In the old days, people traveled from place to place traveling as light as possible. Living of what their surroundings had to offer. Modern men (and women) are not that different. Commuters, students, consultants and businessmen travel a lot from place to place as well, having to travel light, needing to live on the combination of what they brought with them and what their environment has to offer them. But how do these people live?

As a consultant I travel a lot. For me, an average workday contains about 4 hours of travel. When totaled over a week this starts to add up to some serious amount of time. Because I travel by train, I do have the opportunity to focus my attention onto something else. For me, that was the main reasons to buy a PDA about 8 years ago. For me, it was more than just the calandaring functionality. Being confined for several hours a day in a train, i was looking for more. I was looking for information, being more productive or just amusement.

It is not only when I travel that I have these needs. Also when I'm abroad I see that I have the same needs: I like to keep informed, I like to communicate to others and I like to be amused.

Things that are relatively easy to attain when you are at the safe comforts of your home or own office, all things you need are easily found. But what if you travel a lot or switch working place about every day? At Modern Nomads we believe sometimes a bit technology can help a lot to get what you want when you are outside the safe comforts of your own home and office. Mobile Technology can act as an enabler to live of your environment and store the things you need allowing you to travel light. It could help you being more productive, catch up on friends and the world and have more fun. But how do you live of your environment?

"Borrowing" Bandwidth

One of the first things you will need for obtaining fresh information is an internet connection. In the early days you had to dial-in with a GSM to an internet provider. Although functionally it would provide a solution, it was notoriously unreliable: one hick-up and you would lose your connection. 

After a couple of years this was replaced by the much more reliable GPRS. GPRS is more reliable and provides acceptable speeds. But it does come at a price and is less suitable for anything more demanding than web browsing. But when traveling abroad or receiving/sending large documents, it is not a solution. Using GPRS in a roaming situation is extremely expensive. Not only because they charge extra for your data-traffic, but also because they introduce different pricing scheme's, basically charging you for more data than you actually use.

Therefore you would like to resort to Wireless LAN (also called WiFi). There are many commercial providers available, all providing pre-paid or pay-as-you-go schemes for wireless LAN. Benefit of them is that they do not assume you want to use it for a year. Although there are many commercial providers of wireless LAN, many users shy away for wireless LAN. For me, it is the costs that keep me away from WiFi hotspots. In pre-paid or pas-as-you-use schemes, you pay for blocks of 10 minutes, with an average of $5,- per 10 minutes. That makes it an expensive way of connecting to the internet. Others do use them, but hate the environment of the WiFi hotspots: apparently McDonalds and Starbuck aren't the best place to work in a relaxed manner. 

I therefore like to depend on what local people like to offer me. Although it is much less predictable than a commercial provider, it is usable. It does require some tooling helping you to find open WiFi access points. For example, when i traveled to London a couple of months ago, I was disapointed that the hotel itself did not offer any internet connection. I quickly found out that there was an open access point in the neighborhood. As long as I was on the right spot in the hotel room I got a great reception. Although this legally could be seen as an offence, I assumed that many people open their access points as a kind of hospitality. Being in a huge city, like the city-centre of London, you have a huge change of finding an open hotspot. The centre of London is filled with WiFi access points. When you walk around with WiFi scanners, you will see open access points popping up everywhere.

The challenge becomes bigger when you travel to smaller places. Last January, I traveled to a very small village in Austria. Seeing the size of the village, I did not count on finding any opened WiFi access points there" broadband (flatfee) internet access does not come cheap in the mountains, which reduces the change of finding open hotspots dramatically. But i did look for access points and to my big surprise i found one in the neighborhood of one of the bigger hotels. I suspect it is a service that this hotel offers for its customers, but since I did have dinner there on a regular basis as well, i had the feeling i could use it as well. When I did not eat in the restaurant, i thought it would be a bit conspicuous to sit in the lobby, so I just stood outside.

One disadvantage of using open access points outside is that you have to stand the weather that comes with it. In my case, I had to stand in -18°C (0°F) in snowstorms. When you have to pick up your news in that weather you soon discover the power of the RSS-feed a great advantage of this way of obtaining news is that it picks up all your news in about 1 minute, which is a great deal faster than browsing all those webpages by hand.

When you are standing in the middle of a small Austrian village, you do start to wonder if it isn't theft of bandwidth: regardless of the legal discussion, there also is an ethical discussion. I usually picked up my mail and RSS-feeds around 18:00. The few times I came after 19:00, internet speeds were drastically lower. I guess that my timeframe of around 18:00 was a time that was not popular among the normal guests of the access point. So basically i was using left-overs from the access point, the time-slots the real guests did not want to use.

"Borrowing" power

But some 'guests' go even further. The New York Times featured an article about restaurant guests 'borrowing' electricity. Many public places install electric sockets for maintenance and repairs. For example, the people that clean restaurants need power sockets for their vacuum cleaners. Mobile workers are tired of dragging on spare laptop batteries and start using these same electric sockets. They are now used by customers for fueling their laptop, MP3 player, telephone or PDA during their visit. Customers act in the idea that they pay for some service, including fuel for their laptop.

You can find these electricity sockets everywhere. You can see them in airports, train stations, restaurants, hotel lobbies and company entrances. They are unguarded and above all, free to use. I must say i am more and more inclined to use these power sockets to feed my laptop. It could charge my device just enough to make it through the day. When i have a meeting with a customer, one of the first things i do is plug in my laptop to feed it, just to make sure i have some juice in it for the way back. For my generous hosts it is a very small addition to the electricity bill, but for me it is a huge joy.

The Dutch railways actually recognized this and introduced, as generous hosts should, sockets inside the first class compartments. Free to use, and one per every 10 meters. Just to stimulate business travelers in being more productive.

"Borrowing" CPU cycles

Actually we see a trend in which we as mobile users become more willing to live of our environment. We become a bit more brutal, or more expecting, depending on how you look at it. Until now, we just borrowed some bandwidth if we needed it and some power to feed our equipment if it ran dry. But where does it stop? Are we becoming more and more demanding? What will we expect even more?

My guess is that we are going to expect the use of CPU-cycles next. Laptops are big, heavy and impractical if you are on the move all day. All you need is a terminal, for just some hours. Some companies already provide internet terminals for guests, so they can check e-mail. Using a sync-and-charge cable you can not only charge your mobile device on every USB-port, with a small application you can also use it as a USB stick. With the coming of Windows Vista in the end of 2006, this will become even easier. Windows Vista will introduce Windows Mobile Device Centre, basically allowing every Windows Mobile device to be used as an external storage device.

This opens a lot of opportunities. You can start using any desktop, even in hotel lobbies and computer stores, for applications that need real CPU-power of a big screen. You can use every PC you can get your hands on to edit and print Word files or Excel spreadsheets.

Although this seems a bit far fetched, it could become reality. As mobile workers, we start borrowing small things from our environment to minimize our daily burden we have to toss around. Bit by bit, we shift the border of our generous hosts. We "borrow" from the locals what we need. As true nomads, we will live from what our environment will offer us, or we will move on to richer areas....