In my fearless effort to discover new ways to exploit technology, I bought a device from a company called Karma.
The basic idea is this:
- buy our device for $79 and get 1 GB of mobile high-speed data
- for each friend/person who connects to your mobile hot spot, each of you earn 100MB of data
- it’s cumulative and doesn’t expire
Sounds like a good deal and it could be.
The coverage and connection speed (provided by Clearwire) are adequate. The trick is that it’s an MLM for bandwidth.
I don’t have too many occasions when I am surrounded by people who are hungry for bandwidth who might connect to my open “Jeremy-Karma” network, but I figured the Amtrak Acela from DC to NYC was a great opportunity.
It’s full of businesspeople and wi-fi on Amtrak is, well, horrid.
I left the hotspot on the entire trip (deliberately sat in the middle of the car) and got all of ZERO sign-ups.
Hmmm…
After you use your 1GB of data, then it’s $14 for each additional 1GB.
Not the end of the world and I like being out of contract with no monthly, but I will admit that I was hoping for tons of free data due to sign ups. Oh well.
It is possible that I picked the wrong market for this test…a lot of ppl have their own mobile hotspots on Acela or maybe ppl just don’t look for/trust open networks.
I’ll keep trying and let you know.
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