hotspots.The bleeding never stops for Sony, which has admitted that several models in Cyber-shot range of digital cameras might not be able to take pictures.
Sony is already struggling to improve its brand image after, in one of the largest consumer recalls in history a few months ago, issuing a global recall of 9.6m lithium-ion batteries after isolated incidents where laptop computers caught fire.
Now it says eight Cyber-shot models (DSC-F88, DSC-M1, DSC-T1, DSC-T11, DSC-T3, DSC-U40 and DSC-U50) might have LCDs that are faulty and display images incorrectly, the company said last week. Sony said the cameras might not even be able to take pictures at all. About 4,000 out of the 1 million Cyber-shot cameras are affected. These were sold from September, 2003 to January, 2005. Sony said it would fix any of the defects if your camera is affected. The cameras are especially vulnerable when used in hot and humid environments, hey, like Bermuda!
The story revolves around an “addicted” employee suing his company for not taking any steps to help him — showing that people will go to court on the flimsiest pretext.
According to a news report in InformationWeek, IBM fired James Pacenza in 2003 for constantly surfing sex sites and hanging out in chat rooms during work hours.
Now Pacenza is suing IBM in a New York district court for wrongful termination, claiming the company did not offer him the same access to counseling as available to other employees with “with much more severe psychological problems, in the form of drug or alcohol problems”.
Pacenza also claims his chat room addiction is a form of “self medication” for his post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of his military service in Vietnam.
He is asking for about $5 million in punitive and compensatory damages from IBM. As one wag on a chat room commented, the award would “presumably would allow him to ‘self medicate’ for some time to come without worrying about employer intrusions”.
About one in eight Americans exhibited signs of possible Internet addiction, according to a Stanford University School of Medicine study released last month.
