Google's Free WiFi

On my way home from work tonight I was listening to the latest episode of TWiT (This Week in Tech) definitely amongst my favorite podcasts, when I heard the same questions being speculated on that I've been hearing a few hundred times in the last week...

How can Google's free WiFi make money? And; How can they possibly know exactly where users are?

These are quite simple questions, that really answer each other.

Google will make their money from selling Google adspace to local businesses around the Free Google WiFi hotspot, and using locational advertising, and ads inside the social apps, i.e. dating/chat/map/blog services that they have or are developing. Once local retailers realize that the people that are using these hotspots are those that can afford laptops with WiFi, why wouldn't they want a Google hotspot near them? This could be another lucrative marketing tool in Google's arsenal.

And as far as how Google can know where users are... They can't know EXACTLY where they are. Google really doesn't care where you are, and they have no need to know where you are. They do however know precisely where their access point is, and Google knows that you have to be within a certain radius of the router to connect to it... Therefore they know where you are, and that means they know what businesses are around you that have paid for the adspace.

Remember that lovely beta app that Google promptly shutdown on everyone, because really didn't help at all called, and cached your personal info: Google Web Accelerator. Guess what... I found that it is back featured on the Google front page. This (I'm really speculating here) will be the mechanism that will allow Google to know what you are surfing for, and it will be part of the mandatory program that you have to run if you want to use the free WiFi. It will be reporting back to the Google server, (over the secure VPN connection - to protect user privacy) That's how they will provide the ads based on what you are interested in, or at least that's how I'd do it.

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