I’m Pietro, I work with Martin and I’m guest blogging about this year’s Menorca TechTalk as Martin is very busy running the whole event. Guests spent four days in Martin’s farms in Menorca and had a great time. Yesterday there was a talk opened to the public, with entrepreneurs giving informal presentations on topics ranging from the state of the Internet in Japan to the differences between Europe and Silicon Valley when running a startup.

Joi Ito started with a speech about the Internet in Japan, where the mobile Internet is now growing faster then the Web. Japan is more advanced then Europe or the US but is moving towards a dangerous direction, with mobile operators controlling traffic and getting a huge cut on profits from Internet services running on their networks, thus disincentivating entrepreneurs and startups.

Jacob Hsu (CEO of Symbio) and Thomas Crampton (now based in China and working with Next Media) talked about the Internet in China. Thomas focused on what he called propaganda 2.0, while Jacob talked about the many opportunities in the country, especially for the companies that can build a good relationship with the government.

Andrew Mclaughlin (head of Global Public Policy at Google) followed with a speech on how he sees the Internet in Europe and underlined the danger of some recent EU’s directives extending old media regulations to the Internet. Micheal Wolf (former President of MTV Networks) gave a very interesting speach on the future of television, which in his vision will involve shorter formats and worldwide releases at the same time.

Marko Ahtisaari from Blyk gave us an update on how this ad-funded mobile operator is growing as a media company, offering users aged 16 - 24 free or very cheap mobile telephony while letting brands reach their users with very targeted messages and engage them in conversations.

The session ended with an improvised panel with Zaryn Dentzel, who moved from the US to Madrid to start Tuenti, now the biggest social network in Spain, Loic Le Meur, who moved from Paris to Silicon Valley to build his latest startup, Seesmic, and Ola Ahlvarsson who runs Result, helping other companies going international. Zaryn told us how moving to Spain proved to be a great opportunity, although he runs the company with an international team. Loic talked about the differences in starting a business in Silicon Valley, how some things are easier, like getting a meeting with a potential business partner, but some are harder, like finding engineers, as companies compete to attract the best talent. Ola gave a very interesting speech about the different kinds of entrepreneur, that he categorized into 6 models.

Here´s Om´s skeptical analysis of the new Clearwire, the US Wimax operator in which Google who is also an investor in Fon contributed $500 million. We at Fon are not so skeptical. Indeed we believe that this is great news for consumers in general and potentially for foneros in particular.

Fon´s first existence was about Wimax not WiFi. But in 2004 it was too early for Wimax and we moved on to the inmensely popular WiFi with our Fonera and thanks to it and telco partners like BT, Neuf in France or Livedoor in Japan we built the largest WiFi network in the world. As of last week we had over 200K WiFi hotspots compared to less than 30K of T Mobile. But in a couple of years Fon would love to help our community members empowering them with not a WiFi but a Wimax fonera. A Wimax fonera is just like a Fonera, meaning a wireless transmitter connected to DSL, fiber or cable, but it sends Wimax. We have such prototype and we could make them for $200 or less. For rural areas Wimax is fine with huge towers a la GSM but for urban areas our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing signal. Of course foneros would want free services for them as donors but we believe Wimax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.

On May 5, Pedro Jareño – one of the founder’s of Minube.com – set out on a 60 day Web 2.0 trip around the world, and FON will be with him every step of the way. According to Minube.com, “it’s time to revolutionize tourism. It’s time to build a real travel web 2.0!” And that’s exactly what Pedro is doing!

Pedro has built his trip around the web 2.0 culture with the real time advise of a vast network of different communities around the world, including bloggers, entrepreneurs, and Foneros. Pedro’s blog will trace every step of the way across 65,000 km and 16 cities of his world tour (from Madrid to Zurich, London, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, and finally back to Madrid).

Finally, Pedro will be able to publish his travel 2.0 experiences with photos, commentaries, videos and podcasts thanks to our FON Spots and Foneros sharing their WiFi across the globe. Keep an eye out for Pedro for when he’s in your neck of the woods.

Bon Voyage 2.0, Pedro!

I started reading about the cyclone in Myanmar and it first said 300 dead, then 4000, then 10,000 and now they are talking about 22,500 dead and 41,000 missing. This number is incredible. I was looking at other death toll figures and the people killed by this cyclone are more than all the US soldiers dead in Irak, plus all the people who died in 911, plus all the Palestinians and the Israeli killed in their wars for 40 years. All of those are less than 15K dead compared to 22,500 and probably 50K dead from this one cyclone.

