I just read about an interesting use of WiFi in a Korean newspaper.

Old Seoul was much smaller and was surrounded by walls with four gates at each of the compass points.  Areas near the gates (with the exception of the North Gate for obvious reasons) flourished commercely even after the walls came down and gates lost their meaning.  At East Gate (Dong-Dae-Moon) and South Gate (Nam-Dae-Moon), small stores banded toegether and formed large shopping districts which does business practically around the clock.

Hundreds of tiny stores selling amazing array of goods at rock-bottom prices is enough to draw buyers from all around the countries as well as people from near-by countries like Japan and China looking for bargains.  But getting them online was a nightmare.

Nam-Dae-Moon merchants have just agreed upon a plan, with financial support from Seoul city planners, to use WiFi to get every store online, forming a federated online shopping portal.  Orders are received online and forwared to each store via a WiFi-equiped PDA and delivered by a common shipping service.

With all the potential technincal and social problems along with tight $1 million dollar budget, they got plenty of headaches ahead.  But, if they succeed, we should see similar Wireless Market Districts popping up everywhere in and around Korea.

Update: I just had a fiendish thought.  Many of those stores selling similar goods are located near each other to form product-oriented shopping sub-districts in a nice mixture of co-operation and competition.  I wonder if the competition part could spark a WiFi hacker wars by sons and daughters of those shop owners.  With tools like ettercap Joi Ito pointed out recently, a hacker for one store can interefere with online orders going to another store.

Since problems attract solutions, Nam-Dae-Moon project will be one interesting WiFi hotspot to watch.