What's Google's next move in wireless?

Google's in a great position to take advantage of the many things it has going for it. As well as search, these include:

• Location dependence—Google is now very good at geo-location, and directs you to a search cluster near you for performance. It can also show you geo-targeted ads, which will probably become more fine-grained in future.
• Wi-Fi—it seems that Google is about to launch a public access Wi-Fi product, which it will also secure with a VPN offering: Google Secure Access. This should mean that security will be better on a Google Wi-Fi access point than with, say, T-Mobile. Speculation is that access will be free, and Google will generate revenue by mining contextual information as they do today with Google ads.
• Bandwidth—Google seems to have been busy buying up insane amounts of "dark fiber" capacity in the US, which it'll need if it's going to offer free Wi-Fi!

As an example, combine these three factors with Froogle (Google's comparison shopping service). If you're out shopping in bricks and mortar stores, what if you could connect using your PDA over Google Wi-Fi for free, it knew where you were, and could show you the closest place to purchase what you're looking for?

Tags: Google, Google Secure Access, Wi-Fi, WiFi.

No, I'm not sending you spam

Hi. If you've come to richi.co.uk to find out who's sending you spam ... it's not me.

Spammers usually send email with forged senders. In this case, using email addresses @richi.co.uk. It appears that quite a number were sent out over the last few hours, with subjects like "FW: whats up?" and "lol, I found a gold mine"

In tech. circles, this is known as a Joe job:

an incident of spamming designed to tarnish the reputation of an innocent third party ... most email Joe jobs are acts of revenge.

Tags: spam, Joe job.