Techbook.de Coverage

Who's On My WiFi's Free Windows Agent was recently covered by Techbook in Germany.

Here's a link to the article:

https://www.techbook.de/apps/fremde-benutzen-wlan-whos-on-my-wifi

Just so you know before you click the link, the article is written completely in German.

However, if you use Google Translate with the link, you'll notice that it works fairly well on their write up of us.

Thanks Techbook!


smart city

5 Top Smart Cities Have This in Common

The internet has an uncanny history of tiny companies disrupting behemoths of industry. It turns out, it’s not just startups flipping corporate superpowers on their head. Small, rural cities in the United States are proving they can not only compete with major cities like Vienna and Paris, they can beat them.

It’s easy to see why cities want to be “Smart Cities”. The promise of efficient utilities, quick transit, and disaster recovery options are compelling economic advantages. Smart cities will fundamentally improve how people live. So how do they get from great ideas to laying groundwork?

We look at some of the most innovative cities of all sizes to discover how cities are getting ahead.

Smart City List

5.Toronto, Canada

This Canadian city is a leader in North America. They have implemented smart transit systems and renewable resources to save money and the environment. It’s a major economic hub that’s investing in new tech, cementing Toronto’s status as one of the leading smart cities in the hemisphere. The secret sauce? The region has affordable fiber internet to both businesses and consumers, meaning gigabit speeds across the entire city.

4.Vienna, Austria

Vienna is an international center for business and politics, and they are investing in their infrastructure to meet this demand. Boasting a world-class smart infrastructure and transit system, the city has become a destination for tech companies. That includes ISPs, where the fierce competition has resulted in multiple fiber options for citizens across the city. Blazing fast internet speeds keep the high-tech infrastructure running.

 3.Ponca City, Oklahoma

At the opposite end of the Smart City scale, Ponca City is a small community of 25,000 residents. That hasn’t stopped attention from the rest of world as the city hosts delegations from Italy, Australia, and all over the Northern hemisphere. Why so much attention to an Oklahoma farm town? It’s all because of their internet, fiber to be exact. Ponca City has a completely free municipal WiFi network that covers the entire city, powered by a fiber network built over the course of 15 years. It’s an inspired forward-thinking project that’s paying big dividends back to the city.

2. New York City

The big apple needs no introduction. The mayor’s office released a full public proposal on everything from wireless water meters to responsive traffic signals. Central to this goal is the pledge to provide high-speed broadband to every resident by 2025. To do this, Verizon has been contracted to bring fiber access to every part of the city.

 1.Chattanooga, Tennessee

Easily one of the hottest up and coming cities in the United States, Chattanooga boasts the fastest broadband in the Western hemisphere. Thanks to savvy city leadership, they’ve been dubbed the city that was saved by the internet. Gigabit broadband internet access that was built and offered by the city has ushered in a technical renaissance, a small oasis of startup culture nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

 Building for the Future

The key component to any competitive smart city is fast and reliable broadband. Uploading thousands of gigabytes of city usage data to the cloud takes bandwidth and lots of it. Like a house without a foundation, a smart city plan won’t survive without the broadband infrastructure to scale into the future. For that, the winner is fiber, hands down. The examples of small cities like Chattanooga and Ponca City prove even rural municipalities can compete with major cities. New York City is pledging to provide high-speed broadband to all of its residents by 2025, but Ponca City already checked that box 5 years ago.

So how does a small city compete with major players? Start now. Investing in fiber infrastructure takes years and major budget investments to compete, but results in major benefits down the road. Rural cities are already starting to take notice of the success stories, and fiber when done right can make a city in decline a smart city in a matter of years.

Adding usage tracking to your smart city project? Find out how WhoFi can help.


6 questions to ask yourself before buying WiFi Analytics

If you've been considering monitoring the wireless network of your event space, city hall, or coffee shop, you probably have quite a few questions about whether or not you really need a WiFi Analytics solution in the first place.

We created an article in our new resources section to help you make the decision about whether or not a WiFi Analytics solution is really what you need, or if something else might be a better fit.

You can read the article here:

Do I really need a WiFi Analytics Solution?


Meraki Agent

Who’s On My WiFi is happy to announce that our Meraki detection agent is now generally available.

What is Meraki?

Meraki is a cloud-managed network hardware company owned by Cisco.  Cloud-managed means that once you set up the access point or switch hardware on your network, all of the configurations are managed through their cloud dashboard.

What is the Who’s On My WiFi Meraki Agent?

Client’s utilizing Meraki Access Points now have an option to directly connect their APs to our analytics service without the need for an additional software agent.  This further simplifies the analytics service setup on Meraki networks.

How do they work together?

