Funniest Wifi Names This Week

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Samuel

Every week the OpenSignal app picks up thousands of new Wi-Fi names. Rather than leave them languishing in our servers, we thought we’d share and analyse some of our favourites for you.

1) !!!DEADLY VIRUS!!! – Miami, Florida

OH MY GOD. GET DOWN. HE’S GOT A VIRUS. See, this Wi-Fi name is clever because it plays upon the fact that a virus can be both digital and biological. This name fundamentally succeeds because it exploits the fear we feel at living in a world where governments cultivate both smallpox and stuxnet side-by-side. It’s also buttressed by a really pleasingly enthusiastic number of exclamation marks. From now on six is the new standard. Four just doesn’t feel like trying any more.

 2) Hide Yo Kids Hide Yo Wifi – Detroit, Michigan

This is actually pretty good. I don’t even have to be nasty about this one – I can just be relaxed, smile appreciatively and pat myself on the back for a Friday well spent. This guy’s original, he’s funny, he’s referenced a popular meme. Frankly, I’d say he’s done pretty damn well. If anyone’s keeping score (which, let’s face it, I definitely am) I’d have to rate this Wi-Fi name pretty highly. Well done anonymous human on the outskirts of Detroit.

But… Wait. Where has that tiny voice of doubt come from? It is a rising whisper carried through my brain on a susurration of cynicism, scudding along my synapses until it roars into my inner ear, throwing my naivety and optimism off balance.  What if this isn’t original? What if it’s just a tired re-telling of the same joke reposted online a thousand times?  I sigh and query the Wi-Fi database. There are 797 Wi-Fi networks called ‘Hide Yo Kids Hide Yo Wifi’, of which this is the most recently named. Originality is a pre-modern conceit. I make another cup of tea.

yet another iteration

yet another iteration

 3) “The Pantry ;) ” – Santa Ana, California

Why is the pantry winking? Why is a pantry even being referenced? What on earth happened to the age of refrigeration? –  These are all questions that a superficial trawl through the list of newly collected Wi-Fi names cannot answer. Like an Old Street Hercule Poirot, I must work entirely with the clues in front of me. Like a Shoreditch Colin Powell I must consider both the known knowns and the unknown knowns.  And it is with the quiet-voiced confidence of a Hoxton Walter Cronkite that I now present the most plausible theory to you:

What we have stumbled upon is but one piece in a wider game. A game of flirtation and seduction – nuanced and influenced by the imprint of an antique sexual mores, enacted against the backdrop of an aristocratic domesticity. A game inspired by the excitement and tribulations shared with West Coast America through the medium of Julian Fellowes’ dark masterpiece Downtown Abbey. Meet me in the pantry, wink, announces the Wi-Fi name, and for one brief moment we are at Highclere – free of modern distractions, locked in an erotic game with the pantry at its epicentre.

Next Week: Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca as told through a series of Epson printer error messages.

4) No Free Internet 4 Chowz – Detroit, Michigan

Yeah, that sounds fair enough. Get your own damn internet Chowz! Or at the very least pay for it.  Is that really so much to ask? As far as Wi-Fi name manifestos go, I’ve got to say that this one is considerably more relatable than noted classics e947g_Wifi or hotspot_guest13. You can defend e947g_Wifi as much as you like, but I’m just not convinced it strikes the right note with voters.

 5) I’m Batman – San Jose, California

I grow tired of this. No, you’re not Batman. Besides, Batman would obviously have delegated Wi-Fi installation to Alfred who would quite clearly have called it something boring and non-revelatory like ‘Wayne Manor Wi-Fi’. However, I approve of this Wi-Fi name as it reminded me of this. Again, just to be clear to whoever named this Wi-Fi, you are not the Batman.

 

 

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Announcing the Launch of WeatherSignal

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Samuel

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We’re pleased to announce the launch of a new app, designed to do for weather what OpenSignal already does for cell phone coverage. WeatherSignal is a new way of approaching weather data collection using native Android phone sensors. The ubiquity of the modern smartphone means that for the first time it is possible to collect weather data at a level and frequency unavailable to current weather station networks. We hope that by collecting and displaying this data we will be able to improve the granularity of weather readings – leading to more accurate localised forecasts in the future.

