While we intended our numero uno birthday free fonera givaway campaign to be for the USA only, we decided to ship to Canada and the UK as well. So Canada and the UK are part of the birthday celebration campaigns!

Bienvenidos Foneros canadienses e ingleses! So now if you are a resident of USA, Canada and UK click here to get your free Fonera while limited supplies last.

I just came back from the FON party. It´s 3am in Madrid (our one year birthday party was wild) and I find out that our servers sunk due to ENORMOUS demand for Foneras from the States. This is because many blogs linked to our offer that we were giving them away for free for our birthday.

We know that thousands of people who tried to get the Foneras got rejected by our site. We apologize. We just never had so much demand in our history as a company and we were simply not ready to take so many orders per hour. We were not really able to add capacity tonight in Madrid, but now so many people got rejected and gave up that the ones who come in are getting through and are getting their Foneras.

I feel bad about this cause it´s unfair. Those who came first did not get them and those who come now do. Don´t know how to fix that. But now it´s working fine.

If you live in USA and want to join FON, today is your lucky day. Today is FON´s birthday numero uno and if you click here you don´t pay NADA to get your Fonera (FON´s wifi router). We already have 18,000 Foneras ordered in the States and we are on our way to becoming the largest WiFi network America.
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When we started FON, our idea was to develop a piece of software that turns your router into a member a global family of routers who share wifi. So first we released an open source download that would convert certain router models into FON routers but we failed with the download model. Even though FON appeared in most blogs, the New York Times and many newspapers and magazines around the world, we discovered that there were not enough people interested in a download. We diagnosed this lack of interest for three reasons: first, people saw little value in being early adopters, second, they feared that sharing would leave them without bandwidth; and third, they were afraid that strangers would get into their WiFi networks (now many people have WiFi printers, WiFi media servers, etc).
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And we will celebrate with a party at Teatro Lara in Madrid. Unfortunately, I can´t invite all the readers of my blog, but the first 100 to write to us are invited. Pls send an e mail to Alberto if you would like to join us for drinks and dance at 11pm.

Om Malik is giving away Foneras (FON WiFi routers with 2 SSIDs) for free. These normally sell for $29,95. Click here if you live in the States and would like to get a free Fonera. You won´t even have to pay for shipping, just give your word that you will connect it or give it back to the community.

My apologies for readers outside the US, but we have ran free promos in most countries and we are doing the US last and in very limited format cause its so damn big!!!

DLD sent me the first results of the “DLD Online Survey 2007”, a 228 expert survey about media, marketing and digital life.

Download file
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Our FON labs in Barcelona have just released a beta of the FON software for Macs that we are testing internally. Basically, what this download will do is turn any Mac into a FONspot. Say you go to a conference and they want to charge you $20 for WiFi or, in some cases, the WiFi may be free but, as it happened in LeWeb 3, there´s practically no connectivity cause there´s too much usage. Well what you can do is connect your Mac to a 3G, EVDO or HSDPA connection (some carriers may not allow this, pls check) and offer FON WiFi to many around u and be one popular person. You can then regulate how much bandwidth you share so you are not depleted yourself. Your bandwidth will then be free to FONeros and cost 3 euros first day and 2 euros/dollars thereafter for non FONeros of which as a Bill you can make 50% of it.
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