Categories
Innovation

Free internet access on the train in Brisbane

Queensland Rail will be offering south-east Queensland commuters free wireless access to the internet from early 2010, according to the Minister for Transport, Rachel Nolan. This access will use spare capacity on the infrastructure used to transmit real-time video footage from surveillance cameras to QR’s control room at Central Station.

One thing from that story that caught my attention was this:

She (Rachel Nolan) said people living near train lines or stations would not be able to tap into the free internet service because it would be “firewalled”.

That would have to be one pretty intelligent firewall! Here are some actual possibilities to guard against free-loaders. One not so attractive way to do it would be to set a limit on daily downloads. The theory is that there’s only so much you could download on the longest possible trip on the QR network in south-east Queensland (say, Gold Coast to Nambour, or something like that). The other more attractive solution, in my opinion, would be to tie usage to go cards. Your internet session starts when you swipe on at the beginning of your journey, and it finishes when you swipe off. There’d be some kind of web-based login procedure like you get at hotels and elsewhere, where you enter your go card number to gain access; or regular users could have the option of registering the MAC address of their wireless card with QR/Translink to skip the login procedure. Given that it still takes ages for a credit card top up to find its way onto my go card, I don’t hold out much hope for QR/Translink being able to implement this particular solution within the already very optimistic time frame of early 2010. But I do think it’s a reasonable long term solution. It might even help Translink in their quest to move more commuters over to the go card from paper tickets.

Categories
Innovation

Social Radar: Twitter on top

There are many ways to measure brand awareness. As in most analyses, you shouldn’t rely on any single metric to determine which brands have most mindshare. Having said that, the Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands ranking is interesting. It measures conversations and web chatter. According to the ranking, Twitter comes out on top. Google comes in second, and Facebook makes it into fifth place. One of Twitter’s major competitors, FriendFeed, doesn’t even make it into the top 50 by this particular measure (did Scoble back the wrong horse and Kawasaki the right one?). But this ranking didn’t just include “social networking” brands. Rather, it was a survey of how frequently any brand was mentioned in a collection of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. Interestingly, such well known brands as Coke and McDonald’s fell outside the top 50. I imagine this is because these brands no longer have novelty value. They are ingrained in our culture. Really the only time we could be bothered blogging about these sorts of brands is when controversy strikes, or when someone makes a provocative movie like Super Size Me.

So what does this mean? It means that right now Twitter is hot. People are talking about it, and that’s the best that Biz Stone and company could hope for. The big question for Twitter is how to convert all the talk into more users, and ultimately revenue. If they do manage to do this, it would be nice to know how they did it!