Franziska Seel
Joined: Jan 11, 2003
Posts: 12 (view all)
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Gender & Age: Female & 30
Country: Germany
Province/State: Hessen
City: Idstein
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What has Starbucks to do with WSIS?
March 6, 2004 - 01:32 AM
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I just got not only informed, but also inspired by a comment, that Diogo posted a few days ago about the fact, that McDonalds has installed computers with free internet access all around Brazil.
A lot of questions came to my mind that I'm asking myself now and that I wanted to share with you to see what you think about them.
A few weeks ago a coffee chain opened a new branch across the foreign students dormitory of my university. It's called "SPR" and it looks almost exactly the same as Starbucks. Furthermore, it offers free internet service (just as Starbucks does!); there is one public computer and you can even access wireless (hey, this is China! I was really impressed!).
Anyway, what I started to ask myself when I was reading Diogo's update and thinking about this new café is: Why are all those companies starting to offer such services nowadays? Obviously, they must have a couple of advantages when doing this - I don't know about McDonalds, but I know that due to the internet in the SPR I'll stay there for much longer time, cause I can study while having a nice cup of coffee (or two, or three...).
So (and now follows the actually important question), why are those companies not involved in the WSIS process? Why not get a representative of McDonalds on of the roundtables and ask him, how they could contribute to bridging the digital divide? I'm sure they can do a lot, and so can Starbucks and a lot of other companies that you wouldn't initially think of when asking yourself whom to invite to a WSIS related event.
And evidently, companies that are already involved in WSIS (and these are namely only ICT companies) seem not to be that keen about bridging the digital divide, because they don't only have advantages of it at the moment.
So well, isn't it possible that we work with the "wrong" companies at the moment? I mean, not that we shouldn't work with IBM, HP etc at all (their help is indeed still much needed ). But why not being more open to other companies as well? We just need to look around and discover what is happening in the cities. Also, in Hamburg, I remember that the first hot spots the city had, where all in public restaurants and bars. I think we should consider that... What do you think?
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