Announcing the SilverSplash ad serving open source captive portal
Captive portals are a mixed bag; the good ones require you to buy an appliance, the free ones don't support the features you want. Some of your users need power user access; business users frequently need vpn access, and also have to push large files around sometimes. At the same time, you don't want p2p leeches and squatters eating up your network.
Now you can make different types of users happy at the same time, and yourself too, by using SilverSplash to enhance your network revenue. The business users get their paid access, and the squatters are often locals who are desirable targets for local business advertisements delivered from your OpenX ad server.
SilverSplash is the first commercial grade open source captive portal which supports both advertising and paid access.
Adjustable visitor time allows you to be competitive with other nearby networks. Bandwidth caps for the free access keep the p2p pirates from plundering your gateway. A customizable paid option gives the business users full access. PayPal integration doesn't require any recurring monthly fees, and means you don't have to worry about credit card handling issues.
Best of all, SilverSplash is open source, and can be installed on any device which runs Linux and the Apache web server. The use of kernel space traffic shaping ensures that you won't see any slowdowns even on the smallest footprint devices. And with a total capacity of thousands of concurrent users, this captive portal will scale up to large visitor based networks such as those run by WISPs.
Advertising and paid usage; together at last. SilverSplash does it on one device, bringing an open source ad capable captive portal to Linux. Licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, you can customize SilverSplash for your own environment.
Users who choose the Free service option will be redirected to a terms of service page with ads, then redirected to the splash page after agreeing. The free service can be set for any number of minutes. You can also specify a bandwidth cap so that users who exceed a certain number of megabytes downloaded will be disconnected and redirected to the welcome page. Stops p2p users cold.
Users who choose paid usage can select access for a number of hours at the price you set. And they are presented with another space to view advertisements which you can serve from your OpenX ad server.
All you need to receive money from WiFi purchases is a PayPal address. No merchant account or recurring monthly plan from PayPal is needed. After payment, the user is automatically authenticated and redirected to your splash page, where you can get another set of ad impressions.
Posted Aug. 10, 2010 Comments (4)
Google discloses AdSense revenue share
(From CNET)
Google has finally revealed how it shares advertising revenue with AdSense customers who run Google ads on their own sites.
AdSense customers are publishers who run "Ads by Google" ads on their pages as well as those who use a custom Google search box on their site and run search-related ads. Those in the first category--AdSense for content--receive 68 percent of the revenue that Google earns for selling those ads, while AdSense for search customers get 51 percent of that revenue, the company revealed for the first time Monday in a blog post.
Posted May. 24, 2010 Comments (0)
Commercial Grade WiFi Monitoring and Reporting
Forged in the unforgiving furnace of ladders and poles, Silver Lining's new monitoring systems for commercial ROBIN Open Source Mesh based WiFi network operators was built with municipal WiFi network operators in mind. Want to know how many unique users per month your network has? How about user activity throughout the day?
If you manage dozens or hundreds of ROBIN Open Source Mesh based WiFi devices and have Silver Lining installed, you'll be able to monitor almost a dozen different 24 hour metrics for your device. This data is invaluable in troubleshooting that 10% of devices you have which require you to get out the ladder or the Hi-Lift occasionally.
These enterprise level features are now available to all Silver Lining users. Paid users get an added bonus of reporting updates every 15 minutes. So that when the next rock concert rolls into town and everyone gets on your network with their iPhones, you'll be able to see exactly how your network is handling the load.
Many thanks to Urban Wireless for providing feedback and testing of these monitoring and reporting features. Several Open-Mesh and other ROBIN Open Source Mesh compatible devices such as the Engenius EOC-1650, Ubiquiti Pico-2, Pico-2HP, Open-Mesh OM1P, and Accton MR3201A will work with these features.
Posted Jan. 13, 2010 Comments (1)