The WeatherSignal app is designed to help the user get the most out of the new sensors that are included in their phone, by displaying all their readings in one easily accessible place. The app then shares this data with us, allowing us to create a live map of weather, temperature and pressure readings – telling you what the weather is like at that moment, anywhere in the world where we have users.

We’re really excited to build a community of users who can help us make weather prediction more accurate in the long run. We hope that being able to use your phone to collect live sensor readings will be both useful and interesting for our users. Users of the Galaxy S4 (the most complete phone in terms of sensors ever produced) will be able to take readings of temperature, pressure, humidity, light intensity and magnetic flux, and compare their readings over time. Other Android users will be able to get a lot of those as well, depending on how old their smartphone is. Most importantly of all, you’ll never be left wondering ‘is it sunny in the park?’ again.

One of the most exciting things that we have discovered is that we can collect temperature from phones that don’t have an external thermometer. We can’t release the full details of how we do this because we’re still awaiting scientific journal publication but the rough idea is that we’ve come up with an algorithm which can translate battery temperature into ambient temperature. For each user obviously this will be a bit approximate but when spread over a crowd it correlates extremely well and means that even phones without any of the new sensors will be able to contribute to the data collection, as well as being able to see the weather map in-app. We will also be using environment fingerprinting techniques to work our whether a user is indoors or outdoors, which will reduce the chance of false sensor readings affecting the weather map.

WeatherSignal is a revolutionary new way of collecting and displaying weather data. By becoming a part of our community you’ll be able to get the most out of your phone’s new features and be a part of helping to improve the way we understand weather and how it is affected by local factors. You can download the app here.

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Using Big Data

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Gabe

While signal testing my way through Omaha a friend in Kansas City, Missouri got in touch and let me know about KC’s City Camp (Un)Conference, happening that weekend at the Kauffman Foundation. She knew I would be in town and wanted to know if I’d be down for talking about what I was doing. Of course I said yes and set to planning a 15 minute talk about some of the things I’ve come across in my travels.

Un-conferences involve a lot of large post-its.

Un-conferences involve a lot of large post-its.

Kansas City is fast becoming a model for industry-to-technology civic transition. It’s not a huge city – #37 in US population and not even in the top 100 as far as population density. But a series of forward thinking leaders and elected officials have embraced an emerging tech sector and made it a center of what the midwest has dubbed the “Silicon Prairie”. A huge helping hand has come from being chosen as one of the first Google Fiber cities, promising a gigabit of bandwidth for a price comparable with standard (and much slower) cable services. Also leading the way into the future are initiatives like Code for America, Homes for Hackers, and Launch KC that are just coming into fruition in many cities twice the size. But enough of the tourism pamphlet, what was I going to talk about for 15 minutes?

Millie Dishes on Big Data at KC City Camp

Millie Dishes on Big Data at KC City Camp

One of the big focuses of my friend Millie Crossland’s (‪@milliecross‬) talk is the city’s open data initiative. As information geeks, we talked a lot about what it means to have all those data points out there – transit info, crime data, public utility maps, 311, etc. Transparency is a big factor. For a government official to be able to say with confidence that any of their district’s budget or crime info is out for all to see is a huge step in the right direction for our democratic process. On a micro level it allows for individual citizens to participate in a more verifiable way. For someone reporting a pothole on their street, the knowledge that their complaint, and their neighbors complaints, have been logged, responded to via text or email, and scheduled to be fixed on a specific timeline is much more satisfying than leaving another anonymous message on a voicemail system.

But back to me, what happens with the kind of data that I’m collecting? The two main goals are pretty clear. OpenSignal wants a baseline for their crowdsourced coverage data and TechHive wants to rate the best nationwide carriers for 3G and 4G service. Clearly this is information that is useful to consumers and to the marketing departments in whichever companies are rated highly.

