Do you have a laptop with a wireless card? Are you tired of sniffing around for free wifi or of only being able to use it at home? Well, now you can find all sorts of new places to do your web surfing for free, either online or using your mobile device. Ilovefreewifi.com is a community-driven site that allows users to come and find new hotspots, leave comments about hotspots, and add new hotspots to the database. Ilovefreewifi.com is built off of the free wifi hotspot site built by Josh Knowles in 2002 at auscillate.com/wireless. Tikva Morowati made the mobile component that allows you to query the hotspots database when you’re walking around the city or on the road, making it even more useful if you're in need of free wifi!

Josh Knowles has run a popular wifi hotspots database off of his personal site for about four years and, even though it's hardly promoted, it has received a fairly large amount of attention. Tikva Morowati wanted to add a mobile component -- the obvious evolution of the project -- and so Josh and Tikva have pulled apart the entire old site and refurbished it using the awesome new-found techniques they've learned and refined at ITP. By moving it off to ilovefreewifi.com and adding new mobile and web-based services, they hope to make the site much more useful to people out there.

Tikva has used this project as a way to learn in-depth how to develop for mobile devices.

Josh's original version can be found at auscillate.com/wireless. It has been written up in the Austin Chronicle, the Houston Chonicle, the Dallas Morning News, the CBS Denver website, and other publications over the years. The idea is aching to be taken to the next level, and now it finally has been!

Anyone who needs to find a new place to use the web for free -- no matter where they are -- is in our potential audience.

I'm visiting my grandmother for the week in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She doesn't have internet access, but I'd like to be able to grab my e-mail and get some work done onine for an afternoon. So I send an SMS message from my cellphone to allentown@ilovefreewifi.com with my address and I get a message back with the closest free hotspots. Success!
OR
I get off the subway at First Ave & 14th street. I've got my laptop on me and would love to sit in a cute cafe and do some work. Thing is, it's late and I know the cafe I normally go to is closed by now. I pull out my phone and type in 501 East 14th Street and send it to nyc@ilovefreewifi.com. I get a message with the top free wifi spots, and press there respective signifing numbers (i.e "1", "2" or "3") to get the hours and phone number of the venue.

It runs off of PHP and MySQL through the web.

We have become much more proficient with using mobile devices to access information through the web.