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Blogging SXSW

There’s some excellent blogging going on at SXSW. Some are posting notes and analysis, Heath Row continues to publish transcripts within minutes each panel’s ending, and he promises to do a roundup with analysis when it’s all over.

I’ve barely been making it to any panels besides my own, because I’m really tightly scheduled, and the one panel I did make it to, a presentation by an exec from WayPort, was depressingly awful. His main thesis seemed to be that community networks would vanish due to their “unreliability” (in Manhattan, it’s easier to get an open WiFi signal than it is to get a cellphone signal — but this is a special definition of “reliability” meaning, “expensive” and “crappy”), and be replaced with expensive, managed networks in McDonalds restaurants in franchise ghettos on freeways near airports — these networks would be run by the phone companies, who would “own the customer.” This is the starkest, most distopian vision of a wireless future imaginable.

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