Trepia provides a new smartmobbing tool: access a location-based list of other nearby WiFi users. It's not available for Mac yet: please contact Trepia to ask them to accelerate Mac development.(Via Emergent Report)

On the surface, Trepia looks similar to a buddy list. While programs like ICQ and AIM will show you a static list of friends, Trepia shows you a list of people who are currently in your area -- people who you most likely didn't know before! You can check out their profile and picture and strike up a conversation, knowing that if you actually want to meet them, they are never more than a few minutes away.

How does it work behind the scenes? If two people are within range of the same Wi-Fi access point, they must be close to each other. Building on this idea, Trepia tracks the movement of people through access points, and then notifies you of other users who are in your area. Trepia is not limited by Wi-Fi's range because it even works when two people are not on the same access point, but the access points themselves are close to each other.

Apple Service Tops Million First-Week Downloads. Apple Computer says its new digital music service, the iTunes Music Store, sold more than 1 million downloads in its first week, Billboard Bulletin reports. The figure roughly matches the download sales to date by all other digital music services combined, sources say.

An experiment is under way in Paris that aims to turn the city into one huge Wi-Fi hot spot, making it what could be the first large wireless city in the world.

A dozen Wi-Fi antennas have been set up outside subway stations along a major north-south bus route, providing Internet access to anyone near them who has a laptop computer or personal desk assistant equipped to receive the signals.

The access is free until June 30 but will require paid subscriptions afterward.

If all goes as planned, the private partners building the system expect to make a decision before the end of the year to install at least two antennas, and possibly three, outside each of Paris's 372 Metro stations and to link them through an existing fiber optics network in the subway tunnels.

"Finally, today,14th April 2003 with the contineous effort of the virtual yeti team comprising of DINESH SHILPAKAR, SANJAY SHRESTHA, BISO BAJRACHARYA, TSEWANG DORJEE, PAVAN SHAKYA and myself combined with constant support and advice from great veteran like DAVE HUGHES and GORDON COOK and DILEEP AGRAWAL, we have been able to link EVEREST BASECAMP at an altitude of 5300m at 1300 HRS Nepal standard time to our server based at the base of KALAPATHAR at an altitude of 5450m) wirelessly by using CISCO AIRONET 350 and then to AAP-1 satellite provided by SES Americom and this is the first email."

The Genesis HICEF is based on a revolutionary technology recently introduced by the Genesis Project in the form of the Edison Device - a residential and commercial energy generation unit that creates gas and electrical power through the separation of hydrogen and oxygen molecules contained in any source of water. At the core of this technology are the Genesis gCells, which break water down into its basic molecular structure through a series of electro-chemical processes, yielding ultra-pure hydrogen and oxygen gases. The reactant chemistry in the Genesis HICEF Technology is different from that of the Edison Device in that the gCells do not require many of the support processes needed in the Edison technology. The water supplying the gCells can be stored in special tanks that replace the ones currently used for gasoline in conventional fossil-fuel vehicles.

"Allen the gadgeteer has created a Java app, available for download to a Motorola i88s phone that records your position and uploads the info to a web site every two minutes. The site displays a map of where you are. You can also mark a location to check the map later to see where the spot you marked is. Instructions on how to load and an explanation of how it works are provided."

"Combining the current location system with a layer of identity authentication -- friends on your AIM buddy list, for example, that have permission to see where you're at at all times -- or only during the day.

Location as a publicly exposed digital identity; with a button push, you can hide your identity from everyone but your closest friends, or show it to all as an invitation to come talk while you're resting in a bookstore.

It's socially acceptable to present your willingness converse as an ephemeral "status" on instant messenger; may as well tie that in to real life."

"I submitted comments to the FCC today on EFF's behalf, asking it to allocate unused TV frequencies to unlicensed use under the same terms as the 2.4GHz spectrum that WiFi runs in. The cool part was, I got to advocate the position that since the FCC is in the business of regulating who gets to speak, and since WiFi shows that with less regulation, more people get to speak, that the FCC has a First Amendment duty to open up more spectrum for WiFi-like uses. The First Amendment calls on government to eschew regulation of who may speak and how they may speak. Historically, the FCC and FRC's regulatory efforts have balanced the restriction of access to spectrum--which is a proxy for speech, since it is an effective medium of expressive communication--with the need to preserve orderliness in the airwaves so that harmful interference is minimized. The paradigm for this governance held that if anyone were allowed to speak in any way, the resulting chaos of harmful interference would result in a world where no one was heard.

The 2.4GHz experiment, which applied an entirely different paradigm--lightly regulating device characteristics, requiring devices to accept all interference, and allowing anyone to operate a compliant device--challenged technologists to create devices that could function in this very different spectrum environment, coping with contention and interference with technology rather than regulation.

The results have been stellar. The 2.4GHz band has spawned unprecedented innovation in devices and protocols, packing 802.11b, 802.11g, Bluetooth, baby-monitors, X10 cameras, and a host of other communications technologies into a narrow slice of spectrum that was once dismissed as a 'junk band'."

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature."

"There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

"I am in Levi, Finland, at a meeting where we are talking and playing and working wireless. I pull out my laptop, fire up the bluetooth manager to connect with my cell phone to dial up a connection and ... whoa ... is this slooooow ... where *did* the connection go ... and just when I am about to give up I see hundreds of bluetooth devices on my laptop's bluetooth manager! Headsets, phones, devices, all revealing themselves in low security mode. It's a shock, as I can hardly believe my eyes. Like looking at a Windows Networking window at a LAN party or conference, but these are phones and devices and laptops aplenty. Later I try it in my room and the same thing happens, with a few less connections but the same effect..."

High school and college students generally do not have the home phone numbers of any but their closest friends. Before initiating a call to a keitai, they will, almost without exception, begin with a text message to determine availability; the new social norm is that you should "knock before entering." By sending messages like "Can you talk on the phone now?" or "Are you awake?" text messagers spare each other the rude awakening and disruption of a sudden phone call.

One teenage couple that participated in our study exchanged 30 text messages over the course of three hours as they watched television, ate dinner and did their homework, before engaging in a one-hour phone conversation. This voice contact was followed by another trail of 22 messages that kept them in contact until bedtime.

Keitai-wired youth are in persistent but lightweight contact with a small number of intimates, with whom they are expected to be available unless they are sleeping or working. Because of this portable, virtual peer space, the city is no longer a space of urban anonymity; even when out shopping, solo youths will send photos to friends of a pair of shoes they just bought, or send fast-breaking news about a hot sale that is just opening. After meeting face-to-face, a trail of text messages continues the conversation as friends disperse in trains, buses and on foot, nimble thumbs touch-typing on numeric keypads.

Just as Weblogs are distributing journalistic authority on the Internet, mobile media further de-centers information exchange by channeling it through networks that are persistently available to the mobile many.