Together with BT we created BTFon and we develop campaigns like this with Peter Crouch. In this video you can see the FON team doing the Mexican Wave… with a style of its own.

What’s important with this is the great number of foneros we got thanks to BTFon. Unfortunately I can’t share how many of them, because BT prefers announcing the numbers later on, anyway what is clear is that BTFon has a great image and is attracting a lot of people.

FON Japan and Seven Seas Techworks, a company that develops interactive web services and content delivery platforms, are collaborating to provide an educational solution called “Student Pass for iPod touch” to universities in Japan.

Students will get an iPod Touch to access content and services like their class schedule, study materials, attendance management system. They will also be able to watch videos of the classes they missed, study the materials they received and look for job offers on their iPod touch. FON will take part in this project by providing Foneras to the students who will set the them up at home and use WiFi to receive contents and services from their university.

Starting from June, as part of a first trial, “Student Pass for iPod touch” and “La Fonera” will be distributed to students attending Yamanashi University.

Update:

Here the first coverage from Japanese media:

• ITmedia
• Excite
• Yahoo
• Livedoor
• BIGLOBE
• Nifty

Journalists sometimes portray WiFi as the enemy of operator based mobile services.  But if you take a look at this email I got today from AT&T you will see that what we reply at Fon is true.  That mobile operators are concerned about apps that use a lot of data and prefer that traffic to go over WiFi.  Even with HSDPA if people start downloading 300 MB movies for the iPhone network costs are unsustainable.

This is why WiFi has a role to play alongside GSM/3G and other mobile technologies.

Yesterday Fring released an iPhone version of its great mobile VoIP and Instant Messaging application. This is the first native application providing real VoIP on the iPhone, via WiFi, of course. Fring is compatible with Skype, MSN, GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo! and provides calling and messaging to your friends on these popular networks. It also provides VoIP calling using the SIP standard, so you can use any VoIP provider to call for very cheap rates using WiFi.

Fring works very well on the iPhone thanks to the great WiFi support Apple built into it (one of the best connection managers around, choose a network and access it automatically the next time). Fring has been available for a while on Nokia phones, but WiFi support built in those smartphones is less sophisticated, so Fring had to add several features like WISPr, to connect to already known hotspots, and its WiFi roaming feature, to let you automatically switch from a WiFi network to another, or from WiFi to 3G.

The best way to use Fring on the iPhone is of course with iFON, FON’s WiFi connection manager for the iPhone, which scans available WiFi networks and automatically connects you to FON signals, without having to enter your login details. So when you are abroad you can use your iPhone to easily find a FONspot and call home via Skype or SIP.

Call quality with Fring on the iPhone is very good, better then on Nokias in my experience. Instant Messaging is of course another great addition to the iPhone, a much needed one. It’s very intuitive and the iPhone’s huge multitouch screen offers a very good experience. You know already about the iPhone’s keyboard, you get used to it and you’ll still be faster then with T9.

Fring stays active while the iPhone is in sleep mode or if you press the “home” button on your iPhone and do other things with it. This way you always get notifications when you receive an instant message or when a call comes in.

You can install Fring only if your iPhone is jailbraked, but this is just a pre-release. Once the final version will be ready it will sure be available on Apple’s App Store for every iPhone out there (in June, when the new firmware will come out).

Here is a video my friends at Fring just made to present this release

Now that we have began giving La Fonera 2.0 to coders, I started dreaming of new apps that I like to see done over the standard Fon functionality (give me WiFi, give some WiFi to others, allow me to make money with my WiFi, allow me to roam the world for free).

As you know the Fonera 2.0 is like a minicomputer that, other than being a social WiFi router, can do all sorts of things so long as we program it. And even more if we add an audio in, a mike, a speaker…

Here are the ideas, the good, the bad and the crazy ones.

-Fonera bridge functionality so i can get any encrypted signal or open signal from inside the home and turn it on the window to Fon signal.

-HSDPA to WiFi converter so HSDPA can be useful in many devices. For this the Fonera 2.0 should have a car plug or an external battery pack.

-Mesh functionality for wireless communities that, as opposed to foneros, have people who want WiFi and don’t have DSL or cable.

