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!
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 Who's On My WiFi 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?
Innovate Oklahoma: A tech startup’s opinion
A new program was launched by the State of Oklahoma today.
The program is called Innovate Oklahoma.
The idea is that Oklahoma has built an open marketplace, where both government agencies and citizens can list state governmental issues which could use a better technological solution. Not only are the problems listed, some of these problems will be open for bidding by companies and other technologists to provide solutions.
To my knowledge, this is the first program of it’s kind in the United States.
The State of Oklahoma believes that by being open and transparent about technological challenges, and looking to it’s own citizens and companies for solutions, it can achieve a better experience for it’s citizens at a lower cost. If the state of Oklahoma kept such issues on a private list, and attempted to build all of the solutions internally or through contractors the cost would be a much greater burden.
At Who’s On My WiFi, we work with both businesses and city/state governments across the country, offering WiFi Analytics solutions. We know that because governments are working with taxpayer dollars, there is always a concern in trying something new and the buying process is often slow. For many government entities, solutions to problems are often thought of in years. The RFP Process alone can take 6 to 12 months for a single project. In contrast, most start-ups think in weeks or months, not years, and they can often become frustrated with this procurement process and choose other customer bases to serve.
So the fact that Innovate Oklahoma is focusing on the speed of delivering solutions to taxpayers, as well as transparency of the issues at hand seems like a solid foundation to build a sustainable ecosystem catered to early stage technology companies.
And to us, that’s what’s the most interesting about this new program. The state where we’re based, is now making a bet on technology startups. As technology entrepreneurs, this makes us feel very welcome and excited to grow here in the state of Oklahoma.
The fact that government funds now have a chance of financially backing early stage companies as a customer, instead of as an investor, seems like a way to ensure that startup companies are building something of value from the beginning. It also likely means that other early stage companies that have government agencies as part of their core user base, like Who’s On My WiFi, will want to have a presence here as well.
Goals
The program that is being attempted certainly has lofty goals. Some of the goals are to modernize the delivery of services to taxpayers, reduce costs, increase efficiency, and help to promote the technology ecosystem already in the state.
Whether the program will be able to achieve all of these goals is not yet known, but whether the program succeeds or not, I think the current administration and the state should be commended on making the attempt and taking a chance for a better future.
As a company, now we will be more aware of any technological issues of the state. Should we feel that there is a problem which we think could easily be solved by WiFi Analytics technology, we’ll be more than happy to work with our government to deliver the solution at what will likely be a fraction of the cost of a custom built solution.
The Innovate Oklahoma website launched today during the Governor’s speech. If you have not yet seen it, please visit https://innovate.ok.gov
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
Who Is On My Wifi version 2.0.7
Version 2.0.7 of Who Is On My Wifi was released this evening.
This latest release contains the following changes:
Enhancements:
Blocking
This one has been a long time in the making. We have released a blocking feature in the software. So, now, when you see an intruder on your network that has been detected by Who's On My Wifi, you have the ability to block them. What this will basically do is cut them off from the internet so they would just choose to connect to someone else's wireless.
There is a lot to blocking, so there were several smaller changes that also went out in the software to handle blocking. For instance, we added a separate Block log on the Main screen that shows you all of the blocking packets being sent to the intruder. The status on the bottom left has been changed so that when blocking is happening, you are notified about it. As well as updates to the help section, and all of the underlying code and settings changes that made this all possible.
We're very proud of this, and we hope you like it.
Again, remember, to use this feature safely and only on your own network because it can be easily traced back to you if you block someone on a network that you do not own.
And as always, if you experience any bugs with this new version of the software, please contact us at support at io3o.com
Setup Wizard
This is the other major feature that we are very proud of from this release. One of the biggest complaints we kept hearing was that people didn't understand exactly what the software did. Many people thought it was just a manual ARP scanning tool, and were confused by and a little bit angry that it kept loading on startup. We're hoping the Setup Wizard helps explain a little bit better what the software does and helps people get up and running.
Bug Fixes:
Windows 8 Fix #1
If you read this blog, then you might've seen our post a few days ago about the initial bugs we have been finding while running the software on Windows 8. We're hoping that this first bug fix will help people get up and running on Windows 8. It's a fix to how the .NET framework is installed when Who's On My Wifi is setup. Unfortunately to get the software completely running on Windows 8 is going to take a few more fixes, but this was a good start.
Interviewed by the Oklahoman
Who's On My WiFi 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!
Router Plugin 1.0.2
Version 1.0.2 of the Who Is On My Wifi Router Plugin was released this afternoon.
This release contained bug fixes and optimizations and also made the plugin compatible with Tomato Routers. We will be providing more information about the Tomato Router Plugin as it becomes available.
BUG FIXES / OPTIMIZATIONS:
Installing the updated version of the plugin losing settings
For those of you who installed the 1.0.0 or 1.0.1 version of the Who's On My Wifi Plugin, you might have noticed that when you updated to version 1.0.2, that you had to re-enter your username and password. This is because the settings file was being overwritten with each version of the plugin. This has now been fixed so that updating to a later version of the plugin retains all settings files.
Decrease the overall size of the plugin
Due to size limitations of the WRT54GL when running tomato, we needed to change some of the ways that we were building our plugin that resulted in an overall size decrease for the plugin.
TOMATO ROUTER PLUGIN LAUNCHING THIS WEEK:
Who's On My Wifi Router Plugin is now compatible with Tomato
We'll have a more specific blog post when everything is ready to announce for this. This version 1.0.2 of the plugin is now compatible and working on WRT54GL routers running the Tomato firmware. However, we will make a more general release once things like the Setup Wizards, installation instructions, help files, etc. have been updated to help customers and users try out our plugin on Tomato compatible routers.
Simple Secure Router - May 15th
Who's On My Wifi is proud to announce that the Wireless Router is finally here!
We'll be taking Pre-Orders of our Simple Secure Router starting on May 15th through an IndieGoGo Crowd Funding campaign.
The campaign will run from May 15th through June 15th, and we are doing this to raise money for our full scale manufacturing run.
We're calling our Wireless Router, the Simple Secure Router.
It's incredibly Simple.
You can set it up with just a smart phone in a few minutes.
And we've eliminated a lot of the complicated options most people never use in most routers.
And it's incredibly Secure.
The Simple Secure Router is a secured/locked down router that runs the Who's On My Wifi detection software and natively connects to Who's On My Wifi Online for easy detection, notifications, and logging of all devices on your network.
And if you ever receive an alert that there's an intruder on your network, just login to Who's On My Wifi Online, and you can kick off the intruder from anywhere in the world.
We think you'll really like the Simple Secure Router, and we hope you'll join us on May 15th on IndieGoGo and get a copy for yourself!