• silicon.com
• Technology
• Mobile

By Tony Hallett, 19 January 2007 14:45

COMMENT

You may have seen and heard one or two stories relating to Starbucks this week. Sure, you might have heard about an Oxfam campaign to do with how much the coffee giant pays growers in places such as Africa.

You might also have heard about the online campaign to get a Starbucks outlet moved from the Forbidden City in Beijing. I almost spurted out my beverage of choice when I heard there even was a Starbucks there. But go netizen pressure!

Last year we mentioned the KFC next to the pyramids (in sight of them, rather than tucked up next to the stone work). Whatever next? A McDonald's in St Peter's.

Anyway, beyond these incidents - which doubtless kept some highly paid press officers busy - I want to mention a couple of tech-related incidents.

I was sitting at home most of Wednesday nursing a cold. (It really was a cold, rather than 'man flu', which seems to be the new phrase du jour. I think it refers to the way men often upgrade the humble cold to full-on influenza, when we all know flu is a different beast. Where was I? Coffee...)

My couch-potato-ness allowed me to watch much rolling news. One piece I saw on the BBC mentioned Starbucks about to kick off a "large expansion" in London. I didn't know this fact - though I can believe it - but there are already supposedly around 165 Starbucks within five miles of Oxford Circus. And we need more, apparently.

Much as some people I know might portray this as the end of Western civilisation (there's a line here somehow about Beijing and Eastern civilisation), one of my first thoughts was what it'd mean for wi-fi.

I'm assuming it means it'll be easier to find. But it might not matter. Wi-fi is ramping up all over the place and initiatives like The Cloud's upcoming mesh across the whole of the City of London show we won't all have to up our coffee intake.

We'll be kicking off a campaign dubbed 'Fair Wi-fi' shortly on silicon.com, led by managing editor Will Sturgeon, so look out for that. But of course another recent initiative of ours - the business traveller service atlarge.com, all about internet connectivity at the airports of the world - has thrown up a tale or two.

And you guessed it, one that stands out to me concerns Starbucks.

A user who travelled through Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta Airport in Indonesia, lest we get confused with Jakarta Halim Perdanakusuma Airport (hey, it's a far-reaching website) - let's call him Jeremy, for that was the only name he gave, spoke of a novel way to power up his laptop.

He wrote on this page: "Power point is available at front of shop if you unplug the Starbucks sign. There might be more connections but I've not come across them... "

Does anyone else think that unplugging a shop sign is an interesting way to find a plug socket for your charger? Now we don't know exactly what kind of sign we're talking about.

We called Starbucks about this - about the whole angle of 'tips on charging your laptop' - and they said they had no comment.

We're not sure whether a great big sign above a mega-store was darkened or whether it was a small, revolving sign, the type you see outside small shops or even mobile carts. Or something else.

But good on Starbucks for not clamping down!

Sticking with that part of the world, we're still waiting for the first developer to post to atlarge.com about drinking a cup of java in Java while coding using java.

Sorry.