Free WiFi at Power Plant Mall, Just Install an Adware

I have been hearing about the free WiFi blanketing Power Plant Mall and nearby areas in Rockwell Center, Makati. Great news considering Globe WiZ and Airborne Access’ hotspots in the mall are very spotty and limited only to a number shops.

I decided to do a little bit of shopping there today since I’ve got nothing better to do on a Sunday anyway. After trying on a few shirts but not buying anything, I went to Seattle’s Best to get some coffee and maybe read some of my RSS feeds. I took out my iPhone, sniff some WiFi in the air and there on the top of the list, WiGO Free WiFi. I connected, tapped on my Google Reader bookmark and was taken to a nice blue login page. “Sign-up is free!”, a button happily announced so I tapped on it. There it is, the catch: I have to install something called WiGObar.exe. An executable file on my iPhone? I know there are dozen of third-party apps for iPhone but I highly doubt that the WiGO guys were able to come up with an emulation software to let it run a Windows executable file.

Great. Mac users (and Linux and every other device that isn’t running Windows for that matter) are left out again. They seem to be forgetting that Rockwell is a Mac users haven. They now have a beta version for the Mac and you can get it right here.

For the sake of this blog post, I decided to give WiGObar a whirl when I got home on my Mac through VMWare. I registered, downloaded the 500-something KB file and ran it. So, what does the WiGObar do? Serves up banner ads. Surprised? Here is how it looks like:

Doesn’t it remind you of AllAdvantage and those get-paid-while-you-surf services back in the late nineties? Couldn’t they think of a better way to serve ads to their users and not take precious real estate from my screen? That bar is on top of everything and when you try to move it, it will always bounce back to that spot.

I know I should not be complaining since it is free for us users after all but jeez, that thing is hideous. I can think of better alternatives such as contextual text ads or maybe that same bar but one that appears and disappear after a set amount of time. For now I would rather pay for my WiFi, thank you very much.