RedButton Free WiFi Product Preview

We are officially launching our new RedButton Free WiFi Product on the 9th of June and it is available for preview. The product has been specifically built to cater for the needs of the hospitality industry, its all about boosting traditional sales and brand loyalty. Restaurateurs and hoteliers have the control needed to use free Internet as a flexible and effective tool to boost their business.

The following picture of a display outside Wimpy Rondebosch serves as a prime example of how RedButton's Free WiFi product can be used. In this case, since Wimpy is generally chock-a-block serving their legendary breakfasts in the mornings and burgers at lunch time, management decided to make the automatic 50MB free wifi allocation available after 3pm only.

The advantage of an automatic allocation is that little intervention is needed from restaurant staff. Should fine grained tracking be required one can correlate product sales with the free Internet allowance by using venue specific vouchers - for example you get a free 50MB voucher if you order a drink.

We've worked hard on this product. Earlier editions, without all the features currently available but with the fundamentals, have been in operation for nearly eight months now. In the process we have spent time listening to what venue owners have been telling us, listening to what their needs are, rather than what we think they are.

With this product we hope to have once again shown our commitment to flexibility and adapting to market needs. Thanks for listening.

Three WiFi Gadgets That Will Change Your Life

In this grandiosely entitled post we have a look at three WiFi gadgets that could make your mobile life easier, or just help you glow in the dark.

Eye-Fi - Wireless Memory Cards

Eye-Fi produces memory cards with WiFi built in. In essence you are able to upload your pictures automatically to your PC or favourite photo sharing website (e.g. Flickr, Facebook) once you come within range of your regular WiFi network(s). The service that allows for automatic uploading to photo sharing websites, called WebShare, sounds particularly useful. Imagine all the pictures you would finally be able to share effortlessly instead of leaving them on your hard-drive or worse, still on your camera after months, gathering virtual dust.

Eye-Fi comes in 3 versions, Home, Share and Explore. With Home you can upload to your PC at home, share throws in access to WebShare and finally Explore gives you geotagging functionality and complimentary hotspot access in the USA. We can't wait to get our hands on an Eye-Fi SD card, the Share option looks like the one to go for since with Home the pictures will still be stuck on you PC only it will largely happen transparently.

It seems Eye-Fi SD cards have not yet reached South African e-tailers, search results on Digital Planet, kalahari.net and pricecheck.co.za only showed plain vanilla SD cards. The only place we could find Eye-Fi was here on Amazon.com.

Unfortunately Eye-Fi cards will not work with any hotspot network, such as RedButton's network, that require the user to log in via a web browser splash screen (see this Eye-Fi FAQ entry). Allowing access without a browser based login process is something we are not currently working on but we may in future.

Hotspot Detectors / Wi-Fi Finders

There are a number of manufacturers that have released Hotspot Detectors that allow you to check for signal without having to power on your laptop. Why would you ever need one? Well hotspots are not always very well advertised, for various reasons, and these devices make it easy to pick one up. Imagine being in the middle of some town square in a town you don't know and you need to get connected fast and free if possible, you'd look for open networks on your Wi-Fi Finder and probably head to the coffee shop that tops the list in terms of signal strength.

The ZyXel AG-225H Wi-Fi Finder is one that looks half decent. It can do more than just find WiFi, it takes the logical next step and functions as a WiFi adapter.

And Finally...

If Eye-Fi and Wi-Fi Finders don't work for you, why not get the ultimate, a WiFi Detector Shirt? It sports glowing animated bars on the front that dynamically change as the surrounding WiFi signal strength fluctuates. Walk down any WiFied city street at night, perhaps throwing caution to the wind with a quick sprint down a dark alley, and you'll be lighting up like a christmas tree.

Beware the flood trojan - amongst other programs lurking in the shadows

From time to time we have users who have background programs consuming portions of their credit balances at unusually high rates. While some of this traffic is legitimate in the sense that the user may have at some time given their consent to for example automatic operating system updates, in some cases a flood trojan has used the user's computer without their knowledge or will. This is one of many security issues Internet users have to be aware of, irrespective of their service provider.

So what is a flood trojan? In fact what is a trojan? Will RedButton try to punt a PC Security Suite? First lets go into what they can do by way of an example. While assisting in diagnosing a problem on a particular client's laptop, our records showed that it managed to upload 310MB in only 24 minutes. To get a better idea of what was happening we gave the customer a free 10MB, asked him to log in and closely monitored his data flow. It turned out that all 10MB were used up in no less than 33 seconds by some program sending data to a particular Internet server whose hostname ends with "static.theplanet.com". A google search on this topic quickly revealed that a trojan virus was at fault, one with a demonstrably insatiable appetite. It was like feeding a crocodile with goulash. While this illustrates the high upload speed of the underlying broadband connection, consider that background programs such as trojans can consume large amounts of data that a subscriber had paid for without their consent. Flood trojans add insult to injury by using the hijacked connection for malicious activities.

We are going to skip the details of what trojans and particularly flood trojans are, click here to read more, the gist of this post is that the need to continuously secure your desktop to ensure its integrity cannot be overstated. Without a secure desktop you run the risk of having your bandwidth used up and in some cases this can happen at lighting speed. There are some basic security practices that you need to adhere to if you have an operating system such as Windows XP

• Make sure your firewall is enabled
• Make sure your virus scanner is updated and scans your PC regularly - if you don't have one, get one
  
• Make sure you install operating system updates - security holes are often fixed in these
  

There are many anti-virus programs out there, but one free version you could start with is AVG Free, another tool you might want to use is Spybot Search & Destroy.

If the above practices seem like too much hassle, consider an alternative operating system like Ubuntu Linux, it may just be that you can be even more productive with an operating system that is arguably inherently more secure.

Finally please note that RedButton cannot be held liable for any loss or damage incurred through viruses and trojans on customers' computers as their security and administration is clearly beyond our control. This is stated clearly in our terms and conditions that every RedButton customer agreed to (available here).