I keep reading about the two iPhone misteries that ain´t so. One is that there´s enormous demand for the iPhone in the States and shops ran out of them (I tested this myself 10 days ago in San Francisco), the other one is that UK and French iPhone sales are dissappointing and shops are full of them. Journalists go on and on about how much Europe loves Nokia or other meaningless theories of Apple rejection. When are writers going to put the two together and realize that a good part of the enormous amount of iPhones sold in the States are in Europe? Apple has a pricing policy that encourages this. Apple prices its products in euros and in dollars as if the currencies were very close to each other and not $1.55 to 1 euro. But the kind of people who can afford Apple products can also afford a trip to the States. If you buy a MacBook Air for example you can pay your airline ticket on the price difference alone. So Apple sales in the States overstate American consumption and Apple sales in Europe understate European consumption on all products but especially the iPhone.

Last year we celebrated our first Menorca TechTalk, a gathering of Tech Entrepreneurs at my farm in Menorca. It was fun, relaxing, a great learning experience for all of those who participated and for those who attended the TechTalk itself which as last year it is open to the public on Saturday from 5pm to 8pm. If you would like to attend the TechTalk which is an informal presentation by some of the attendees of their companies and main activities you have to register via email telling Matias Bergmann at matias@fon.com that you would like to come.

What follows is a list of the participants in the TechTalk. The gathering starts on Thursday morning and ends Sunday evening.

Alan Levy (Blogtalkradio)
Albert Martin (FON)
Alec Oxenford (Dineromail)
Alejandro Estrada (Dineromail)
Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
Andrew Mclaughlin (Google)
Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
Arturo Paniagua (Hipertextual)
Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
Benjamí Villoslada (Menéame)
Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
Carlos Martin (IG Expansion)
Cedric Maloux (Gay.com)
Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5)
Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
David Sifry (Technorati)
Demian Bellumio (Cyloop)
Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
Esteban Sosnik (Vivendi)
Felix Fietkau  (OpenWrt & FON)
Felix Petersen (Plazes)
Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum)
Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
Imre Kaloz (OpenWrt & FON)
Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
Jack D. Hidary (Hidary Foundation)
Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
Jennifer Schenker (BusinessWeek)
Joerg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
John Markoff (The New York Times)
Joi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, Investor)
Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
Jordi Castello (OLX)
Jordi Vallejo (FON)
Jose Maria Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
Lars Hinrichs (XING)
Loic Le Meur (Seesmic)
Louise Blouin Macbain (Louise Blouin Media)
Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, Investor)
Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
Marko Ahtisaari (Dopplr)
Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
Megan Smith (Google)
Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
Nikesh Arora (Google)
Ola Ahlvarsson (Result)
Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
Pablo Larguia
Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
RJ Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
Rodrigo Teijeiro (Sonico.com)
Rupert Schaefer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
Thomas Crampton (Next Media)
Victor Martin Garcia (FON)
Zaryn Dentzel (Tuenti)

Yahoo is an amazing company, with tremendous products and enormous potential. But Yahoo has been poorly managed for years first by Terry Semel an alien to the internet and by Jerry Yang who is a remarkable individual in many ways but as a returning CEO he is no Steve Jobs. Still Yahoo has half a billion unique users per month and outstanding products and services: Yahoo mail has more mail users than Gmail, Yahoo Messenger has more members than Google Talk, My Yahoo is the number one start up page in the world, Flickr is the best photo service and Yahoo has wonderful products in many niches. In my view what Yahoo really needs is an amazing CEO who can change the perception that many people have of this great company. Here´s two people I know who I think could pull this off. One is Chad Hurley of Youtube and the other Niklas Zennstrom of Skype. If Yahoo managed to attract either one to run the company I am convinced that they would in turn put together a remarkable management team around them and turn Yahoo around. Both have worked very well with partners in the past (Niklas and Janus, Chad and Steve) and these partnership seem to perform superbly on the internet with Larry and Sergey being the leading one.

I would like to clarify that neither Chad nor Niklas have told me they would be interested in running Yahoo and they are both very busy and happy with their own projects. But I wanted to use them as an example of what Yahoo could try to do. A committed board could at least try to recruit them or the very few people of their caliber that exist in the world and built a new and great management team to run the company.

