Posts by jonathan »

Our hotspots are pretty cool and people are always asking about details… you know… money!

I figured it would be a good idea to show some of our cards (poker analogy) so that people can get an idea of how much money there is to be made by operating hotspots.

Lets take the modest (but real) example of a hotspot operated by one of our customers in a house with some boarders. In April the boarders used almost 4 gigabytes of data earning the operator of the hotspot R525 commission. Considering the hotspot operator’s total monthly costs were only R199 (Including the ADSL line) he walked away with R326 profit. The particular hotspot operator used about 2 gigabytes of data for his personal use in April which only cost him R138. In the end he got Free Internet and R188 in his back pocket.

This scales quite nicely though. We have another hotspot that in April moved 33 gigabytes… That one hotspot made the operator almost R4,500 and that operator has quite a few hotspots.

The other interesting thing about the hotspot business model is our Hotspot Agents. A Hotspot Agent is an entrepreneurial individual who introduces new Hotspot Operators to the Frogfoot Wifi Network. He identifies new operators, helps them understand the Hotspot business model and gets them to order their Hotspots through him. By simply acting as matchmakers they make 20% of the profits. You can read more about this on the Hotspot Agent page.

There’s lots of other questions that people always seem to ask so I also put together a FAQ (frequently asked questions) list.

Got any more questions? Feel free to leave a comment.

Cast your mind back 20 years — 1988, Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a place on earth” was at the top of the Top 40 and Trevor Manual was in jail. It was a long time ago!

It was also the year that the world was introduced to the fax machine. And for the next 20 years nothing changed. You put a piece of paper in one side and somewhere else another piece of paper magically appeared.

About 19 years ago that technology became redundant but apparently the world was just so impressed by the magical pretty picture machine that nobody thought to suggest we stop using it.

Frogfoot doesn’t like faxes but unfortunately they are still required in order for us to receive pretty pictures with peoples signatures on them. A while back we decided to digitise all our incoming faxes. The purpose of this was twofold. Firstly to save paper which is good for the environment and secondly, to make sure that we never lose any faxes.

Doing this is very easy with a little Linux and a recycled Microcom Deskporte 28.8 modem (circa 1995). We use Open Source software called Hylafax to receive and store the faxes and I wrote a little application that lets our receptionist “file” our faxes into virtual in-trays. This gives any frog web based access to the entire history of our faxes.

We also recently did some cool stuff with automatically filling in our signup forms and giving them to you as pre-populated PDFs. This means that you don’t need to “Fill in the form”, but rather just print it out, sign it and fax or email it back to us. We like making your lives and our lives easier so that we can get back to the hard work of being awesome.

We at Frogfoot love technology, we love Open Source, we love doing things properly, we love a lot. But there are things that make us cry. Microsoft is responsible for a lot of those things, with my personal tears being shed specifically for Internet Explorer 6. It takes all the good vibes we try and collect and kills them like a rainbow unicorn drowning in quick sand. (You get the point right?)

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, almost 8 years ago. It has its own psychopathic way of deciding how to render HTML (the “program code” behind how websites look) which drives all web developers nuts, it doesn’t support transparent PNGs (an image format newer and better than GIF) and is also slow and insecure, probably responsible for most of the viruses and spyware that’s lurking in the world today.

For all the tears I have shed for Internet Explorer 6 there is a blanky of love and security that is Firefox.

Firefox is the Open Source poster child. Many of you might remember a company called Netscape. Back in the day (the wild west 90s) Netscape made a web browser called Netscape Navigator. It was the web browser and dominated 90% of the market share in the early 90s. Then Microsoft came along and in 1995 started bundling Internet Explorer as part of its Windows 95 Plus Pack.

Thus began the browser wars. A small software company against the ruthless giant of Microsoft, willing to do anything to get its way. Both companies released feature after feature, trying to outdo each other. Ultimately it was Microsoft’s decision to bundle all its successive operating systems with Internet Explorer than rung the death knoll for Netscape… it was just too hard for a small dedicated company to compete against a relatively good (for that time) web browser that was already on people’s computers. By 2005 Netscape’s dominant 90% had dropped to less than 1%.

Though Netscape took Microsoft to court, labelling their “bundling” practice as anti-competitive, and ultimately winning various antitrust court cases, Netscape was never going to rise again. But its ashes were only smouldering… and we all know what rises from the ashes. Foxes?

Eric S Raymond is a hippie. He’s possibly the biggest hippie in the Open Source, Free (as in freedom) Software world. He is also a right wing fundamentalist nut. But we love him like we love our eccentric uncle who runs the orphanage and feeds the poor. He is such a big influence that his books are viewed by some as the “sacred texts” of Open Source.

One book in particular is held as being the cornerstone of “why-open-source-works”. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, published in 1997 was so ground breaking with its theories that it could be compared to someone saying “The world is not flat” in a world where everyone still believed it was. In this book ESR explains how hundreds (thousands even) of workers, working together (in their spare time) towards a common goal can produce something as brilliant and robust as a cathedral, faster than the so-called “real builders”… and how the idea of the source code being free, and available to everyone, would be enough of a motivation for people to get involved.