We are at a point in civic data collection in many cities where we are not lacking for information, but for useful ways to parse all this information. City Data Hackathons have become a standard celebration of new datasets, but to me what that really means is that cities and private organizations alike are saying “Please help us make sense of this! We know it’s useful… somehow.” The same goes for all the mobile carrier and signal data I’ve been gathering in my trip across the country.

In my talk, I explained what I was doing traveling across the country and I opened it up to the audience: “How might mobile coverage data be useful on a wider scale?”

One idea was to make coverage data available and easily accessible to EMS, on-call medical and remote healthcare workers. This could allow them to choose the best communication system for their area. For instance, in highly coverage-variable or wide rural areas, it may be most useful to have both an AT&T and a Verizon device available to send and receive critical messages. During the recent Boston bombing, on-call doctors were summoned with vague garbled voice calls and text messages (“mass-casualty…. we need you….”), a redundancy system wherein a message is sent to duplicate devices across common local carriers may have helped get messages across overloaded lines.

Cell phone belt

To be honest, I’m not sure if it would work or even make things worse, or just ensure on-call doctors looked like this.

Another idea that came up was for better legislative action where the telecom industry is concerned. Back in 1913, access to basic landline telephony was legislated as a universal right in the United States “ensuring that virtually every resident has access to local exchange wireline telephone service” (Bluhm & Bernt, pdf). State by state, with more and more houses relying only on mobile phones, that legislation is being backpedaled, with the expectation that the market direction of increased mobile use will fill the gap. This might be okay if every place in the country had a legislative guarantee of some kind of cellular service OR landline service, but there are no moves in that direction, which means entire rural areas of the country could slowly blink off the communication grid – areas that could be predicted pretty easily by analyzing something like OpenSignals heat maps.

What’s your idea? Where do you see all these data points leading us?

Let us know over Facebook or Twitter!

You can follow my travels on Facebook (OpenSignal Gabe), FourSquare (OpenSignal) where I’ll be checking in periodically. I’ll also be blogging some more about my epic road trip here on the OpenSignal Blog.

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This Week’s Funniest Wi-Fi Names

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Samuel

Every day the OpenSignal app picks up thousands of new Wi-Fi names. Rather than leave them languishing in our servers, we thought we’d share some of our favourites with you. This week our theme is ‘The Neighbours’.

1) Serial killer neighbor watchingU – Anaheim, California

The best thing about these ‘neighbour’ Wi-Fi names is that they have an exciting ambiguity to them. On the one hand this guy could be a neighbourhood hero, holed up in his house with only his Wi-Fi name to broadcast to the outside world. He might sit there day and night, nervously watching the blinking green light on his router, ceaselessly warning newcomers about the real and present dangers of the Anaheim Axeman’s famously unyielding stare. Sure, he could just call the cops. He could just move away. But he is the hero that Anaheim deserves… although not necessarily the one it needs.

On the other hand, this might be the Wi-Fi of one of the most exhibitionist serial killers ever. The kind who has a twitter account and uses ‘#murder’ A LOT.

This is how he watches

This is how he watches

2) My Neighbors have ugly kids – St Louis, Missouri

Whoah, whoah, whoah, the kids? He went for the kids? Come on man, let’s calm down. Take 5. Drink a Snapple. That was uncalled for. No one wants this (seriously though, what even is this?) to get ugly. The best thing about this Wi-Fi name is that it’s just so passive aggressive. The guy doesn’t come right out and say ‘yo, neighbours, your kids are UGLY’, he just leaves it hanging there, like a WLAN encrypted note floating in the ether. If you’re going to insult someone’s family at least come out and do it direct. Or, you know, via Wi-Fi.

Dwight, you got this?

3) Zombies ate my neighbors – Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Seriously. Dude. The zombies are going to SEE THIS. It might be too late for the neighbours, but you still have time to save yourself. Any second now the zombies are going to pick up your Wi-Fi on their Windows Phones (amirite? who’s with me?). Man, I need to get a laughter track for this blog.

