ChasNote

Glenn Fleishman at WifiNetNews on Google’s motivation for providing free city-wide wifi for San Francisco — super ad targeting that doesn’t violate consumer privacy:

They’re aiming to move more advertising dollars out of the devastated newspaper business in the city and suck more life from telephone book display advertising. National advertising in the U.S. comprised $45 billion the first half of 2005; local advertising, $26 billion. Because Google will run the network, they can deliver ads targeted to the city block for folks using their Wi-Fi network without knowing anything about the individual consumer, as it will be entirely based on the Wi-Fi network not consumer characteristics. I imagine Google views this as a massive experiment and money well spent.