Stockholm’s hot startup Instabridge has been winning awards and has had no trouble making it onto the top Swedish lists, but we haven’t heard much from them in recent months. Now we’ve received word they’re taking over Amsterdam with 300 WiFi hotspots designed to get people using their Android app and offload their 3G or LTE usage to WiFi.
Instabridge cites a Cisco study last year that says that over 80% of users prefer to use WiFi rather than 3G or LTE when browsing on their mobile phone. By reducing the friction of connecting to a WiFi network through their Android app, then operators see much less data going through their network. Instabridge plans to monetize this reduction through partnerships with operators.
Anyone is free to set up their own Instabridge WiFi connection for their friends, or friends and strangers to use. Rather than relying on this organic growth, it sounds like these Amsterdam hotspots are designed to give them an initial bump in users. Agevik says, “These are people who are sharing wifi with the Instabridge community, and you can of course go around and ask the owners one by one, but that’s a lot of hassle compared to just installing Instabridge.”
Right now Agevik says they’re not monetizing their push into Amsterdam, instead they are purely focused on increasing their wifi capacity.
In the future when evaluating other cities to take their solution to, Agevik tells ArcticStartup that they will be looking at the price of mobile data, and the amount of WiFi capacity already available in the city.
Instabridge now has nine people based in Stockholm.
