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This is cool but I feel like buying a 1000 count of cheap USB sticks and loading them with wikipedia or whatever would be cheaper and more useful.
So this allows people in poor countries to have access ONLY to the best curated resources available on the Internet? And those people then have a better chance at a much better education? Why not in developed countries schools as well?
Someone already thought of this and uploaded all of the contents of the box to a website! You can find it at wikipedia.com
How to market it in developed countries is going to be a tough nut to crack though.
This is cool but I feel like buying a 1000 count of cheap USB sticks and loading them with wikipedia or whatever would be cheaper and more useful.
What would they be plugging these USB flash drives into? Underdeveloped countries / regions have very low penetration with traditional laptops / desktop computers. But nearly everyone has a smartphone of some kind, which has WiFi. That's the reason the form factor of these are mobile hotspots.
Seeing the demo I noticed it looks like this "prepper disk" that was submitted days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790409 Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?
> https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...
From the hn-thread. You might be right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone already thought of this and uploaded all of the contents of the box to a website! You can find it at wikipedia.com
That's missing the point. Full Internet access is just too broad. Going to wikipedia and aimlessly browsing about is fun, but a more educative approach can narrow the focus for students and especially for younger learners. How to market it in developed countries is going to be a tough nut to crack though.
It's aimed at places with little to no, or unreliable, internet. So if you have normal internet speed there is nothing you can't get that's on the box. Also it seems that its not even a curated Wikipedia, it's just a full clone of it (assuming for whatever language your downloading)
With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…
Something like the internet archive, but fully decentralized.
With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…
Brilliant concept! I recently met the fine folks at Beekee who make something rather similar: https://beekee.ch/beekeebox/ It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote managem…
I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).