Seattle (ip-192.com): Starbucks will start to serve a Latté or Frappuccino with free in-store Wi-Fi through AT&T, starting July 1, 2010. Later in the year, the Seattle based coffee and coffeehouse chain will roll out the Starbucks Digital Network in partnership with Yahoo and other sites. The service will include a mix of free local content and news from sites usually hidden behind a pay wall.
"Free Wi-Fi is in my mind just the price of admission - we want to create ... new sources of content that you can only get at Starbucks. This is a thing that doesn't exist in any other consumer marketplace in America," said Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz during the Wired Business Conference in New York.
While other companies like Caribou and McDonald already offer free Web access, nobody else is promoting their own localized content. Starbucks hopes that the Digital Network will help to create some sort of community center where people will meet between office and home or, how Schultz put it, a bridge between the real and the digital world.
Since every customer will need a unique identifier to log into the network, Starbucks has the potential to serve targeted advertising based on its patron’s surf and purchase history. Online content may come from AOL's Patch.com, a community-specific news and information platform. The Digital Network will also allow free access to the Wall Street Journal, and serve music and videos.
Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 17,133 stores in 49 countries, including 11,068 in the United States, nearly 1,000 in Canada and more than 800 in Japan. The free Wi-Fi offer will be limited to the 6,700 company-operated locations in the U.S. 4,300 franchise stores will not participate in the promotion.
You can find a Starbucks store locator here.
Starbucks plans to offer free Wi-Fi at 6,700 company owned stores in the U.S. The Seattle based company follows McDonald and Caribou. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com
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