This is a pretty bare-bone POC app. While shutting down service when no internet makes sense, I am currently not doing it. But rest of the time, the service keeps listening on the queue all the time, even if there is no data in the queue.
I am wondering how much battery drain it could cause. Whatsapp also has this MessageService that keeps running all the time in the background & it has not been a battery hogger I guess.
Yup, thats right. Sorry for lame landing page. We have a prototype ready but before deciding to formally put it out, quickly wanted to run it down with a few people to see if there is actually some interest. Its largely inspired from the Buffer guy experiment to validate before he decide to finally build it - https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-wee...
Are you sure that your ISP can really figure that you are sharing internet with others at their end ?
Even if they do, legally speaking, will you sharing the internet connection on your name with your flatmate / family members would amount to breach of contract ? In all likelihood, your flatmate shares the cost of the internet with you. Isnt this case is exactly the same, somebody else using your internet & helping you offset some of your cost. Am I missing something here ?
1. There are no telco partners. We directly sell to consumers.
2. Data sharing & usage is metered. You accumulate then you use it elsewhere. Its called Karma GB.
3. We are also thinking of putting up a feature that lets you enable 'free wifi' if you are a cafe/restaurant owner and you need a DIY solution for your customers. Thinking of keeping it as paid feature.
Ya, you pay to buy Karma GB & use it at a Griggi WiFi. The idea is, if the concept becomes ubiquitous, people will be constantly looking for Griggi WiFi when they are close to residential/commercial establishments. You may have someone using your WiFi too :-).
We are also going to put a feature which would let people manage their free WiFi hotspot with Griggi as well.
The vision is to be the default WiFi sharing platform across the world. As a user, you just have your Griggi username, password & you use it to connect to every other WiFi hotspot.
The thing is, the Karma system directly collides with your goal of becoming ubiquitous.
I live in a small residential street where every neighbour who wants Internet has cable or fiber, so the chances of gaining significant Karma are very low. Let's also suppose I'm not a geek.
So, why would I pay $20 (+shipping?) for a new router, ask a friend to come by my house to install it, pay the electricity costs, etc, when in the end I'll still have to pay more to actually use it?
The Karma system eliminates the incentive for almost anyone except those living in busy streets to purchase and run their own router.
And this is helped by the fact that metered connections have all but disappeared around here, so a person with high Karma isn't actually "paying" anything for it, it's merely a rent that she can extract from the location of her property.
So I predict you'll mostly get users in city centers, which is where they are the less useful, since it's also where you can usually already get free or cheap Wifi.
You are mostly right. Everybody has an internet connection now a days. There is sizeable migratory population which could get benefitted from such a system as they dont need a new wifi connection every time they change place provided neighbours have Griggi. Its chicken & egg for sure.
What we are trying to do is similar to what Uber did to cars. Not everybody need to own a car. Similarly, not every household need a dedicated wifi connection when you can borrow some from neighbours.
Apart from city center, big apartments are another good case for Griggi. Big apartments in cities have a good number of migratory population.
Free WiFi hotspots that works is still a rarity in city centers of developing nations. Griggi is also an attempt to organize the unorganized free WiFi hotspots. A couple of guys are trying to solve this problem by building a mobile app that does the job of remembering username password of free wifi hotspots. Griggi is an attempt to solve the problem at the root. But I agree that it also makes things more challenging for us.
Im in the UK, and while I think this is a cool idea we already have BT Openzone/Fon available in a lot of places (It works in a similar way, except its free for anyone who is also on BT). We also have free 'Cloud' WiFi in lots of public places. I'm sure you'll have some success in areas without lots of WiFi hotspots, but you may struggle over here.
Its coovachilli with a community & book-keeping server that keeps an account of how much others using your wifi & how much you could use of others. Its very close to Friefunk project actually.
It should be able to support any linux based router OS. The router package is combination of WifiDog (http://wifidog.org), wshaper & a couple of home-grown scripts. The server side is authPuppy (http://www.authpuppy.org/) tightly integrated.
Most of the linux based OS will support the above packages. For others, we are yet to test.
Friefunk actually is a pretty cool project. Any such initiative would typically require quite a bit of community involvement if it has to grow organically. How big is the Friefunk community btw ?
So Ruby & RoR are two different beasts. If you come from hey-I-already-know-a-web-MVC background, you might skip learning Ruby & directly jump to learning RoR .
If you go RoR way - Michael Hartl's tutorial - http://railstutorial.org/ is probably the best place to start (I did that when I was starting with RoR). Codelearn - www.codelearn.org should be the next best.
I am wondering how much battery drain it could cause. Whatsapp also has this MessageService that keeps running all the time in the background & it has not been a battery hogger I guess.