The Skadeedle team is headed to Austin later this week to attend South by Southwest Interactive. SXSW Interactive events continue to grow every year, bringing thousands of industry peeps to a week-long, technology infused Spring Break of sessions and parties. With that many people (and all their devices) gathered in one place, the WiFi in Austin can get pretty tapped with everyone jockeying for a piece of bandwidth. In order to get a good connection, you need a dose of good luck, or some good karma. In this case, it comes in the form of a WiFi Hotspot from the folks with the same name, Karma.
Tech Crunch reports, “The Karma 4G and WiFi-capable Hotspot is about half the size of a smartphone (so it does indeed fit in your pocket), comes with a range of six to eight hours of battery life, is capable of speeds of up to 6 megabits per second (Mbps) and can facilitate up to eight open connections at once. Additional bandwidth costs $14 per gigabyte and “never expires,” according to Karma co-founder Robert Gaal.”
The Skadeedle crew is taking two Karma WiFi hotspot devices to SXSW so we can share the love with our fellow attendees. Here's how Karma works; you simply pay for the device (at a cool $79 a pop). Then it gets very cool..according to Karma’s site, “Your Karma hotspot has a WiFi signal that's open and branded for you (ex. Skadeedle's Karma). Anyone around can connect to it.When they do you'll both receive 100MB of free data.”
Image courtesy of Karma
According to Mashable, “Anyone in the vicinity can log on to your Karma WiFi hotspot for a pay-as-you-go fee of $14 per GB of data. In return for each person who purchases connectivity through your device, you earn 100 Megabytes of free data — about enough to browse the Internet for five hours, and open 10,000 emails.”
“It is not tied to a device, or to a network, but to you,” co-founder Steven van Wel explains.
On a side note, Karma also gets big ups for the confirmation email we received when we placed our order. It's got nice branding, a friendly voice and tone and incorporates social media with the Tweet Us button call to action. And, of course, we're big fans when someone tells us we rock 
If you're headed to SXSW and need some WiFi juice, just look for your Skadeedle friends. We're happy to share our good Karma.
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How many people logged in to your karma wifi during SXSW ? Would be interested to know. I’ve got a karma device for about a week waiting for someone to login to it
Hi Phil,
The WiFi at SXSW was much better this year, than in year’s past. However we still had people joining our Karma even at the Austin airport. Try carrying it with you and leave it on. People will join in. Cheers!