The Digital Trade Roots

Our bias has been to develop and deploy a service for all. We believe that cities should fund effective digital access for their citizens. Its common sense as privately financed systems follow strictly commercial objectives, and do not have a mandatory requirement to include everyone, those that have less computer skills, the old, the disabled and the poor, they are the digital divide. But deploying a digital service that includes these people has to address usability equations that in reality benefit everyone; making the service ubiquitous, simple and with universal access.

Public DataWeb evolved from the EC funded ‘Telematics’ project called 'Public DataWeb'

It was predicted in 1995 that the Internet would become the common carrier for digital services

Therefore the ‘projects’ vision was to provide a ‘utility, service for all.

The Internet in its early days was elitist, and today in 2006 it still is.

The danger inherent within this is that populations and nations that are not involved with the communications network adopted by the planet will miss out. History shows that those nations and peoples not involved with the commerce and trading roots of the past were marginalised. The international trade routes of the the clipper ships, the internal roads, railways and electrification of nations, clearly shows how communication mainlines evolved and flourished, historical fact shows those distant and unconnected were marginalised.

The Internet overcomes 'distance' and sets a level playing field for nations and more importantly individuals and businesses to benefit.
We wanted to investigate and provide methods that enable everyone to become connected if they choose so, and for this to be irrespective of a financial or skills requirement.

We set about building public access methods, others did the same but from a commercial aspect aimed at people paying for use.

We built public kiosks, with touch screen user interfaces, and began to put simplification templates over some of the complexity of the web.

Others introduced pay for use options, without modification of the services that were primarily built for desktop PC operation.

Over the years kiosks came; kiosks went, our systems evolved.

Our approach was at variance to the commercial methods providing revenue to service 'gatekeepers'. To fully accomplish our aims we needed to deploy our systems, and for that we had to find city authorities with a similar vision, it had been possible in the past.

Utility services were placed in the public domain in the Victorian age by city Fathers and other public spirited benefactors, libraries, schools, water, roads, railways and in Europe the telephone, were all introduced with public subsidy.

Sheffield was the first city to embrace our concepts, and over five years we worked with the city to generate and test public access methods. This experience has given us a great insight into the real day to day issues that arise when developing and evolving a digital public service.

Some issues encountered: Vandalism, remote system monitoring, weather proofing, durability, 24x7 maintenance, glare wash out, touch screen navigation of the Internet and so much more.

In 2006 we had evolved our techniques and learned from five years operational experience to emerge with a street and indoor kiosk service that also provides a unique WiFi Mesh system, with the backbone street units being totally re-designed.
The parasol or Umbrella kiosk was born.