08 Fon’s revs were euro 2.8M loss 7M, in 09 revs were 4.9M loss 1.5M. 1st qt 2010 revs 3.9M and $280K profit 🙂 This is a tremendous achievement and I want to congratulate everyone who works at Fon. It took Fon 3 years to get to a million hotspots. In the first quarter of this year alone we grew another half million.

Does Time Warner Cable, Comcast in the States offer an IPTV service if u pay their monthly subscription? When are they going to Slingbox as they Tivoed? They have a great opportunity there.

Google has a serious branding problem. Is it the “Android”, “Nexus”, “Nexus One”, “Google Phone”? People can’t agree.

FB app slows down your iPhone if you have many friends. Today I started cutting my friends list in Facebook from 4000 to 500 because neither the iPhone, nor the Android, Blackberry can handle Facebook when you have so many friends.

It took Fon 3 years to get to a million hotspots. In the first quarter of this yr alone we grew another half million.

While everyone talks about the iPad – the iPad does have its shining moments – I do believe, in the end, there will be more Android tablets than iPads. Just as, soon, there will be more Android smartphones than iPhones sold around the world. What convertibles are to transportation, the iPad is to computing. There are moments in which you adore your iPad and nothing else will do. But in general, the iPad is too limited and I am convinced there will be Android tablets that will allow you to do many more tasks in a tablet format.

iPad vs. Android from Martin Varsavsky on Vimeo.

In this video I argue that the iPad is great, but that the Android Tablet will be even better.

Just four years ago, FON was a small group of WiFi addicts with a simple but ambitious goal, WiFi everywhere. Today FON is the world’s largest WiFi community. FON now has 2 million members and 1.5 million active hotspots worldwide. For those looking for WiFi on the go that means you can connect to 950,000 hotspots in the UK; 175,000 hotspots in mainland Europe; 50,000 hotspots in Japan and 325,000 hotspots across the rest of the globe, thanks to FON.

And that’s just the beginning! Our user-generated WiFi network keeps on growing. We expect FON hotspots to more than triple in 2010. This gives everyone a lot more WiFi to look forward to and plenty of reason to celebrate.

In the UK, where open WiFi is illegal, we would like to point out that FON is legal and operates together with BT. The BT FON network is the largest in the nation.

Fonera, FON’s innovative WiFi router and your ticket to free WiFi, is available from the FON shop today.

FON data from Q1 2010.

Original post on the FON blog. Read also “FON reaches 2 million members,” by TelecomPaper.

There’s nothing like a great vacation to clear your mind and make you think about the important things in life. In this video shot in deserted Hoffman Cay in the Bahamas, I try to tackle the difficult question as to what is the end game in the life of a tech entrepreneur? Is it really only to please customers, shareholders, employees? Is it not also a very personal quest for happiness? And does that happiness exist? I think it does 🙂

….is that it’s been a blessing in disguise for the EU. Before the crisis the Euro was heading towards 1.50, now it is down to a more reasonable 1.35. If Greece defaulted on its debt, it would probably go down to 1.2. Would that be bad for Europe? Most would say no. In a world of competitive devaluations in which China has been amassing $2.4 trillion in reserves thanks to an artificially devalued currency, exporters in the EU would welcome the fall of the Euro. Moreover, the only real danger of a declining currency, inflation, looks very well under control: labor costs are down because of unemployment and energy costs are down because of lack of demand. No wonder it’s taking so long to bail out Greece.

Obama was elected…

“on a platform of universal health care, ending the Iraq war, a massive cap and trade system, 18 billion in new money for education, a revamping of the tax code to make it more progressive, a restoration of our civil liberties and enforcement of our anti-discrimination laws, a doubling of foreign aid, a huge expansion of national service tied to making college more affordable, tightening regulation in the financial markets, an unprecedented set of ethics and transparency rules governing the white house.”

For a while it seemed that the USA was headed nowhere. Now, as Lessig says in this great but long article, there is hope.