Once again the mystery and magic of the ubiquitous WiFi attracted a standing room throng at the City Club to find out how this cutting edge technology can translate into a good business practice, and more importantly, profits. With co-sponsorship of the event by Cleveland.com and Bright.net, the multitude was further ensured, but it was the advertised full title, "Why Wi-Fi: How the wireless Internet will transform your business" that really brought the curious crowd.

However, the 170 or so attendees were offered an up-to-the-minute status report on OneCleveland by the ever-effervescent Lev Gonick, CIO of Case and Chair of the project. With as many as six new announcements on the progress of OneCleveland, it wasn't that Lev had nothing new to say click for pdf of his slides, but he only hinted at the opportunities that would become available for businesses in the effort. In previous presentations, he was careful to only speak to serving the nonprofit community. To allay concerns of the professional IT sector, he did say that installation and application development could be contracted out by the services nonprofits.

One of the big pronouncements by Dr. Gonick was that the City of Shaker Heights became the first municipality to join the consortium of OneCleveland. Significant in two ways, first that it is a suburb of the city and underlined the project as a regional one, and second that it joined even before the city of Cleveland, who would probably get the most benefit out of the initiative. If there was ever a single example of the inertia in the City to do what has an obvious advantage, this is it. The numbers are published, the savings are easy to calculate, and the grand vision is palpable. The other announcements of support and grants by Cisco Systems prompted Lev to say, "For those of you thinking about joining, that's called an incentive." What else does city hall need?

Back to the program, it was left to poor Jim Potaro, CTO of Neteam Corp, to follow the Lev act and provide the information that the audience was really looking for and was promised. NeTeam, founded by a group of Telxon Corp. veterans, has worked on some of the country's largest wireless networks include the New York Stock Exchange and Carnival Cruise Lines. Though punctuated with demos of state of the art gadgets that resembled StarTrek badge communicators using Voice over IP (VOIP), Jim's vast experience was in the large deployment on enterprise systems and big warehouse/cruise ship designs. The ROI of instant, accurate, and mobile connectivity in those venues that encompass healthcare, finance, and manufacturing was shown, but it was applicable to only a few that were in the room.

When asked about the ROI for small retail businesses as a marketing device, both Lev and Jim could not speak specifically, but gave a futurist description of what was possible. Very fine and good, but pressed for evidence or references about the value versus free or pay-per-use, referring to Tower City's WiFi-City and national chains McDonald's and $tarbuck$, Potaro said that this technology is too new and the evidence for and against has not yet come to light, as far as he knew. Though the answers were not exactly what the crowd was looking for, the value of these meetings in forming connections was evident, when a number of visitors volunteered to send info to me and CrainTech editor and organizer Chris Thompson, forwarded an article found by another attendee on the positive effects that Schlotsky's has been seeing in their free wifi program. Carry on CrainTech. from Cool Cleveland correspondent Steve Goldberg steveg@ieee.org

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