-A Flickr uploader so i can put the SD reader straight to the USB drive of La Fonera, go to my Fonera web page, instruct the Fonera to send those pictures to Flickr, leave my home and have La Fonera send them over the next hour or so. Same with Photobucket and other popular picture services.

-A youtube uploader so i can get my favorite videos into a pen drive or SD, stick it into the Fonera, upload them to Youtube while my laptop is doing something else or i left home.

-Bit Torrent or Azureus: download my favorite movies and tv series (that are legal to download) into my hard drive that is plugged to La Fonera 2.0 all this while I am not at home or doing something else.

-Combine La Fonera 2.0 with another piece of WiFi hardware that goes in an amplifier and receives streamed music from my computer over La Fonera, or from a hard drive in La Fonera that I left programmed to do this. This hardware would be like a WiFi music receiver that gets WiFi signal and transforms it to audio out.

-Same idea, but with video and my TV so i can get video delivered to my TV over WiFi.

-An app that once i have the WiFi receiver in my TV shares my screensavers with my TV’s so i see my family and friend pictures in large TV screens.

-A network hard drive for both individual files and a WiFi back up system. This could be combined with www.getgspace.com as well.

-A WiFi network printer with printer plugged via USB to La Fonera.

-A wireless USB functionality so La Fonera can be somewhere and the peripherals somewhere else.

-A home monitoring system for security/babies that not only allows me to see, but to talk back to people near the camera again using already existing cameras. Even just a microphone without a camera would be good so you can listen to what is going on around La Fonera like a baby monitor.

-Buttons that could be on La Fonera and given specific uses, for example, that are pressed when an older person takes medication so this person can be monitored from the outside. If they don´t press the button, they may need a phone call reminding them to take it or they maybe simply……. dead. On a similar vein a panic button for security reasons that is tied to a security service.

-The ability to add a simple keyboard and monitor to La Fonera to use it as a simple Linux computer (i would need video card and probably a more powerful computer). But this simple computer could do tasks that i may not want my expensive laptop to be doing, such as being a media server.

-A WiFi pbx system for telephony.

-An iPhone app that sends music from my iPhone into La Fonera over WiFi so La Fonera sends it to my audio system (that has WiFi receiver). In general, I feel that what the iPhone and iPod Touch should do is allow me to walk into my home and send music to my stereo.

-A Facebook app (for this La Fonera needs to have a speaker) that would work like this: you would go into the Facebook app and program your Fonera to make funny noises when your friends poke you, to read you your timeline, to read you your messages and anything else you would like it to say. Ideally this Fonera would be a special purpose product that looks like your FRIEND in Facebook, like a robot that tells you all these things, that moves when you are poked, etc.

-An interface with Rapidshare and Megaupload, two extremely popular file exchange sites (again, with all the caveats of this being legal).

-A simple app that turns La Fonera into an alarm clock that wakes up up in the morning, or a more complicated app that is connected to the Google Calendar and makes La Fonera remind you of things to do.

-The famous FATERA, a scale with WiFi connected to La Fonera that posts your weight every morning to groups that are trying to lose weight, sort of AA but for losing weight and at home. Similarly you could have breathalyzers for people actually on AA so others can know if you drank. Again social pressure to lose weight or stop drinking.

-Sensors that can be attached to La Fonera so you can be warned of temperature changes in your home or fire or simply make temperature graphs of your home. These sensors would have to be away enough from La Fonera so its temperature does not affect them.

As I’ve recently disclosed, our main objective at FON is the launch of our next product, the Fonera 2.0. The Fonera 2.0 is a Fonera that will not only make it easy to provide WiFi for yourself and for your neighbors, it will also provide Foneros with great features like the ability to connect a hard drive to it and autonomously upload or download content from the Internet while you’re doing something else on your laptop or your PC is off. In short the Fonera 2.0 will manage your daily relationship with the Web 2.0 doing such thing as sending your pictures to Flickr, your videos to Youtube, downloading your torrents, etc. Many of the things that the new Fonera will do a PC can do of course but why tie up a thousand dollar investment with your vital info doing menial task when you can have a $49 Fonera do them.

