Attracting more readers

I was travelling through the Helsinki airport yesterday and ran across an internet kiosk for a local newspaper, where the newspaper was the default homepage, but the kiosk allowed me to use the browser to access any other website.

I’m surprised not many other newspapers have done this. A kiosk located in the airport provides travellers with a simple way to read the news, and also enables them to access email or whatever it is they are interested in. A similar idea is to provide freely accessible WIFI, with the newspaper set as the homepage. These services are cheap to maintain, and benefits the newspaper with improved access to their content (ie. more readers/page views) and increased loyalty with their brand (because they are providing this quality, free service for their users).

What is preventing more free, sponsored, WIFI hotspots? Is the airport (or other locations) trying to charge extraordinarily high fees for this?

Speaking of free, sponsored, WIFI hotspots, I was just in a Paris café where WIFI was free as long as I viewed a 30-second Nokia commercial. While not ideal, I was fine with this, as it’s better than paying T-Mobile at Starbucks. But insead, why not just make the homepage default to a Nokia product? I didn’t watch the video at all, but if they had a cool product for me to check out, I would probably take a split second to look at it if I landed on their website.

My Eastern Europe Trip (Part I)

I’ve spent the last week travelling through Eastern Europe for work, giving presentations in Kiev, Riga, and Vilnius so far (heading to Tallin in a few minutes). I’ve learned a lot about the culture in each country, and it’s fascinating to hear about how things have changed since the Soviet era.

In Kiev, for example, the concierge at the hotel said that there was no such thing as a traffic jam in Soviet times. He jokingly said, ‘traffic jams are one of the many benefits of capitalism’.

Some thoughts on each of the cities:

Kiev, Ukraine
* Kiev was the most difficult to navigate because all of the signs are in Ukrainian or Russian (and I can’t read Cyrillic).
* The underground metro in Kiev is awesome. It’s amazingly deep underground. When exiting, I rode up a few very steep escalators to get above ground. I didn’t realize how far underground I was until exiting. It must have been 200 feet at least.
* Of the cities I’ve visited so far, I think Kiev has the greatest lack of Western influence.
* Kiev has very impressive monasteries and churches (as do Riga and Vilnius)

Riga, Latvia
* I stayed in the old town in Riga, which felt like a small village The streets were all cobblestone and the old town doesn’t allow cars (unless they have special access), so you can walk in the streets for the most part.
* The center of Riga is very walkable, so I didn’t have to try public transportation.
* I felt that Riga has a lot of German and Scandinavian influence.
* The architecture and artwork in Riga is great. The University of Latvia is a terrific old building (which is where I gave my presentation It’s located just a block away from the Freedom Monument:

More to come about Vilnius and Tallinn. I have to head to the airport now…

My favorite neighbor

There was an uproar in my neighborhood over the last 6 months regarding the owner of 1819 Mason Street who cut down very large trees on her property without permits and made no effort to improve the dilapidated shack located there. When I first moved into my neighborhood I thought it was pretty cool to have large trees on the block, as it provided greater privacy. Here is a shot of what it looked like then:

And, this is after one tree was removed an another was chopped to a stump:

Today I was surprised to find the building leveled when I was leaving for work. While a big part of me misses the character of the trees and shack, I’m also glad that it was finally removed, because it was far beyond repair.

Now let’s just hope the city maintains the current zoning restriction on building higher than a single story on that lot…