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Microsoft Puts Free Portable WiFi In Forbes Magazine Print Issues
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI wish I had a copy, I feel like the parts could be used for some fun hacking projects.
- losethos 13y agoI'm not confrontational, just pushing God and claiming my turf. Glorify God. God says... 6:22 And the whole house he overlaid with gold, until he had finished all the house: also the whole altar that was by the oracle he overlaid with gold. 6:23 And within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree, each ten cubits high. 6:24 And five cubits was the one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the other wing of the cherub: from the uttermost part of the one wing unto the uttermost part of the other were ten cubits. 6:25 And the other cherub was ten cubits: both the cherubims were of one measure and one size. 6:26 The height of the one cherub was ten cubits, and so was it of the other cherub. ---- Is TempleOS Done? I have a vision of a pleasant, massively souped-up C64, for freakish not-shallow people who can look past low res. The draw of God is good though. The Bible speaks of stumbling blocks. The door-keeper to some things is condition of the heart.
- craze3 13y agoThis is perhaps one of the most awesome publicity stunts I've ever seen. I wonder if this type of tactic is going to catch on. Can you imagine if each copy of Wired shipped with 30 days of free wi-fi? Their subscriber count would shoot through the roof!
- meatsock 13y agoentertainment weekly shipped an issue with a full phone inside, a trend i've been hoping for since the first time a blinking LED was included in a cover as a promo. http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/ http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/
- bestham 13y agoIt would shoot trough he roof because you get more than what you pay for, and that is not economically sustainable in the long term. It's like saying: Imagine if the price of a new car was $200, they would sell millions!
- bestham 13y agoVery clever, but I hope there is a way to make use of the electronics after the time when Microsoft wants to pay for the data have passed. Our ecosystem cannot sustain this short product life-cycles.
- D9u 13y agoI imagine that one would merely need to purchase a T-Mobile "Data Pass" to maintain the WiFi connection.
- D9u 13y agoI take issue with the definition of "15 days free internet." I happen to own one of T-Mobile's "4G" mobile hotspots, and I pay $50 for a whopping 5 GB of data. The "Data Pass" I purchase from Team Mo' Bull is good for 2 months... As if anyone on today's internet could make 5 GB of data last 60 days!??? If I'm not careful I can go through 5 GB data in 72 hours. Thus, if a consumer with one of these magazine WiFi hotpots were to use, say 20 GB data in 15 days, will overage charges apply?
- danso 13y agoI can't wait till the day that a magazine comes with a free portable 3D printer to print and redistribute copies of the magazine. That'd be a nice publicity stunt for the printer maker. Edit: seriously though, I'd hate to be the unsuspecting subscriber who tries to bring his Forbes issue onto an airplane Edit: if I were Microsoft and I wanted the most bang for the publicity buck, I'd sell these issues exclusively at airport newsstands
- icki 13y agowouldn't a 2d printer be more appropriate for redistribution of a magazine?
- DigitalTurk 13y agoobviously you'd use the 3D printer to print the 2D printer that prints the magazine
- hamburglar 13y agoObviously the 3d printer version would manufacture its own paper. :P
- BrentOzar 13y agoIf you wanted to run a MITM attack against executives with high-value accounts, this would be a heck of a way to do it.
- jonknee 13y agoHow would that work? Anything of value would be encrypted and out of your purview.
- olefoo 13y agosslstrip attacks could be made to work, all sorts of things are possible if you own the network. If you have your target picked out, and know the stack he's using and what his home network policies are, you can flash an official looking help page with instructions for disabling specific security features "If you're having problems with your connection."
- jonknee 13y agoWell sure, but that's a lot different than just controlling the network (which someone else is always doing).
- mpclark 13y agoThey seem to have neglected to mention how many copies got this treatment. That would be interesting to know. Next month: A free car with your print magazine* *selected subscribers only
- stephengillie 13y agoThe following month will feature a free copy of the Oprah magazine* *selected subscribers only
- TwiztidK 13y agoAs a Forbes subscriber, my issue did not come with free Wifi. Needless to say, I'm bummed.
- Evbn 13y agoMore bummed than getting Forbes magazine in the mail every month? Wow.
- andyjsong 13y agoI bought 5 copies for vanity reasons at a local bookstore in Mountain View. None of them had the wi-fi hotspot. :(
- yread 13y agoI hate this. All the electronic waste, batteries and whatnot for a 15 day trial. I hope such a thing wouldn't be allowed in EU with the stricter waste laws
- adventured 13y agoWe better stop making many forms of new electronics then, to limit waste. Just imagine how many millions of USB sticks have been thrown in the trash in just the last year alone, as they become outdated by newer USB sticks that store twice as much at half the cost while wasting just as many physical resources! Do you really need a new iPhone? No you do not. The iPhone 4 will do perfectly fine for now (according to some random bureaucrat), so the iPhone 5 should be illegal to sell until further notice.
- agravier 13y agoYour arguments strike me as a good illustration of why we need more recyclable electronics and more recycling initiatives.
- 542458 13y agoRecycling isn't much of a solution. It's like smoking filtered cigarettes vs unfiltered - it's better than the alternative, but you'll still end up dead in the long term. Short of glass, most materials recycle with very low efficiencies. Even aluminium, which is often touted as being "highly recyclable" usually only reclaims around 85% of the input.