In 1998 while the ashes of Netscape were busy smouldering the big wigs in the company were reading Eric’s book. In something akin to the last scene in the action movie where the dying hero fires a single (silver) bullet at a leaking gas tank causing a huge fireball and killing the evil villain, the Netscape bosses decided to release all their source code to the world, to peruse and improve.

The resulting project was called Phoenix… but there was another company called Phoenix so they called it Firebird… but there was another project called Firebird so eventually the settled on Firefox. All of this happened under the umbrella of an organisation called “Mozilla”.

Which brings us back to why Internet Explorer 6 is so incredibly rubbish. Remember how Netscape died, leaving Internet Explorer as the king of the hill? Well, since they were the undisputed king of the hill Microsoft decided that the web browser didn’t need to improve, and since they’d been funding the war for so long, and had now won, but had also set the precedent that the browser was a “free” application there was no reason to improve it (even just a face lift) because they wouldn’t be able to make any money out of it. Well, from 2001 till late 2006 Microsoft rested on it’s laurels with Internet Explorer 6. There was no competition so no reason to improve their ageing, insecure, steaming pile of, erm, software.

Simultaneously though, the Firefox project was gaining momentum. In 2002 the open source project, run almost entirely by volunteers, had released their first version (this was back in the Phoenix days). Mozilla Firefox slowly captured the hearts and minds of the people and slowly but surely, more and more people converted.

Eventually something woke the sleeping giant (Microsoft). Perhaps it was when Forbes magazine called Firefox the best browser in 2004, or when PC World named it their “Product of the Year” in 2005. Or perhaps it was when various foreign governments suggested that Internet Explorer 6 was insecure and that government employees should switch to Firefox.

Firefox now enjoys a healthy global market share which, depending on who you ask, ranges anywhere between 15% to 25%. Certain European countries (especially those who love Open Source) have percentages over 50%. And proof that our customers are intelligent, educated individuals is that on this website, over 70% of the people visiting are using Firefox.

And then of course there are the geeks. If you know someone who calls themselves a geek but doesn’t run Firefox (or one of its derivatives) they are probably not geeks. Geeks love Firefox… Geeks paid for a double page spread in the New York Times to advertise Firefox. Geeks love their friends and families so much that they install Firefox on their computers and hide the Internet Explorer menu items (you can’t uninstall Internet Explorer, it is *that* evil)

At the end of 2006 Microsoft finally released it’s competitor into the ring. Internet Explorer 7 is better than Internet Explorer 6, but it is still a snot-nosed kid when compared to the awesomeness that is Firefox.

So, what’s this about tough love? Well, if you’re still running Internet Explorer 6; an 8 year old web browser, complete with insecurity, bad adherence to standards and crappy PNG support, and you visit our website, you get a nice little badge, suggesting that your life might be better if you were to upgrade your web browser. Our site looks a little Junk in IE6 because we use this newfangled image format called PNG, which was released in 1996 and whose implementation Microsoft repeatedly messed up until 10 years later with Internet Explorer 7.

And even if you are running Internet Explorer 7 you’ll be interested to know that in 2006 PC World compared Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox and concluded that Firefox was still a better browser. A bunch of part time open source hippies made a browser that was better, faster and more secure than anything Microsoft could do. Makes you smile doesn’t it?

We sincerely hope you’ll give Firefox a try. We guarantee you won’t go back!

Frogfoot loves Open Source Software — Pretty much everything we do is powered by it, including this website.

When we first decided to redo our website we chose to build it on top of the excellent Wordpress publishing platform. The reason for this was simple… Wordpress is both user friendly and powerful. We didn’t *need* Wordpress, but it makes the daily management of the website very easy… we like easy.

The biggest gripe with Wordpress is that most of the sites developed on top of it end up looking like, well, blogs… and often they look like one of the popular Wordpress themes that someone has modified.

Frogfoot is unique… we have our own style.

Once we had a design it was time for me to program the theme. Even though the site appears to use three different themes (Consumer, Business and Blog), it’s actually all one theme that I put together from scratch.

But the real magic here is the things we take for granted because they “just work”.

The site is running on a virtual server called a Xen box… What is a xen box I hear you asking? Xen is, as with all good things, Open Source. Xen allows Frogfoot to run multiple virtual servers on one real server. Each one of the virtual servers is completely independent of its “parent” and “siblings”. Which basically means that you can have complete control of your own Xen box on one of our servers… it’s like having your very own server for a fraction of the cost. We run our website on a Xen server with the exact same configuration and performance we sell to the public.

Running on our Xen server is Linux. Linux powers Frogfoot! On this particular server we’re running our standard Debian Etch Distro.

The web server is the amazingly powerful Apache web server running with PHP5 and the database is powered by MySQL 5. We get direct live access to the server by mounting directories with sshfs, a neat way of mounting directories on servers on the other side of the internet. I use The GIMP graphics editing program.

Here in my office I’m running Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy) and the best web browser around Firefox with a host of other open source tools that we all use constantly.

We hope you enjoy the site and check back regularly to read our blog.