Wi-Fi Location Finder For WAP Phones
One of the big problems for road warriors who seek public Wi-Fi is the Catch-22 of finding an Internet connection when you haven’t got an Internet connection. Mobile phone based solutions are the obvious answer. Now, the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose work we generally applaud, has launched a WAP-based tool for finding hotspots. The tool, which can be reached from WAP-capable terminals at http://wap.wi-fizone.org is, unfortunately, quite crappy. The first page offers un-necessary information about the site, but the actual search only begins on the second page where users select a country. Searching for San Francisco, the third page asks for the state. The fourth lists the first 9 California cities alphabetically ending in “more…” It took me about 16 clicks to bypass all the cities listed alphabet prior to San Francisco. Okay, so now I’m 19 pages into the site, the 20th lists some of the hotspots in SF, but all T-Mobile sites are conspicuously absent. Jeez, that’s bad! When I managed the team at Disney responsible for building the WAP applications for ESPN, ABCNews, GO.com, etc. We observed the modicum that you lose 50% of your customers with each click that separates them from their answers. Using that assumption, and assuming that 100% of people will use this application, after 20 clicks, 0.000095% of your original 100 will remain. For goodness sake Wi-Fi Alliance, at least categorize the cities by starting letter (a-c, d-f, etc.) and get the database more complete.