Also, anyone who clicked on the Windows Phone link deserves exactly what they got.

4) don’t covet thy neighbors wifi – Minneapolis (again).

What better defence against the zombies currently rampaging through downtown Minneapolis than getting back to biblical basics? Sure, the coveting of Wi-Fi might not have made the top 10 back in Moses’ time, but right now it’s a pressing issue. I like the idea of a Wi-Fi based moral education, I just hope this guy is dedicated enough to keep all eleven commandments rotating through a weekly cycle. Maybe he should move to Anaheim and get ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’ broadcasting across the airwaves. I know a guy up there who could sure use some help.

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iOS app bug fix

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Samuel

A few weeks ago we launched the OpenSignal app for iOS. The app was received extremely positively and we got a lot of very enthusiastic feedback from our community. Unfortunately we quickly became aware of a bug that was affecting some of our users, many of whom e-mailed in to let us know about it. Those affected by the bug reported that the compass on their dashboard was empty, and that they couldn’t see any nearby cell towers or Wi-Fi points on the map. Once we realised something was wrong we made it our top priority to work out what was going on. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve isolated the problem, and the new version containing the bug fix is now live on the app store.

Obviously there were always going to be problems with releasing any new app, so a big thank you to everyone for being so patient and for responding to our call for bug reports. Please let us know whether you encounter any further issues by e-mailing me at samuel[at]opensignal[dot]com

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What Consumers Want

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Samuel

What is it that people look for when buying a phone? Based on a recent study done by Compete and Google it appears that what chiefly matters to people is the device they are getting and how much they are getting it for. While this seems like a very obvious point to make (of course people want the lowest phones at the cheapest prices) – it is still interesting to note that the actual carrier the phone comes on is seen as increasingly of secondary importance.

The evidence for this comes from the apparently contradictory statistic that 47% of shoppers now consider more than one carrier when buying a phone. To put that 47% figure into perspective, it represents an increase of 134% since 2011. Brand loyalty has been undermined by how easy it now is to switch between carriers, and the fact that they are increasingly undifferentiated . While the fact that people are spending more time choosing between carriers might suggest that it is because they are being afforded more importance, all it shows is that what people chiefly care about is the phone they are getting, rather than who is driving its cellular connection.

The homogenization of operators that this report hints at suggests that attempts by operators to differentiate along extraneous lines have largely been unsuccessful. In the UK, for instance, O2 have largely based their brand strategy on offering priority concert and event tickets to their users, which they do as part of advertising deals struck with large venues. However, benefits such as 2-for-1 cinema tickets or the chance to win a handbag, seem to have much less of an impact on consumers than model price differentiation.

Seriously, who cares?

Seriously, who cares?

There is, however, one point at which the report suggest that consumers are paying attention to the differences between operators. Consumers who say that 4G availability is important to them has risen 31% year-on-year. Interestingly, this fits in with the idea that consumers aren’t interested in extras and just want the best phone possible. Connectivity, signal coverage and data speeds are a huge part of what makes a phone an effective and rewarding device and consumers who view 4G as important appear to recognise this. Once network performance comparison gets easier between carriers, it will be interesting to see whether or not this has an impact on consumer behaviour. At OpenSignal we’ve compiled the biggest database of crowdsourced coverage data in the world – and we hope that one day checking maps like ours will be standard practice when it comes to buying a phone. People aren’t interested in sticking or twisting with their operators based on the lure of free cinema tickets, they want to do it based on price and connection reliability. Up until now consumers have only had the means to check between prices – that’s something we’re trying to change.

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An apology to our Korean users

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Samuel

Much like everything else at OpenSignal, we crowdsource the translations we use in our Android app. What this means is that we make a list of phrases and words available on the Internet, and people voluntarily translate them for us. This has generally worked wonderfully, with our users supplying some really excellent translations – and we are very grateful to them. Sometimes, however, the system doesn’t work as intended. One of the downsides to crowdsourcing our app translations is that often we don’t have the time or capability to check them. We have speakers of most major European languages on our team, so we tend to glance over those, but beyond that we rely completely on the people who have very generously given up their time to make the app understandable all over the world.

