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A satellite broadcasting company called Outernet wants to bring all this content many of us take for granted to the estimated 3 billion people without internet access. That catch is that, in order to get content to as many people as possible efficiently and cheaply, Outernet's connection goes only one way.
"We want to solve the information access problem as quickly as possible," Outernet co-founder and CEO Syed Karim says.
Outernet sells a simple gadget called the Lighthouse that can connect to a satellite dish and download—but not upload—information such as Wikipedia entries, public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, news, crop prices and more. The device doubles as a Wi-Fi hub, so that users can connect to it and download or browse text on their own devices. You can also build a Lighthouse-style receiver yourself, using the company's open source software and instructions. The service is free, and anyone with the proper equipment can pick up Outernet's broadcasts.
Yay, a new device to capture the spending power of the 3 billion humans who live on less than $2 per day.
Related: Facebook's Internet.org "Platform" Launches
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:21PM
There's never really anything new in technology, I can think of teletext on TVs in the 80s/90s and at least one place was distributing a one way usenet feed over satellite in the early 90s and the public high school around 1990 had a literal news feed over satellite service in the library that you could search, and last but not least coast guard bulletins distributed via radioteletype and radiofax.
At a system level there was once a service a long time ago that broadcast news to text pagers, which is conceptually similar. I had to carry a pager for some years with that service, but I don't remember it terribly well.
In the 80s using 80s home computers I used to listen to the coast guard radiofax station NMC somewhere in New Jersey, perhaps, that broadcast fax'd weather pix on 8080 KHz worldwide 24x7. Radiofax was a simple analog protocol, something like 1000 hz pip for sync, then 1200 hz for black and 2400 hz for white (or vice versa) and something like 1 horizontal pixel line per second (or maybe 2, aka 120 lines per minute). Anyway a 80s home computer was well up to the task. I could also print out the charts I got on my dot matrix printer and the satellite shots looked pretty good. AFAIK the coast guard still broadcasts weather and safety bulletins for ships at sea.