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Burger King to offer Internet Access
Mockingbird writes
"The Associated Press is reporting today that Burger King plans to offer internet access from up to 20 workstations at a franchise in Hartford, CT. Value meal purchasers get 15 free minutes, but no porn and no e-mail. Have it your way, indeed. "
If I mega size it can I have a half hour?
The BK on Lower Broadway near Wall Street in NYC gives you a password with your receipt.
It expires after 15 mins.
You need a $5 minimum purchase for more net time.
Who's gonna eat $20/hour in Whoppers ?
It might be a good way to read Slashdot when you stop for lunch. Just stop in, read a couple of articles and responses while you eat your burger and fries, and get back to work/on the road in 15 mins. Basically, it's a way to read a newspaper or whatever while you eat.
I'm just worried about the condition of the keyboard/mouse on the computer after thousands of average people surf on them while eating greasy food. They would accumulate keyboard plaque at an alaming rate.
I read the internet for the articles.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
I can see it now, some nut is going to go apeshit in this joint and start shooting people LIVE ON THE INTERNET.
This'll give the know-nothing talking heads on TV more "proof" that the internet and violent activities go hand in hand.
Burger King, this is a royally bad idea.
LK
For more information on WSOD, check out http://www.software.ibm.com/network/ workspace/. A list of features:
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Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
Umm, why would someone need to advertise Burger King at Burger King? People are there. They've already succumbed to the advertising pressure.
Anyone have any idea of how BK plans to implement this? Are they going to have individual Windows boxes setup with 'Net access or are they going to have Macs or are they going to be truly intelligent and run X-servers. As long as Netscape or IE is up and running, I don't see how people will care.
In San Antonio, TX, Kinko's has this sort of 'Net access dealie where you can basically use their computers for anything (graphics editing, pagemaker work, surfing the 'Net, checking e-mail, et al) for a price. I wonder if people will be able to limit themselves to just a meal, though.
So what's to prevent an enterprising soul from coming in, yanking the blue cable from the PC and plugging it in to their Ethernet-capable laptop, and side-stepping all the ads and other bullsh*t that's sure to be on the BK-PC? (It wouldn't be hard to discover the IP address of the PC and reconfigure the laptop accordingly.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Its a neat idea but it won't be free. The browser home
page will be burgerking.com, there'll be scrolling ad banners, popups, etc.
The idea is dumb for this type of business. Burger King, McDonalds et al are supposed to be fast food. How many times did you use the Net for only 10-15 minutes? Now exclude checks for an E-mail.
What if people would love this feature so much that they will keep surfing more then 15 mins? How they are gonna to enforce the limits? Fast food places are making their money on FAST rotation of people -- got your food, eat it and go away. This is not cafe where you can sit, drink coffee and enjoy your Quake session. It is not gonna work for the fast food chains.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
First, nobody says that the keyboards have to be touch keyboards. Look at the point of sale machines that they use... no buttons, just touch pads.
Second, a touch screen seems to be the perfect method for accessing a web-only device. Doesn't seem to be too difficult for an employee to use some glass cleaner (or whatever) every 30-60 minutes to keep those nasty germs away.
I saw a mention of "french fry grease." The greases and oils used in fast food tend to gum up things like keyboards, but point of sale technology has been around since the 1970's... it doesn't appear to be a problem with the majority of the fast food places you see around town.
I don't think I'd use it (I'd hate to be standing in a "line" behind a bunch of kids ooh-ing and ahhh-ing over the technology). But... there ARE cyber-cafes right now. Why not cyber fast food?
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Or if they allow telnet you can just logon to your shell account and use Pine :-)
My understanding is that they will only have a client for http. Therefore, no e-mail, no telnet, no IRC. What they mean be no e-mail, I would assume, is that they will have no POP3 or SMTP client, therefore no e-mail. Probably if you had web-based e-mail, that would not be restricted by the proxy. But then again they may block things like SSL and user authentication.
They already said that they would be censoring access. However, it is not said whether they were filtering bad sites out, or good sites in. If they were filtering good sites in, meaning that the proxy server has a list of the sites you can view, instead of a list of sites that you can't view, it makes it more probable that they wouldn't let you get any sort of e-mail.
atw asks:
How many times did you use the Net for only 10-15 minutes?
Umm...all the time? I read Slashdot in ten-to-fifteen minute bursts all day long. I ordered tickets to Star Wars this morning in about five minutes. I bought a book last week in less than three minutes.
Whether it will work within their business model remains to be seen. Might be fun to see them delve into some other aspects of the technology: how about a distributed processing net with a node in each store location? That cool effects shot in your favorite movie might have rendered using spare cycles on Burger King's network of office computers.
--j, who sees some amusing possibilities
I think many of you have missed the point here a little. I don't think that any of you are part of BK's target market for this scheme.
Obviously, all of you here have access to the internet, one way or another, and i am assuming that most of you can use it pretty much whenever you like, and as much as you like. Afterall, we are nerds aren't we?
So perhaps the target market is people that don't have regular access to the internet? People with Hotmail accounts that they check whenever they get the chance?
I wonder how many whoppers i need to buy to download a copy of Redhat....
They have this already in numerous locations in NYC.. I'd use when I heat there, but the dual T's at work and my desk full 'o PC's are much more fun.. They have web cams tho, you can send 'video postcards.' whee.
Matt
If I was at a fast food joint, only had fifteen minuets at the net, they only thing I'd be interested in is checking my e-mail. I bet they would set up dumb NT stations that only had Exploder.
If by some mirical we were given access to a telnet program I could log on to my server and check my mail there. This is idotic personally.
----
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
No way that this is the *first* BK. There's a guy in NYC who's got two Burger Kings online. 3Com did a deal to put Web cams in the store in the financial district. I went there. Here's the picture from the 3com webcam:
HTTP://www.burgercam.com/pcard/3KDKEZ3BX6.htm
I don't really see the point of 15 minutes of net access with no email (I guess I could eat a burger and skim Slashdot), but the important thing is that they used the words "Internet" and "World Wide Web" in a press release. Their stock should go through the roof! (*snicker*)
Quoting the article:
"Also planned is a Webcam where Internet surfers can call up Hartford's Burger King Web site and see a live transmission of action in the restaurant."
A live transmission of all the "action"? What action?!?
I say we just file this one under clueless suits use nifty buzzwords and waste bandwidth...
I definately wouldn't want to touch that keyboard. Instant e.coli death. Voice recognition might work, but that would be pretty awkward in a quiet bathroom, hearing 4 different guys in stalls talking to themselves.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
Like they're going to block hotmail, et al?
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BlackNova Traders