The Guru of Wi-Fi

If you are familiar with the personal and professional history of this month's cover subject, you know he's more than just another ex-dotcommer taking a crack at the next new thing. He's also more than the interim CEO of a recently formed company that's attempting to forge a profitable business out of a popular and increasingly widespread — but still commercially nascent — wireless LAN format.

Once you understand what he has done, and what he has the potential to do, you might say Larry Brilliant is the new spiritual leader of the Wi-Fi movement.

That's a tall order, but Brilliant's history of social activism certainly gives him the pedigree for such a ranking. For proof, read the profile of him and Cometa Networks, the Wi-Fi hopeful he now heads up, that begins on page 26. Brilliant accomplished great things — the most telling example being that he helped eradicate smallpox from India — before he ventured anywhere near the world of business in general, let alone telecom or wireless specifically.

For all of Brilliant's community, medical, technological and business endeavors, however, one in particular stands out that perhaps best qualifies him to help guide Wi-Fi out of community network obscurity toward commercial success: The Well, the original online community, which Brilliant helped found in 1985.

On its Web site, The Well is described as “a literate watering hole for thinkers from all walks of life.” The Well is now owned by Salon Media Group, and neither Brilliant nor his co-founder — writer and former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand — are involved in the effort any longer. But The Well still subscribes to the ideals on which it was founded: It's a cooperative effort that promotes intellectual discourse on all varieties of subjects.

The Well was among the first efforts to use the Web for the social purpose of connecting people to freely exchange ideas. And given its grass-roots beginnings and community leanings, Wi-Fi is the perfect technological accompaniment to The Well and everything that came after it. Wi-Fi is the ideal connectivity method for connecting society.

Perhaps to say that Wi-Fi can change the world is to overstate Wi-Fi's capabilities in its current form, which brings us back to Cometa Networks and Larry Brilliant. Whether he puts it like this or not (and he doesn't), Larry Brilliant is someone who has committed his life to changing and improving the world. Now he's the head of a Wi-Fi company. At the very least, he is the ideal person to attempt Cometa's charge of using Wi-Fi technology to create a profitable business venture while preserving the fundamental characteristics — ubiquity, community, low-cost and ease of use — that make Wi-Fi so appealing.