A View From Mount Starbucks

The only downside to working in a coffee house is the noise. It's tough to conduct face-to-face business meetings. So Nguyen has a proposal for Starbucks: start adding business meeting rooms to their company-owned outlets, available for hourly rental, chargeable to the ubiquitous Starbucks card.

Vu Nguyen sips Tazo Chai tea as he taps away at his laptop computer. He's sitting at a table in a Mira Mesa Starbucks, networked to the world. Vu was 10 when he, his sisters and his parents -- his father having spent seven years in a Communist reeducation camp -- escaped from Vietnam. They were boat people.

Now, at 29, Nguyen is a Wi-Fi man, a living example of the resilience of the American dream. He wears a baseball cap, polo shirt and sneakers. His grin is infectious and charming. Nguyen is a computer programmer and president of a $2 million company. His Web site, Pickajob.com, matches companies and future employees, for a fee. Not a bad business to be in, following the dot-com bust.

Seven months ago, he let his secretary go, closed his office in Encinitas, hired a live answering service and moved his operation to a Starbucks table.

He insists that the move had nothing to do with the viability of his company. "I figured out that the only reason I had an office was for the fast Internet connection," he explains. Now he uses T-Mobile Hotspot Network, a fast wireless connection available at most Starbucks and other outlets across the country. The unlimited service costs him $39 a month.

By moving his office to Starbucks, he saves about $5,000 a month. "Plus, I'm more relaxed. I don't have to wake up and beat the traffic. In the office, I was isolated, cut off from the world. I'd feel sleepy in front of the computer. But here, I network -- I introduce myself to people." A few weeks ago, he introduced himself to a semi-retired San Diegan who is now a major investor in Nguyen's company.

The only downside to working in a coffee house is the noise. It's tough to conduct face-to-face business meetings. So Nguyen has a proposal for Starbucks: start adding business meeting rooms to their company-owned outlets, available for hourly rental, chargeable to the ubiquitous Starbucks card.

Good idea. The wireless lifestyle is spreading quickly. Wireless phone companies sell their own, slower Internet connections. But Wi-Fi (for wireless fidelity) stations are relatively cheap and easy to set up. Some Wi-Fiers offer the signal for free, but entrepreneurs like Nguyen see big bucks ahead.

Last week, USA Today reported that Wi-Fi now connects villages; Wi-Fi kiosks are popping up in villages across India; yaks carried Wi-Fi gear to a Mount Everest base camp, where a cybercafe opened this month; and San Diego County's 18 Native American reservations, through a program sponsored by UCSD and Hewlett-Packard, use Wi-Fi and related technologies to connect schools and police stations to the Internet.

Eight days ago, the United States, having bought or at least leased a country, stood by as Iraqi looters stripped antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad -- priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization. Meanwhile, Cisco Systems, Proxim, Nomadix and other Wi-Fi equipment manufacturers positioned themselves to bring Iraq to the century's technological edge. Why wire the country for the Internet? That's so 1990s. Skip the land lines; go wireless.

If Iran and the ayatollah taught us anything, it's that cultures shove back when pushed too quickly into the future. In America as well as Iraq, the pace of change -- the disruption or destruction of old connections -- is uncomfortable, even painful, for anyone with a memory. Or most anyone.

Technology doesn't need a war to usurp or destroy the past. Over the past two decades, libraries and families committed thousands of library records and photos to magnetic media, not realizing that the half-life of magnetic media is about a decade. Call this the Disappearing Information Age.

Even humankind's ancient awe of nature is taking a hit. In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Ernest Hemingway described the mystical mountain, 19,710 feet high, its western summit called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. "Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude," Hemingway wrote.

When we read that line long ago, a chill went up our backs.

Times change. According to one study, the rapidly retreating 11,000-year-old glaciers on Kilimanjaro will, in two decades, be gone with the snow. Today, or maybe tomorrow, the leopard will be tagged electronically, tracked via Internet by Wi-Fiers sipping their Cafe Americanos at the Kilimanjaro Starbucks. Something lost, something gained.

Let's hope the Wi-Fi generation -- inventive risk-takers like Vu Nguyen -- surprise us. Perhaps, as immigrants, they'll understand better than the rest of us what can be lost, what can be protected and what can be born. Nguyen tells how his father came to America and washed dishes to support his family, and eventually saw his children become electrical engineers and entrepreneurs. Still, his family holds tight to the core of Vietnamese culture, and Nguyen -- though his memories are dim -- somehow yearns for the land of his birth.

Today, Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee exporter. In that country, a 31-year-old entrepreneur named Dang Le Nguyen Vu -- a name so close to San Diego's Vu Nguyen -- operates a chain of 400 coffee cafes, in every province in Vietnam. Dang Le Nguyen Vu, an ambitious man, wants to go global -- Starbucks style.

"That's wonderful," says the American Vu Nguyen. He imagines someday sitting in a coffee house in former Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, sipping a cup of ca-phe sua and checking his company progress via Wi-Fi connection. Maybe he could even hook up with Dang Le Nguyen Vu and convince him to add business-meeting rooms to his cafe
chain. "I'd like to invest in that," he says.

These days, distance has no meaning, and dreams and nightmares have no limit.