Who’s On My WiFi customers are connecting their Meraki equipment to our Analytics service to add additional business intelligence to their WiFi network.  This network information is stored and analyzed to identify network usage trends over time in several ways that allow the ability to understand and predict patterns and trends.  This information helps businesses unlock powerful WiFi data that can be utilized in bolstering marketing efforts, identification of customer loyalty, employee usage and much more.

If you are ready to link your Meraki network to Who's On My WiFi, log in to your account and click Setup Wizards to walk through the process. No account? Set up a demo to get started.


WiFi Analytics Interview

Co-Founder John Kerber was interviewed today by Network Diagnostic website LMTV regarding the new field of Location Analytics, and how to make physical locations smarter with the newly released WiFi Analytics platform from Who's On My WiFi.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbHULks4A3M


Interviewed by the Oklahoman

WhoFi met with a reporter and photographer from The Oklahoman the morning of the first. We discussed the new router and talked about our upcoming Indiegogo launch on May 15th.  Exciting times for the company!

John Kerber Interview with Oklahoman


CNET and Local News coverage

We wanted to let our regular readers know that we were recently covered by CNET on cnet.com as well as channel 4 in San Antonio on their morning Tech Segment.

We thought you might like to see how we're being covered in the media.

Here is the story listed on CNET:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/see-who-is-using-your-wifi-on-windows/

Here is the story from WOAI News 4 in San Antonio:

http://news4sanantonio.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/whos-my-wifi-tells-you-tapping-in-15128.shtml

Thanks again to CNET and WOAI for the coverage.  It really helps.

Thanks to all of our users and customers who have helped us get here and helped improved our product.  We'll continue working hard to help simplify security!

Thanks!


Startup Accelerator

Hi everyone,

We're proud to announce that Who's On My Wifi has been accepted into the Launch Oklahoma Startup Accelerator class of 2014.

For those of you who don't know what a startup accelerator is, it's kind of like bootcamp for startups.

We'll be meeting with mentors, successful entrepreneurs, other growing startups and more of the tech community in an effort to help our startup grow and refine how it operates.

We're very excited to be part of the 2014 class!

http://www.launchoklahoma.com/


SXSW Buffalo Lounge Pitch Contest Winner!

Who's On My Wifi was selected as the Startup Pitch Contest winner at the Oklahoma Buffalo Lounge at South by Southwest this past weekend in Austin!

The Pitch Contest had 10 Oklahoma based startups each showing off their latest creations and were judged on the pitch and viability of the product.

We wanted to say thanks to the Chamber of Commerce and I2E for hosting the event.

We also wanted to say thanks to the judges for selecting us.

It was an awesome experience to meet the other startup founders from across the state and to see and hear about all of the cool things that they're working on.

You can read more about the Buffalo Lounge event at this page:

http://thebuffalolounge.com/interactive/

Thank you Austin!


What is PING? And what does it do?

The trusted PING command that has been available for years used to be the de-facto standard for seeing if a computer was up and running or if it was down.

Simple example of how to use PING.

In the following example, I have 2 computers connected to my computer network.

The first is a computer at IP Address 192.168.1.102.  It is connected to the network and is currently powered on.

The 2nd computer is at IP Address 192.168.1.101.  It is also connected to the network, but the power is currently turned off.

Ping Success:

To see that the first computer is up at IP Address 192.168.1.102, you would go to the command prompt and type the following command:

ping 192.168.1.102

You can see very clearly that it says that the computer is up and that it sent 4 replies.  You now know that this computer is up and running.

Ping Failure:

What happens though if you try to ping a computer that is connected to the network, but is not currently turned on, or if you ping an IP Address that is not in any way connected to the network.

When I try to ping the computer 192.168.1.101 that is currently turned off, here's what happens.

ping 192.168.1.101

The message "Request Timed Out" means that ping was unable to find a computer at that IP Address.

So, in this example, I showed a computer that is currently connected, 192.168.1.102, and a computer that is not currently connected 192.168.1.101.

Limitations of Ping

One of the limitations of Ping is that over the years, people (Microsoft) decided that if a computer is trying to ping you, it is probably trying to do you harm.  So, when Microsoft started installing a program called Windows Firewall by default on all new PCs, the trusted PING program became less and less useful as a diagnostic tool.  The reason why is that if you PING a computer with Windows Firewall turned OFF, it will give you the normal "REPLY FROM..." message and show you that the computer is currently up and running, but if Windows Firewall is then turned on, the same computer will respond with "Request Timed Out".

This is very frustrating for IT people who just need to see if the computers on their network are up or down.

In a future post, we'll go through a program called ARPING or HARDPING that can get through this limitation, but as you'll see has limitations itself.