Who says Mountain View has all the fun?

The good folks at Meraki are making news again.  As some of you have heard, this San Francisco company has been busy putting a repeater-based network in place to provide the city of San Francisco with FREE Wifi Internet.

To date, Meraki has provided its Wi-Fi gear and free Internet access to residents in 80 percent of San Francisco’s major neighborhoods. The company plans to continue building the “Free the Net” network in 2009, deepening coverage in each neighborhood.

Recently, Meraki held a press conference with mayor Gavin Newsom, to launch its latest project, which will add wireless coverage to twelve low-income housing projects in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. The company also plans to provide Wi-Fi Internet access to low-income housing owned by the city in other neighborhoods as well as provide free Wi-Fi to senior centers throughout the city by the end of 2008.

You can sign up here to help expand the ever-growing network: Read the rest of this entry »

I love to see truly innovative and useful applications of modern technology, especially when the technology makes the world a better place to live – and park.

Coming this Fall, San Francisco is going to implement a city-wide wireless alert system to some 6,000 of its 24,000 metered spots that will whisper sweet nothings to your cell phone and lovingly tell you when a spot has opened up.

For those without hi-end mobile devices, a more pedestrian “street sign” version will also display the information. Smarphone users may also be able to pay for parking using their devices once the system gets ironed out.

The system used by the city was created by a small tech company called Streetline, who are able to monitor up-to-date parking stats.

[Via The New York Times]