July 10, 2009 Ojai, California*
I’m sitting in front of Jim & Rob’s just about to open up the Reporter and read Rob Brezny when my phone rings.
“Demitri, it’s Julie!”
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry I’m late. I’m at Jersey Mike’s still installing a dSpot box.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.”
I hop on my bike and cruise down to Jersey Mike’s shrugging off the disappointment of the change in location. I’m thinking maybe I’ll get to see one of these babies in action. I’d become intrigued by this new service having heard about it the night before at Movino’s. I arrive and find Julie Collins sitting at a table with Arte’ the owner of Jersey Mike’s and two business associates. They are wrapping up their meeting having transformed the sandwich shop into one of 20 dSpots (www.dspot.com/ojai) in the Ojai Valley. What is a dSpot, you ask? It’s free WiFi internet service. I’ve come to get the scoop straight from the horse’s mouth.

We order sandwiches and move to a table by the window. As Julie fields cell phone calls I turn to Steve Congrave, the creator of the dSpot and ask him how it all began. Steve is the owner of a UK service provider called Aardvaak which has been offering free dial-up service since 1997. He began creating services for the Internet since it premiered. It was after moving to Silicon Valley in 1999 that he saw a need for free WiFi accessibility. Over the next 3 years Steve mulled over the possibilities and in 2003 an LA friend suggested that he provide WiFi to doctor’s offices and sell computers that work as hotspots. That plan of action proved to be cost prohibitive.
“Then one day it dawned on me that the Linksys routers work as a computer. The boxes cost about $12 to manufacture so I coded an operating system, bought 20 routers and created a toolbar to control ad displays. You can download a toolbar but most people assumed it was spyware. It isn’t but just to give people a choice, I programmed in a 10 minute interruption that displays ads – if you have the toolbar running then you don’t see this. Instead ads pop up every few minutes as unobtrusively as possible.”
Armed with a working prototype, Steve went about demonstrating his dSpot for the next 4 years – to no avail. The biggest hurdle that potential investors and customers noted was where to put these dSpots and how. That’s where Julie Collins comes in. In 2008 Julie and Steve were introduced. Julie is the publisher of an independent Yellow Page business and published the first online phone book in Ojai. Steve, with his dSpot and being an internet service provider directing 50 websites with a quarter-million pages indexed in Google, could not have been a better match. Julie provides the “feet on the street,” needed to “seed” a community with a limited number of free dSpots and then get these thingamajigs into businesses where people have to sit and wait. Local businesses, advertising in the valley and wherever dSpots are located throughout the country and the rest of the world, can buy in at the low price of $30 per month, $360 per year. Customers can pick up a free internet connection with occasional advertisements from local businesses. The ads are targeted to the customer’s behavior especially as there is no registration needed and it’s all completely anonymous. Something to do with MAC address tracking I’m told.
I asked how this system is patented or copyright protected.
“These sort of things are very difficult and expensive to patent protect. I applied for a couple of Provisional Patents in 2005 and have “Prior Art” going back to 2003 which protects us. It’s also an area that you have to be very knowledgeable about, NebuAd and Phorm tried something similar with internet service providers and this caused them to almost go bankrupt. NebuAd did in fact close. It’s essential that you protect the customers privacy and anonymity while at the same time protecting your network from abuse. We have some neat tools that do just that.”
“Are you the only company providing this service?”
“At this point we have no direct competition. There are other companies, such as JiWire and Anchorfree that can provide ad services for hotspots using national advertising. We’re the only one focused on local ads, including our unique ability to send out public service ads for the City. When we work with an Independent Phone Book such as City Books and The Ojai Phone Book, we give them exclusively for the dSpot service, so no other Directory can offer dSpot in Ojai. There are 8,000 independent phone books in the US and we have to get dSpot out to them all and quickly. So we are currently working on dSpot in a box – a UPS box. Phone Book Publishers will be able to buy “everything you need to be a dSpot” in a do-it-yourself box – sales materials, video training tools, handbooks and the code.”
It’s now time for Steve to head to Ventura where he will make another business into a Free WiFi dSpot.
Julie begins telling me how she and Steve were united in Lake Havasu.
“ I think it was around July of ’03 and I was searching the internet looking for an online phone book and came across a book for Temecula. I was so excited I tracked down the CEO and initiated the first online phone book in Ojai and became a beta-tester to help that company to refine it’s software.
Last year the marketing director, for that company, called me with a new project and wanted me to meet with Steve in Las Vegas. I drove in from Lake Havasu and she flew in from Washington. I grasped the potential of a nationally linked, free WiFi, advertising driven service immediately.”
Our conversation turned to local happenings and I asked if she would ever return to Ojai.
“Oh, yes! My heart is here. My home is here. I’m glad that I can come back with this service for the community I love so much. Yes, I will be returning.”
Julie went on to describe all the benefits of the dSpot service.
But first she described the demographics. “The largest targeted demographic user is 35 and under. The 2nd largest is 60 and up. The benefits to the community as a result of the dSpot are several;
1. dSpots talk to each other. Placed in a community the dSpots communicate with each other and prompt ads from other locations to your dSpot, anticipating the activities of the users to promote local businesses while maintaining user anonymity. And you can download and print coupons from the businesses or even better, send them as a text message to your cell phone – no paper needed!
2. Each dSpot advertiser gets a mini website; a page they can populate with all their information and is as easy to use as Facebook. That web page is promoted in the major Search Engines such as Google and many Ojai business categories are already on the first page of Google organic listings as a result of the other 250,000 pages that dSpot has indexed in Google.
3. The mini web site pages allow businesses to get reviews and ratings from their customers and to monitor customer feedback, both positive and negative, which give the business owners a way to monitor how their business is perceived.
As we wind down our interview I ask Julie what’s next for her.
“Will you come back to Ojai?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. But I am proud of what we’ve done in Havasu. When we began there were 6 phone books being delivered. We made the 7th. Crazy huh? But in just 2 editions we have managed to give Havasu a gem of a book and just this Spring a preference & usage study was done which rated my Havasu book usage at 96.1 percent. That feels great and now I’m very happy to make Ojai the next city to have dSpot. I love Ojai and I hope it helps to enrich the community in terms of keeping locals shopping locally and also increase tourism, bringing more people to town that perhaps would not have heard of Ojai – before logging onto a dSpot somewhere else in the world. Yes, I’ll definitely be returning to Ojai. It is my home and I love it too much to be gone forever.”
The cost for dSpot is $30 per month or $360 for the year.
The cost to advertise a business or product on dSpot is $30 per month or $360 for the year.
Local dSpots locations:
Rainbow Bridge Health Food Store & Restaurant
Ojai Coffee Roasting Co.
Bart’s Book’s
Ojai Spring Carwash
Right Click Computers (covers Dahl’s Mall)
Antonio’s Mexican Restaurant
Marina Cafe – coming soon
Vesta Home & Hearth
Ojai Recreation Department/Boyd Center
Fred’s TireMan
Jim & Rob’s-Ojai
Jim & Rob’s-Mira Monte
Movino Wine Bar & Gallery
Giorgio’s Restaurant & Sports Bar
Jersey Mike’s
Adamson’s Automotive
Carrows Restaurant – coming soon
Coffee Connection
Farmer and the Cook
Ojai Valley Athletic Club
On the grass – behind the Arcade
Ojai Phone Book/BitVision Computers-big parking lot on the side
Ventura dSpot’s:
Me n Ed’s Deli
Rusty’s Pizza
*Since this article was first written the dSpot service has gone through technical difficulties which I’ve been informed have been worked out. Julie Collins welcomes any comments that will help her to improve the dSpot service.