One day in the overheated market for mashables

All free WiFi projects are said to be unfeasible because they are not economically viable.  Let's think of some alternatives. 
I can think of one right away: let us all not protect our bandwidth like schoolboys and let the others enjoy WiFi too.  In urban areas there will be little open spots which boingo could cover in their hotspot directory.  In rural areas the only possible solution I can think of is mesh networks where the user is client and node. 
But Engadget today gave me another idea: let the police for it!  They did not exactly say that, but they reported on a security ramp up in England. Apparently in England hovering surveillance drones, camcorder-wielding traffic wardens and helmet cam-equipped officers aren't enough. London's city of Westminster is apparently looking to "install networked security cameras that can recognize parking permits and the plates of offending vehicles." Essentially, the system would enable parking violators to be ticketed without an actual human witnessing the offense, and it's being dubbed "the most significant application to be deployed on the Westminster's WiFi network." Eventually, the council plans to roll out about 250 of these sure-to-be-hated cameras, and it should ruin enough people's days to "pay for itself in two to three years."  So we might as well take the most of the situtation and let the police pay for our WiFi.  It is a win-win.

Techcrunch today came up with a great idea.  They call it the Holy Grail of Mobile Social Networks.
Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.
It could be done: we have cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth to solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones.  Techcrunch looks at 3 companies in Europe (US carriers do not allow user-based installs of java: Aka-Aki (Germany), Mobiluck (Paris) and Imity (Copenhagen). 

Satisfaction Unlimited is a neat idea about crowdsourcing support amongst one's customers. They do online support for Twitter, Pownce and Slideshare and have opened up a public beta.  It makes sense:  if you are a fan of a gadget you quickly become an expert yourself and make some money on this new skill.  Although I am under the impression that crowdsourcing's popularity as a jargon hype word is going down rapidly, recently there have been a few capital injections for crowdsourcing companies such as Powerreviews and Bazaarvoice.

Yesterday I said that If I see another announcement of yet another social network in my RSS reader, I was  going to vomit.  Industry analysts seem to think that the rule of three will apply and that only tree big ones will remain.  I am afraid this is 1.0 thinking.  Perhaps only three big elephants will remain but they will have no soul only a massive body.  The new social networks are coming bottom up and not top-down.  They are niche players such as iGuard (a network for people who take multiple medicine), Sermo (a network for physicians), TeeBeeDee (a network for +40), Circle Builder (a network for church networks). 

Talking about search engines: do you remember me speaking about Cuill, the super-stealth search hype from SF?  They were apparently self-financed.  Not true: Greylock Partners gave them 4m$.  You can do a lot of stealth marketing on 4m$.  

I have just installed Growl and I am very happy with the new notification software which makes your desktop dynamic but something struck an emotional chord in their message on their new version.

So with Growl 1.1 the single biggest feature took about 2 years to make. I made a point of making sure this was in the changelog, the knowledge that it took 2 years is something that should either make users proud that we worked on it for so long to perfect it, or scared that we did, or just go "wtf". This guy certainly did the wtf (on tuaw and on macupdate).

I hear you, guys, I hear you.

P.S If you do not know what to do this weekend, here is some homework.  Mashable came up with 5000 tools to make the most of the web.

http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online/