This morning, our attention was drawn to the Korean translation of the app. Under the ‘Terms and Conditions’ section, the anonymous Internet translator had written ‘all Korean people are stupid’. Judging by the reviews on the Korean version of Google Play, quite a few people were understandably offended by this. We’d like to apologise to anyone who found what was written offensive, and, until we can source a more reliable translation, we have changed the default language to English to stop it affecting any more of our users. We’d like to stress that no one involved with OpenSignal was responsible for what was written, and just hope that no one took it too seriously.

We haven’t had any reports of problems with our other Android app translations, and we have generally been really impressed with their quality. If you do notice anything offensive then please do get in touch and we’ll fix it right away. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed translations and again, we can only apologise to anyone who was offended by what was written in the Korean translation.

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The Importance of Outliers

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Gabe

OpenSignalGabe at the Hoover DamMy mission roaming the country checking carrier strength so far has taken me to six large metropolitan areas. I love cities for all they have to offer, and for the purpose of broad data collection they are the most useful; after all, 79% of all people in the US now live in a major metropolitan area.* But for me, some of the more interesting data is found in the outliers. With the majority of us living in cities, we tend to forget that there are places that are still off the grid.

As Simon Andersson mentioned in his recent post (Africa’s Mobile Explosion, February 2013) Africa’s previously under-developed land-based telecom network has paved the way for mobile phones to be ‘the basis for development, rather than its result.’ From a planning perspective, rural areas in the US are not particularly different. Areas with under developed land-based connectivity have a lot to gain from mobile network availability. Like broadband availability, mobile connectivity is going to be a major factor in the opportunities afforded to those living and working in geographically outlying areas. Several separate studies have shown that high speed broadband in rural counties led to statistically significant growth in total employment, wages and number of new businesses (for details take a look at Measuring Broadband’s Economic Impact and Broadband Internet’s Value for Rural America). It’s likely that high-speed mobile data connectivity is going to follow the same trend. However, before the economic opportunities can follow, rural areas first need service.

Mobile Reception at the Hoover Dam Chart The above graph is showing average connection speeds in kbps at the Hoover Dam, which straddles the Colorado River in Clark County, Nevada and Mohave County, Arizona.

Just for fun, I ran some speed tests at the Hoover Dam on my way from Las Vegas to Phoenix. The rough terrain and relative lack of population means that this is quite the outlier. While I’m sure the power plant has land-based connectivity, for an average tourist with a phone the situation is highly variable. For someone in an emergency the best bet is a text message to someone with a better connection. As you can see, if you are with AT&T you are up the Colorado River without a paddle. (This confirms @paulkbiba‘s informal test, which he posted about on my TechHive post). The decision to cover a particular area is usually done by a simple cost benefit analysis carried out by each carrier individually. Essentially, the denser the user population, the more likely it is that a carrier can recover their installation and maintenance costs and still make a profit. In this area, the majority of users are just passing through, either on vacation or like me, driving elsewhere, leaving the local communities, dam workers, and emergency services in the dust.

I know first hand that access to the Internet provides substantially increased economic opportunities. As a tech-inclined high school student in Stanfordville, NY (current pop. 2,246), I could not get online fast enough – and at the time we were talking a dial up modem with Prodigy. It’s humbling to realize that in the absence of that singular connectivity, slow as it was, I would not have had 95% of the opportunities that I did, including the biggest kickstarter of income elevators, a college education. Looking forward, I see 3G mobile service as the dialup of the future. There are kids growing up in rural areas of Nebraska and Nigeria alike who are going to get the chance at an education because of what they are reading about on Wikipedia right now.

You can follow my travels on Facebook (OpenSignal Gabe), FourSquare (OpenSignal) where I’ll be checking in periodically. I’ll also be blogging some more about my epic road trip here on the OpenSignal Blog.

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iOS app bug fix is on its way!