This is my simple theory of the role of the US in the world economy since the 90s. During the Clinton Administration the US led the world economy. During the Bush Administration the US sank the world economy. Now what is the good news? That the Bush Presidency will soon be over and whoever wins the next election most likely will fix the US economy and probably the world economy as well. Why is US economic behavior so important if Europe is actually the largest economy in the world? What makes USA so important is that element of surprise in US policy. US behavior in the global economy is much harder to predict compared to that of Europe. Europe does not make the world economy rise or fall because Europe does not have the huge economic swings that America. Europe is steady. Europe does not go from a huge budget surplus with Clinton and a huge deficit with Bush. Europe is boring compared to USA but in economics boring is good and excitement is bad. Outside of the States the world had been quite a steady place during the Bush years. Asia grew consistently fast. Europe grew consistently slowly but still remain the number one economic region of the world. But America was the wild card these past years and in economics the key part of the forecast is exactly that one, the one that contributes the uncertainty.

Europe is involved in military affairs around the world but none of the European economies are as heavily dependent on military spending swings as the US. And on the financial front Europe does not experiment with lending to consumers who borrow a trillion dollars they cannot pay. And compared to the military adventurism of the United States Chinese Foreign Policy is also “boring”. The Chinese want Taiwan, they want to keep Tibet and that´s basically it. The Chinese will not go and invade an African country to make it say, communist. But again the good news here is that Bush is nearly gone and that no Presidential candidate is likely to have an administration as unpredictable as that of Bush. I don´t think that McCain who suffered himself the policies of the military gone wild in Vietnam will increase military spending and nor will the democrats should they win. So USA is not about to squander precious human lives and another trillion dollars in doomed military adventures. And regarding lending money to people who cannot pay… that scheme is also likely to end as banks are more closely watched. Funny how everyone thought that the hated hedge funds would bring the financial world to its knees but it turned out that it was the hiper regulated mighty American banks were the ones brought us down. Personally I have had my savings in a collection of hedge funds for years with much steadier returns than the financial instruments offered by large banks or investment banks. Hedge fund managers have skin in the game and as a group they do reasonably well. Hedge fund managers as a group do what they said they would do, they hedge.

As far as commodities are concerned I also think their uncontrolled rise is coming to an end. With oil at $120 even the worst oil wells will become profitable. In the next 3 years production is likely to go through the roof in a somewhat recessionary environment and this will lead an oil prices declining. Yes China, India and to some extent other LDCs are adding demand by the day for oil and other commodities. But they are not adding it at the rate that commodities prices have been rising. Same for food, with sky high rice prices people will be growing rice in their gardens! We have seen the prices rise, we will soon see supply rice.

Bottom line? I think it´s time to sell commodities and move back to the dollar and trust the new US administration who will probably be known not so much for what they did but what they did not do, and did not allow businesses to do.

USA sank the world, but just by getting its house in order USA will fix it.

I love Linux, Ubuntu, for work and at Fon we use Ubuntu, and I also love Mac for my personal computing. But I strongly dislike Windows. So for me to read that in countries like Brazil, Microsoft products cost double of what they cost in the US when income is around 10% just makes me wonder. Why would anyone pay for Microsoft when Ubuntu is free and much more robust, easier to use and less likely to fail. I don´t get it.

T-Mobile has one of the largest WiFi networks in the world, but with AT&T getting the Starbucks deal, growing your network and keeping your dominant position in the market will be a tough and very expensive task. Each new WiFi hotspot means installations, payments to land based carriers and other costs that you are very well familiar with.

This is why I present you the opportunity of partnering with FON, the company I’ve founded and in which Google, eBay, British Telecom and other great partners have invested. If T-Mobile has the largest WiFi network, FON has the largest WiFi community in the world, with more then 200.000 FON access points around 8 times more than T Mobile. What makes Fon different? That Fon is built by the community member or Fonero. Foneros are nice people who like to share WiFi among themselves. But Fon also has a revenue model for our carrier partners and that is to share revenues from non Foneros who are the vast majority of the people in the planet. BTFon is a great case in point.

With FON users share their broadband connection via WiFi in a secure way, a valuable proposition for users, who share to roam the world for free, but also for ISPs as FON helps them gain new customers (pay at home and get free global roaming) and reduce churn, giving users more reasons not to give up their fixed lines even when they are mostly on the road.

You’ll see how partnering with FON makes a lot of sense in light of your HotSpot@Home strategy, providing your customers with more opportunities to save on their plans, while letting you leverage the cost and performance advantages of IP and broadband using WiFi in locations outside of the customer’s home, especially considering the increasing popularity of unlimited talk and data packages. Your customers could seamlessly connect to FONspots and call or surf the web with their T-Mobile phones. In this way you will gain an advantage for your T-Mobile GSM customers that your competitors don´t have. What I’m talking about is a chance to expand your network at a very low cost, giving your users free access to FON access points and helping with distribution of our routers (La Fonera) that will instantly work as T-Mobile hotspots once connected.

Should this proposal appeal to you pls write to me at martin@fon.es and we will talk some more.