Sean Savage is 100th Biznik
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Imagine walking into your favorite local coffee shop, sitting down, and flipping open your laptop. You glance at the patrons in the cafe, many absorbed in their own laptops, and you don’t recognize any faces. Nevermind – you you will soon. Because the first thing that pops up on your screen is a page inviting you to join a local network. All you wanted to do was check your email, but why not, you’ve got a few minutes to kill.
After you log in, you immediately see profiles for 6 of the people in the room – information they’ve chosen to make publicly available. Turns out the bald guy in the corner with the Powerbook is named Chris Rune, and he runs an 800 number business. You started a massage business recently, and have never considered the possibility of having an 800 number. You wonder, what’s involved in getting one? Since Chris has made his profile available, you figure he’s open to chatting about it. So you send him a quick message. He looks up from his table and motions you over. You stand up, and moments later you’re having a real face-to-face conversation with someone you otherwise probably wouldn’t have met. And best of all, you’ve just made an appropriate use of technology in a public setting – not as a way to hide from socializing, but as a way to enhance socializing.
How’s that for a vision of a networked future? It’s not far out at all, thanks to the efforts of Sean Savage, who today became the 100th person to join Biznik. Sean is president and “chief instigator” of PlaceSite.com, a San Francisco company that’s creating local wi-fi networks that let people connect with each other and share information locally.
Sean recently graduated with a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote his thesis on the intersection of technology and society in cafes.
“PlaceSite provides a new way of using wireless networks — to create digital community services by, for and about people who are together in the same physical place,” he says. “It’s an open platform for Web applications tied intimately to physical places. It lets people share information locally, apart from the global Web. There’s a lot more to it than that… PlaceSite.com explains what we’re shooting for.”
Sean and his crew of developers are based in San Francisco, and that’s where they’re focusing their efforts for now. They’ve already tested a version of their software at A’Cuppa Tea cafe in Berkeley, and are planning a mid-January expansion into two more cafes in San Francisco.
Can we expect to log on any time soon here in Seattle? “I do know some cafe owners and wi-fi hactivists in Seattle, so I expect that to be one of our early rollout cities,” he says.
While we’re drinking our coffee and waiting, here’s a final interesting tidbit about Sean: He’s the guy credited with first use of the term “flash mob.” You can see the attribution at wordspy.com.
“To be clear, I didn’t invent flash mobs. I named them flash mobs; I created the name.”