Waffle: Making Public Wifi Social, and Hopefully Easier

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, or for our RSS feed, click here.

Public wifi is often a nightmare for individuals, made to jump through ridiculous hoops by telcos, venues, or other providers. The Korean startup Waffle wants to make the process easier and more social for users, as well as actually profitable for businesses that need to provide wifi.

Waffle, founded by Lee Min-ku (pictured below), is a platform for public wifi that has proven its mettle at venues across Korea, and even at TechCrunch Disrupt Tokyo. Users can choose to login to the wifi by just signing-in with Twitter or Facebook – and thereby checking-in and promoting the place at the same time – or instead take a quiz or survey. That should be a lot easier than leaping through the hoops of fire set up by your telco to get onto their bothersome free wifi. For venues, they can implement ads on the platform from which they’ll generate revenue, as well as have a custom sign-in page for their own wifi.

Min-ku giving his pitch. Click to enlarge.

Min-ku highlights how this can give people a localized experience when traveling overseas. For example, a Japanese tourist to Seoul could well get a Japanese-language wifi login page if the venue has implemented one.

The platform is tailored either for B2B clients – such as at a conference, or major franchises – or B2C for, say, small coffee shops and stores. Whoever wants to make use of it, Waffle aims to profit whilst also allowing venues to monetize their own wifi – and users get an easier way to get online for free whilst outside. Thats quite a juggling effort for a startup.

Waffle as a concept is fully formed and has been used in the field, but it’s still in a sort of private testing stage right now, being prepped for launch by its seven-strong startup team. Look out for the Waffle homepage going live soon.