Believe it or not, someone has found a way to turn homeless people into roving wi-fi hotspots.
At the South by Southwest conference this week, a PR firm is working with local homeless advocates to help homeless people in Austin make some money by carrying around their own personal mi-fi boxes that they use to sell a few minutes of wireless access to people on the street. Mi-fi is a kind of portable wi-fi emitter that creates a small bubble of wi-fi that you can use on the go (basically the same way that people can use their cell phones to create a small bubble of wifi for their ipads or their laptops). It’s a small electronic box, maybe the size of a cigarette box but thinner, and it can pick up an Internet signal via the air and emit it as wi-fi for up to 20 or 30 feet or something. A number of the homeless are walking around Austin with these emitters, and charging people to get the password for 15 minutes or whatever. Read more here.