Over Wall’s shoulder as he speaks is a poster for the movie Yellow Submarine. Over the stacks behind him are a series of album covers from the Isley Brothers’ Shout! to REM, the Beatles and blues. Wall’s inventory may be largely vinyl era, but he has been selling via a store website, and he is not put off by the technology. It’s just that the WAGZone’s commercial proposition is a trifle hard to fathom. Still, the feel is right. "To tell you the truth, it’s a little vague to me. But it seems exciting. Like there is something in the air," he says.

The concept?paralleled in various other cities, from Portland, Ore., to New York City?is perhaps an inevitable reversal of the first wireless wave. Up to now, the revolution in wireless technology has been, in many ways, a campaign to eradicate distance, to make location irrelevant. You dial a phone or punch up the Internet from wherever you are. You have a conversation, surf the Web or send e-mail from a park bench just the same as from your office. Location doesn’t matter.

In contrast, the Athens experiment is an attempt to make location matter?to marry wireless and place. That could mean that someone sipping a latte could check on the wait time at a restaurant four blocks away. Find out which band is playing at which club right now?and what song it’s playing. Order a pizza that will be ready when she strolls across town. Check to see if the new Shania Twain album has arrived in a store. None of those require stunning new technology. What they require, however, is a tech-bridge between your presence in town and what you can do while you are there.

"The potential is for information to accompany you as a companion," Shamp says. "This is the test bed for that." While the technology is not a challenge, the WAGZone cloud has a database that is still, well, kind of cloudy. But there are some starter applications that may lead the way to something denser. For instance, a host of Athens entertainment information from Flagpole, the local alternative weekly, is on the WAGZone, accessible to all users.

That can be one more way to get people where they want to go, says Jane Scott, owner of the Native America Gallery in downtown. "You don’t want to bombard people, but we get lots of visitors to Athens. People are always asking us where the restaurants are, the cool places to go," she says.