Hot spots to go

Web wandering and Web research have become steady passions of modern travelers. Thanks to the presence of hot spots and wireless hotels, Web activity can always be a click away. Actually, however, it isn’t always that easy. And it isn’t always that cheap to log on.

A Bellevue tech startup has developed a system of “Web packs” that download to laptops, smart cell phones or handheld devices, letting people check on and have access to favorite Web sites even when they’re not online.

The firm, Webaroo, was launched last year and offers the service free of charge. Eventually, it expects to make money by ad placement in pages users download and view on their devices.

It requires a software download; it’s in Windows only for now, but a Mac version is planned later this year, said co-founder Brad Husick.

Husick and co-founder Rakesh Mathur hatched the idea in 2004 when they were walking through Seattle and couldn’t find a free hot spot.

The men decided the world needed a way for Web users to shrink down their favorite parts of the Internet so that they could search and use that information when not online.

The trick was to weed out the stuff users were unlikely to ever need so that what was left fit on a smart phone memory card or even on a 1-gigabyte USB thumb drive.

Today the firm has about 10 employees in Bellevue and Silicon Valley. Much of the heavy coding gets done by another team of 70 software technicians and engineers in India, Husick added.

Webaroo has about 500 download Web packs; most deal with entertainment, sports, travel and news. The most popular include world news, world business, and – surprisingly – large segments of online Web encyclopedia Wikipedia.com.

Husick has an 8-gigabyte memory card on a smart phone, and he’s put just about the entire catalog of 3.5 million Wikipedia articles on 6 gigabytes of storage.

The company’s tagline is: “search unplugged,” and Husick said the company’s business plan is “counterintuitive” to the notion that soon the planet will be covered with WiFi hot zones and broadband connections.

“That’s a beautiful dream, that we’ll have ubiquitous WiFi all over the place,” he said. But in reality, security concerns have limited the number of free hot spots globally. And recent surveys have found that the cost of paying for WiFi connections gets more expensive every year, he added.

What Webaroo offers, then, are bite-sized chunks of the Web, minus all the unneeded and redundant stuff. If the company has developed anything novel, Husick said, it’s the ability to find the kernels of key information and eliminate the chaff – repetitious links, useless boilerplate and other features most people don’t need.

Users generally will need roughly 1 gigabyte of storage to use Webaroo effectively.

Once you download the free software, Webaroo doesn’t try to gather any information. “Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Husick. “We don’t even ask for an e-mail or a bogus name.”

The company only assigns each user’s software a specific serial number and identifies where that person is, based on IP number.

When advertising starts, what Webaroo will collect are aggregate numbers on the specific pages and subject areas its users view most often.

Most Webaroo Web packs are sized at roughly 256 megabytes. After they’re downloaded to the device, the Webaroo software lets you browse the data and find articles, using any browser you prefer.

Each time a user re-connects to the Web, the software then goes out and refreshes the Web pack, bringing down the relevant new content for those subjects.