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Samuel

Soon after releasing OpenSignal for iOS, it became clear that there was a bug affecting some of our users. I mentioned the bug in the blog post announcing the iOS launch and it was great to have so many users get back to us – reporting problems, and giving us the info we needed to work out what was causing the bug. So thank you everyone!

The bug was affecting both the dashboard and the Towers/Wi-Fi maps. All affected users had the same problem, the compass didn’t work and the app was claiming that there were no towers or Wi-Fi points near them, which was clearly not the case. We’re delighted to say that after testing, and using the info supplied by our community, we’ve been able to submit a new fix to Apple. The update containing the bug fix will be published as soon as possible, depending on how long it takes for Apple to ok it, and should be out in the next few days.

Thanks again for reporting problems to us. This new version should fix all the current issues, so thanks for being patient. If you do experience any further problems then get in touch with us via Twitter or Facebook and we’ll get back to you right away.

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What Crowdsourcing Really Means

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Samuel

Last week, Reddit failed to find the Boston bombers. This failure has been widely decried as a ‘failure of crowdsourcing”, and not just a small failure, a gross one. Nothing that Reddit did helped to catch the bombers, and the product of its much-publicized efforts was to denounce and then misidentify at least one innocent bystander. The results of this were obviously negative, both internal to the investigation (the police were forced to release pictures of the suspects earlier than intended to help quell the online furore) and external (in that entirely innocent people were wrongly labelled as terrorists). While what happened on Reddit was certainly a ‘crowd-failure’, it wasn’t a failure of crowdsourcing for one important reason – it wasn’t crowdsourcing at all.

Crowdsourcing uses a mass of separate individuals as an organic computer to solve a specific set of problems or questions. There are two distinct kinds of crowdsourcing; the first is active, which makes use of mass cognitive surplus (brain power not otherwise employed meaningfully, a term coined by Clay Shirky) to solve a problem. The second form is passive (like an app collecting data in the background during normal use), which repurposes existing behaviour and uses it to collect information without the agent having to do anything different. For crowdsourcing to function, it is necessary for the ‘organic computer’ to be issued with a set of instructions. Much like any computer, the ‘crowd’ needs a user.

Reddit set out to compile evidence and to form a collective judgement. This was Reddit functioning as a kind of public sphere (a place for the deliberation of evidence in order to form conclusions), rather than an organic computer. In order to clarify this point, I’m going to give an example of how Reddit users could have been used to crowdsource information on the Boston bombings:

The FBI make a PSA asking for help going through photos of the marathon looking for anyone carrying a backpack and wearing a backwards baseball cap. Tens of thousands of independent Redditors take up the call, trawling through photos and identifying men who fit these characteristics and sending them to the FBI.

This would have been active crowdsourcing working perfectly, using the cognitive surplus of thousands of people to analyse a data set. Even if none of the results helped to catch the bombers, the process would still have been a success. The crucial elements here that make it different from what actually happened, and therefore qualify it as crowdsourcing, are that there is an external source for the problem to be solved, and that there is no (or limited) discussion between the agents at work solving the problem.

Crowdsourcing works best when the crowd is completely atomised, when it is a collection of independent agents working to a clearly defined set of parameters. Once the crowd-computer can talk amongst itself it becomes less efficient (in that certain data points get reflected and overemphasised through the discussion) and the moment it starts setting itself the questions, becoming both user and processor, it stops being a computer at all. That’s the point at which crowdsourcing stops and a rough kind of public democratic discourse takes over.

What happened on Reddit wasn’t crowdsourcing because it wasn’t a crowd being used to solve an external problem. It was communicative action at work, a group-discussion aimed at forming a positive conclusion. Crowdsourcing was created by the Internet, what happened on Reddit was simply enabled by it. What happened on Reddit was an old phenomenon using a newish medium, crowdsourcing is a newish phenomenon using a newish medium – it is important not to confuse the two.

Many thanks to /u/OhioFury for his post on Reddit and Charles Arthur in the Guardian for stimulating some of the thoughts (and supplying some of the info) that led to me writing this post.

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