Four stories from the wireless frontier
At Conferences
It was clear Wi-Fi had transformed conferences when Qwest's then-CEO Joe Nacchio spoke at PC Forum in March 2002. Two audience members began to heckle in real-time blogs, and the crowd, reading along, turned against him.
Rael Dornfest
Emerging technology conference convention chair
O'Reilly & Associates
Portland, Oregon
"I chaired my first wireless conference, the Peer to Peer, in January 2000. The first thing I noticed was that people weren't disappearing back to their rooms to check email between sessions. They'd just sit down in one of the common areas and log on. Because everyone was gathering in the same place, there was a lot more spontaneous discussion. Also, the sessions themselves became more interactive. Audience members would instant-message or email each other during a presentation as well as check out Web sites and info mentioned by the speakers. It really raised the quality of the presentations.
I remember at the 2002 Emerging Technology conference, Danny O'Brien set up a panopticon - a digital map of the conference layout with little icons representing attendees. You could move your icon to show what session you were attending, so that people could find you. But perhaps the most interesting wireless app is EtherPEG - code that scans the local network, captures a bit of every image being transmitted to and from laptops, and creates a montage of what people are looking at. At the Emerging Tech conference last year, someone posted the results to his weblog. When Larry Lessig was talking, the images went quiet. He's such an amazing speaker that people focused just on him. During other speakers, the images flowed like wine!
Remember Clay Shirky's idea of the lazy Web - that if you want something built, you just mention it on the Net and someone will build it? Mention an idea at a Wi-Fi conference - Steven Johnson's concept of Google Share, for instance - and within 48 hours there'll be three or four implementations of it."
On the Farm
Farmers who once just relied on gut instinct are now crunching numbers while working the field. High-end tractors, equipped with sensors, onboard computers, and GPS, are driven by data ranging from temperature to amount of seed released.
Tony Thelen
Marketing manager
John Deere Ag Management Solutions
Urbandale, Iowa
"I grew up in Iowa, and you just don't typically think of Star Wars-type products in agriculture. So it was a shock for me when John Deere introduced its first wireless machine in 1996 - a combine that could measure the moisture of the crop and how much is harvested.
I was talking to a fellow the other day, and he said, 'I'll never buy that thing.' They think they don't need some whizbang satellite service. But you get them in the seat of the tractor, and after one trip down the field and back it's a done deal. At a basic level, they're less tired at the end of the day because AutoTrac uses differential GPS to determine the precise position of the tractor and then takes over the steering. Because the rows are more exact, the farmer isn't wasting seed or fertilizer by overlapping. One farmer told me he usually buys 11 percent more fertilizer and seed than he thinks he'll need, just to account for spillage and overlap. This year, he used our ag-management system and ended up with only 9 percent more chemicals than he needed.
Low prices and imports are forcing farmers to be more efficient. Then there's the weather. Planting, cultivating, and harvesting windows are shrinking, and farmers have to be that much more efficient. Basically, you have good weather and bad weather, and when it's good you've got to be up and running.One farmer I met was planting 24 hours a day to take advantage of the good weather. He could work right through the night because of the satellite-controlled steering. We can steer tractors via the sky!
All that information is transmitted wirelessly and available 24 hours a day. If a machine breaks down, the system emails the service department."
In Hospitals
Hospitals use wireless to help tame their barely controlled chaos, though they can't always use off-the-shelf gear. Boston's Beth Israel developed its own low-power cellular network that doesn't interfere with medical equipment.
Larry Nathanson
Director of emergency medicine informatics
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boston, Massachusetts
"I can't imagine doing my job without wireless. We have wireless laptops for ER registration. That means we can start working on patients as soon as the medics wheel them in. It used to be that we'd have very limited background knowledge on a patient until that data had been entered into the dashboard system. Now we have all of the critical information immediately because the medics give it to an intake nurse sitting right there with us in the ER core.
The major win with wireless in the emergency department is the cell phone service. I was against it in the beginning. I didn't want to have to interrupt a conversation with a patient to take a call. But I found it actually improved patient/doctor relations. I used to be paged when I didn't answer my office phone. Even if the question was very simple, I would have to leave the patient's room and then invariably I would run into two or three other people who needed to talk to me and it would take me 20 minutes to get back to finish the conversation. Now the cell phone rings - it's a mobile hospital extension - and I answer the question right there in the room and hang up. It's an interruption, but only 10 seconds, and I end up spending a lot more time with patients. Plus, when patients can hear that it's a critical medical issue that's causing the interruption, they tend to be less angry. The nurses love it, too, because they know they can reach me in a second.
I was a programmer before I went to medical school. So I sit there in the emergency room and I think, 'Wouldn't it be great if ?' Then I figure out how to do it. I'd love to do bedside electronic charting and order entry. That's my Holy Grail."
At the Theme Park
Where there are theme parks, there are lines. Universal Studios is helping to shorten the wait at the front gate using roaming ticket sellers armed with Wi-Fi-enabled devices and belt-mounted printers.
Brad Tyler
IT Project Manager
Universal Studios
Hollywood, California
"We rolled out the wireless ticketing system on the Fourth of July, probably our highest attendance day of the year. I gave a unit to one ticket agent and took her out into the lobby. It was packed, and we quickly found our first customer. Within minutes, we had people getting out of line and crowding around us. I knew at that point that we were onto something.
It really changes the job. If you're waiting in the line, you're tired, you're hot, and you just want to buy your ticket and get inside as quickly as possible. But when the ticket seller is outside the gate, and you can just walk up to him, the interaction becomes more of a conversation. The sellers have essentially become hosts. On many occasions, I have seen guests planning out their day with the ticket seller, asking about the best time to visit Jurassic Park or the best place to get pizza.
A lot of visitors aren't native English speakers. For them, the roaming ticket sellers have been great. When you're choosing from among 10 long lines, you have no idea who the seller is at the head of the queue. But our wireless sellers wear badges that identify them as bilingual.
Your first experience of the day is a lasting one. If you're waiting in line for half an hour and you're sweaty, that experience tends to stay with you. Any industry that deals with lines can apply this technology.
Desktop computer systems require the customer to wait in line - the data is anchored to the ground. Wireless allows you to go to the guest, rather than having the guest come to you. And wireless solutions are scalable: We can put 50 ticket sellers out there if we need to. The whole paradigm of waiting in long lines is gone."