- agravier 13y agoAlright, but realistically, I don't see "no waste" economies coming up and staying up for good. So, better work hard on those filters than shrug it off.
- jlgreco 13y agoIsn't aluminum particularly profitable to recycle, even with a low recovery, since it requires absurd amounts of power to smelt the stuff in the first place? Aluminum is incredibly abundant in the earth's crust, but from what I understand it is the poster-boy for recycling because of the extreme difference in power costs between melting it down, and making it in the first place.
- mtgx 13y agoA few months ago there was a full Android phone in a magazine: http://www.geek.com/mobile/fully-functional-android-phone-embedded-in-entertainment-weekly-1520099/ http://www.geek.com/mobile/fully-functional-android-phone-em...
- emgeee 13y agoDoesn't the magazine make a pretty poor enclosure for the electronics inside? I feel like people generally consider magazines to be disposable and mistreat them but it doesn't seem like a good idea to do that to what looks like a Li-poly battery.
- renanbirck 13y agoThis begs for a teardown for possible reuse after the 15-day trial.
- sammorris12 13y agoPrint is saved!
- cs702 13y agoWe all knew that as the cost and size of hardware decreases, in the future we would have computing and connectivity everywhere. What I never expected is that computing and connectivity would come hand-in-hand with advertising everywhere. Today it's a magazine ad with 15 days of sponsored WiFi. At the rate we're going, it's only a matter of time before we have Free Happy Meals with hallucinatory ad-sponsored connectivity delivered over the network straight to the visual cortex. -- Edit: corrected "15 minutes" to "15 days," which is what I actually meant to type. Thanks JimmaDaRustla!
- ulyssesgrant 13y agoThe worst offender I've seen so far was on Hulu I think. You could either watch the 1 or 2 minute advertisement, or type the company's slogan into a text box. That really weirded me out...
- princess3000 13y agoTicketmaster just changed their captchas to this format as well, you enter a captcha like "Who's coming with me" while viewing an ad about their social features. Until a few months ago it was a normal, unrelated captcha.
- sageikosa 13y agoFuturama: advertisements in your dreams
- JimmaDaRustla 13y agoFYI: 15 days, not minutes.
- jdechko 13y agoHave you seen the Happy Meal toys & some of the boxes lately? With all of the various movie tie-ins and whatnot, it's only a matter of time before Happy Meals are completely subsidized by the toys included.
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- hmsimha 13y agocan we get a number of these airdropped into North Korea?
- bhousel 13y agoT-Mobile's coverage there isn't very good.
- greenmountin 13y agoThere's a glut of these devices on the market right now, someone must have accidentally added a zero to the order (there was a similar rationale for the Android phones included in EW a while back). Amazon used to have the Overdrive Pro for $100-250, and it was new a couple years ago. Recently[1], there have been promotions for 500MB/mo free data, if you buy the hotspot for $50. One catch is they tack on $1/mo if you don't use it at all. Apparently the hardware is horrible, with crazy overheating problems; best usage practice is just to remove the battery and run from USB. You can get them attached to all sorts of carriers, but this one is Sprint; I figured it was worth a try. [1] http://www.freedompop.com http://www.freedompop.com -- beware affiliate links
- j_s 13y agoThanks for the heads up on freedompop's $.99/mo 'Active Status fee' https://www.freedompop.com/service_plan_terms.htm https://www.freedompop.com/service_plan_terms.htm > If you choose the free Broadband Service and use less than 5mb in any > given month, we'll charge you a $.99 Active Status fee to keep your > account active.
- niels_olson 13y agoWe got an email from our security manager late last week: the current issue of Forbes is not allowed in any secure facilities!
- tenpoundhammer 13y agoI think a better marketing gimmick would be to distribute these things to villages in impoverished nations and then to show the villagers logging into office 360. "If rice farmer mi ling from this is rural chinese village can use 360 out of the office, so can you!". It would be great for the recipients as well, especially if lasted longer than 15 days.
- bytefactory 13y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the current Microsoft stunt is using a T-Mobile portable WiFi connection, so is only possible in the US. For any other countries, unless they'd tied up with a local provider, this wouldn't really be possible.
- DanBC 13y agoT Mobile operates in the UK. They have a number of mobile devices, including 4G mobile wifi hotspots. (http://mobile-broadband.t-mobile.com/mobile-hotspot http://mobile-broadband.t-mobile.com/mobile-hotspot)
- marshray 13y agoI have T-Mobile in the US, but in practice I get a different T-Mobile prepaid GSM SIM when I visit the UK. I haven't actually looked at what the international costs are, just heard enough horror stories that I take the US SIM completely out of my phone before takeoff.
- bluedino 13y agoI could see these going into a vending machine.
- modeless 13y agoThis is just a copy of the lame "cellphone in a magazine" stunt that happened not too long ago. Read the article closely and you'll notice that it says "a number" of magazines have this, not all of them. The number is not disclosed, but I'm betting it's very small. This says nothing about cheap ubiquitous hardware, the future of magazine publishing, etc. It's just an expensive publicity stunt.
- cynwoody 13y agoI have a print subscription (needed to use up expiring airline miles), and my copy does not contain the hotspot.
- mark-r 13y agoIs this the modern day equivalent of the AOL floppy?