The Fonera 2.0 will be an open platform for developers to build their applications on top of, much like a hacked iPhone is now. An open platform is nothing without a community of developers, so we’re announcing today the launch of The Fonosfera, our development community program that will span not only the Fonera 2.0 but all Fon products. We know there are already many communities doing great things with our Foneras, adding new features and fixing bugs. The idea behind the Fonosfera is to bring all the development work the communities have been doing and will do in the future to any Fon user.

The Fonosfera will be a chance for all these communities to keep working independently, while contributing to the development of Fon products including the Fonera 2.0 and the applications that will run on it. The Fonosfera will provide a space for gathering and sharing between developers and to make their projects available to end users all around the world. It will include a framework with development and community tools such as svn, trac, forums, mailing list, wiki etc. We already picked a few communities that have proved they can do great things with the Fonera and sent them a test version of our Fonera 2.0.

The Fonera 2.0 will provide a USB connection and users will be able to plug any sort of USB device to it (as long as there’s software support in the firmware, and we invite developers to add support for any device they might think of). The Fonera 2.0 will provide out of the box the ability to connect a hard drive or pendrive to it, so you can access it on your local network and use it to store the contents your Fonera 2.0 will download from the Internet for you. Another interesting feature we are working on is the ability to connect an HSDPA modem to the USB port of the Fonera 2.0, to share an HSDPA connection on the move or where DSL is not available.

We are working hard to make the Fonera 2.0 as open as possible, and we are willing to take all the help the development community can bring to Fon and Foneros. Our users will still have to wait a few months to get their Foneras 2.0, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait.

The Sun’s coverage of BT FON’s latest campaign. The girl in the photo is Jennifer Metcalfe, star actress in the UK.

Peter Crouch and Jennifer Metcalfe have grabbed their sombreros to spice up the launch of the world’s biggest ever Mexican Wave.

Liverpool striker Crouch and Hollyoaks stunner Metcalfe are promoting BT FON’s fun new campaign which aims to find out which football team in the UK has the most passionate fans.

Bradford babe Metcalfe visited Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium for Saturday’s clash with Liverpool to meet who filmed their own, unique Mexican Waves.

To me it is fontastic to see all this going on as BT is showing Fon that if you really want to reach the general public you have to go for themes that are less geeky than ours. Who would not dream of being able to connect to Jennifer Metcalfe´s Fonera?

Together with our partner BT, we are launching The World’s Biggest Mexican Wave, an initiative to raise awareness of the BT FON community, which has been growing really fast and has now more then 70,000 members. This post is also an invitation to Foneros from around the world to join in this initiative which while mostly UK it can be joined by people from all over the world.

Why The Wave? Well, first of all it’s fun. Secondly a WiFi community is just like a Mexican Wave: people contribute with their individual (radio) wave, and the more people, the better it gets.

Anybody can be part of The Biggest Mexican Wave. Joining the wave is very easy, watch some tips on how to film and submit your own (you can use a webcam, a camera or your mobile phone). Once you upload your video you’ll be part of the world’s biggest Mexican wave, watch it on the website and try to spot yourself!

You can watch the entire Arsenal football team performing a great Mexican Wave for our BT FON community, or a video with Liverpool’s striker Peter Crouch teaching how to do the perfect robotic wave.

BT FON allows its members to connect for free in thousands of places around the UK and in the world. All BT broadband subscribers can automatically opt-in to join the BT FON Community, share their WiFi and roam the world for free. Of course all Foneros can roam for free on BT FON spots.

Daniel Alvarez Perez, a Fonero from Spain, sent me these provocative images that illustrate what cutting the cord or making an effective connection can mean. To me these images explain Fon in a better way than some long text in our web site. This is why I think that there is something flawed in the super successful Google AdSense and that is that Google AdSense abandons graphics. I think that even Google will rediscover a graphical way of advertising as I am convinced that it is for a reason why people like Daniel Alvarez Perez are called graphic artists: there is art in graphic design. Having said this I think European advertising in general is more pleasant to the eye than US advertising which is less graphic and more direct.

Alekseij, a Fonero from Italy, today posted on our forums photos of his unique modding of our Fonera: a Ferrari Fonera! He replaced the case of a common Fonera with a Ferrari toy car.

Here is the result: