McDonalds to Offer Free WI-FI Access in 2010
McDonalds has been offering WI-FI access for the past few years, but it was for a fee of about three dollars for two hours of service.
Now starting this coming January, access to the Internet will be free in select McDonalds restaurants that offer WI-FI access. But charging for hours of services was kind of dumb, because how many people plan to spend hours inside of a McDonalds? The idea of fast food has always been to quickly get your food, eat, and go. There are less corporate food places that are already offering free WI-FI, so in part this is a move to compete with them. But probably more so to compete with Starbucks, who also charges for Internet access. Though it is known for having people spend all day on their computers inside of it. McDonalds has already been trying to get some of Starbucks’ customers by starting their own specialty coffee line.
This sounds like a good idea in the theory that people will mainly use this service to quickly check their email or road conditions while they are eating. But it also may bring the downside of people just loitering inside of the restaurant all day, taking up the space of people that want to eat. The other annoyance will be if they raise the food prices again to pay for all the bandwidth and other Internet service costs. But we’ll just have to wait a month and see what happens next January.
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IBM’s new addition to the cloud computer realm will be in the form of LotusLive iNotes. This is going to be a web based version of their Lotus Notes e-mail system, which also features a calendar and contact management service. Big businesses is the targeted demographic for this online software. IBM is planning to charge $3 a month for contract service and $3.75 a month of a month to month billing cycle.
Like similar web based email system, users will get an allotted amount of storage space. In this case users will receive one gigabyte of storage, with the option to buy another hundred gigabytes. Anti-Spam and Antivirus security will be built into the system.
IBM has planned to release this new system this coming Monday.
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