Finally, A Way to Make the Homeless Useful

Well the music hasn’t even started at SXSW and the festival is already making headlines. At the SXSW Interactive Festival everyone’s talking about the New York ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty using the homeless people of Austin as 4G hotspots. The homeless are given t-shirts saying “I’m a 4G hotspot”, and users are given a number to text for a password to the hotspot. They are then told there’s a $2 dollar donation suggested for every 15 minutes. Either cash is given to the homeless or deposited into a paypal account for them.

And we all thought that in the future, we would harvest the homeless as an alternative food source. Instead we’re pumping their bodies full of unseen internet radiation as we check into foursquare and yelp about food carts.

Read more at wired.com and thanks to gawker.com for the photo.