Now that USA is waking up, Europe is in full swing and Asia is still not asleep our shop has collapsed due to Fontenna purchases. Please be patient! We are sure that things will be back to normal in 3 hours!

And also I am getting tons of enquiries on the issue of why should anyone be a Linus anymore. My answer is that some people just don´t care about money. You know, think of blogs, many don´t have Ads. So if you are a blogger without ads for example, stay a Linus. But if you want to make money through showing WiFiAds and selling passes to the community and roam the world for free then become a Bill!

Today, Tuesday, June 12th the Fiesta Fonera starts. Here are three reasons to party.

First, the La Fontennas are available at our shop. They only cost 2 dollars/euros for good Foneros and 19.95 dollars/euros for everyone else and they boost the range of your La Fonera by 5 times. They are so good that some are already calling them Fonagras….

Second, FON is launching WiFiAds, our ad supported WiFi platform with a 5 cent revenue share per ad shown available to all Foneros. Yes, I know trolls, we copied this one from Google but then so what? They are our investors!

Third, all Foneros will be able to both roam and make money with their La Foneras. Yes, sorry Linuses in order to get this privilege you have to call yourself a Bill, but don´t worry, we won´t tell anybody.

Check out the details of this new offering in our new web site cause I know all this sounds too good to be true.

I just found out that there are many Fonspots that are lost. Namely that we know they exist but we don´t know where they are. And by many I mean around 70K of those. And that´s a lot of Fonspots. How can this be? Well, people get the Foneras, plug them, use them as wifi routers but they don´t tell the Fonero community where they are. Or they try to tell the fonero community where they are but our software fails to geolocalize them. This is unfortunately quite common. Now those Foneras work very well and other Foneros, if they find them, can connect to them. But neither can the owners of those Foneras roam the world for free nor can Foneros find the signal. In order to fix the problem of the ghost Fonspots we will start communicating with the non geolocalized Foneros soon. We will also start a program by which if Foneros find these “ghost” Fonspots that they place them in our maps. Probably we will also ask foneros to report open wifi hotspots in our maps as well. We are looking at the pros and cons of doing this. On the positive side there is more coverage, Fon or open. On the negative side somebody may have their wifi open but may not want others to use it so if we do end up including open wifi as reported by foneros in our maps we will include warnings on this regard. But one way or another we have to find a way to bring many more fonspots into our maps.

Chueca is probably the most beautiful neighborhood of Madrid. It is also the gay neighborhood. Grupo Zero is the largest gay publishing group of Spain. Fon and Grupo Zero have launched an initiative to have Chueca WiFi enabled in anticipation of the Euro Pride so when a million people come from all over Europe to Chueca, Chueca is WiFi ready. This is a video shot from the Chueca WiFi headquarters.

This article says that ABI research forecasts that by the end of 2007 there will be 179,500 hotspots around the world. They forget to count FON Spots. FON has around 140K WiFi hotspots now and we should have around 300K by year end. Maybe more. And now that we have introduced the La Fontenna, our coverage which has certainly been one of our weaknesses, will greatly increase. By the end of 2006 FON became the largest WiFi community in the world. By the end of 2007, we will be larger than all of the other networks combined. And all with the same software, in open source and ready to receive developers apps. If you have a cool app that you would like to make part of FON please send me an email and I will forward it to the right teams.

I am happy to announce that Fon has made an agreement by which Boingo customers can roam into Fon hotspots. With this agreement by which Fon will share 50% of the proceeds of the payments from Boingo customers with Bill Foneros (I will soon disclose how much these are), Bill Foneros will make more money with their Foneras (wifi routers). If you are a Linus Fonero and would like to benefit from this agreement you simply need to go to our web site and change your status to Bill. If you do not change your status Boingo customers will not be able to roam in your Fonera.

Lately there has been some criticism about FON having created the FON Labs. Some Foneros say that FON should focus on making FON better and not waste its time creating such tools as Fon.gs, Gspace, or Gmailuploader because these don’t really address the FON’s core competence. In this post I would like to explain why is it that FON has chosen to do both: assign 40 coders to improve FON while also assigning 2 , who report directly to me, to develop FON Tools at the FON Labs.
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The Webware 100 Awards is a prize given by CNET, and FON has been selected as a finalist in the communications category by CNET’s editors, with another 250 companies among a total of 2000. Now, users around the world will decide which services are the 100 best (there will be 10 winners in each of the 10 categories), by voting on Webware.com. User voting for the Webware 100 will be open from Wednesday May 23 at Noon Pacific Time until 9:00 AM June 11.

All Foneros around the world can vote for FON here!!!

Today we are launching fonero.be together with our partners Scarlet and Tidings in Antwerp Belgium. Fonero.be is a new ADSL wireless broadband provider, and by combining their innovative WiFi services with the FON Community, Fonero.be customers and Foneros can easily connect to Internet using WiFi around Belgium and for a discounted price. Pricing for this service is 29.95€ per month for 6MB service. Thanks to teaming up with Fonero.be, and Scarlet as ADSL and voice supplier, the Belgian market will provide a dense network of FONspots that are not only important for Foneros in Belgium but also those who visit Belgium.