Haha, I also noticed this on their website:
"Everyone throws gigabytes and megabytes around, but what do they really mean?"
It's a mystery!
Not really catering to the "Hacker News" crowd...
Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#52But isn't that exactly what http://www.fon.com/ has been doing for several years already?
It seems fon requires you already have an isp connection. Fon allows you to share it with others. The balance is that on a trip you will be able to access fon hotspot for free (?). Here Karma embeds a 4G connection, AFAIU. Am I correct?
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#53I always suspected the real money in this sort of plan is selling the devices to people who think they're going to make money by reselling access. The timing of this announcement is particularly interesting to me, since I just wrote about the "selling pickaxes" model over the weekend. Strange.
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#54Maybe, Amway wifi? Pyramid sharing? One way to kick off ad hoc suburban networks...
> The average person uses only 500MB, per device, per month.
I used 19GB last month, without even trying. To be fair, that's at home, not on a mobile "device".
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#55But isn't that exactly what http://www.fon.com/ has been doing for several years already?
It seems fon requires you already have an isp connection. Fon allows you to share it with others. The balance is that on a trip you will be able to access fon hotspot for free (?). Here Karma embeds a 4G connection, AFAIU. Am I correct?
After reviewing both pages I think you're 100% correct.
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#56I had an image of what this was before I clicked the link but I was disappointed.
Here's my idea: No hardware required. You share your existing connection (mobile or not). It's public except the user needs to give you some sort of token that you can't forge and shows how much time they used. In turn you can use those tokens to get time on other people's wifi.
Basically "pay it forward" with a little bit of abuse prevention. Maybe the tokens are BitCoin, but it would probably work better if it was a little more "karma" like and the accounting wasn't so strict.
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#57I always suspected the real money in this sort of plan is selling the devices to people who think they're going to make money by reselling access. The timing of this announcement is particularly interesting to me, since I just wrote about the "selling pickaxes" model over the weekend. Strange.
It looks like you don't make money by reselling access, you just get extra data for yourself to use.
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#58I had an image of what this was before I clicked the link but I was disappointed. Here's my idea: No hardware required. You share your existing connection (mobile or not). It's public except the user needs to give you some sort of token that you can't forge and shows how much time they used. In turn you can use those tokens to get time on other people's wifi. Basically "pay it forward" with a little bit of abuse prev…
These will be available in places where there's no existing wifi which seems much cooler to me.
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you talk a lot? T-Mobile has an unlimited data, unlimited text, 100 minute no-contract plan for $30/month. I'm using it with my Nexus 4. Additional talk time is $0.10/minute.
How did you actually get that plan with your Nexus 4? I've been a T-mobile customer for several years, always owning my phone outright (now a Nexus 4), but they gave me a serious run-around, telling me that particular plan was a promotional thing that could only be used with a Walmart handset.
I got it at a T-Mobile store (even though it says online/Walmart only). Maybe you just need a different CSR?
Re: Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot
#60Now, if this were paid by bitcoin, or the karma was signed by the bitcoin contracts (http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit...), then we might even avoid lock-in ...