Gmail has grown by invitation rights. When you have a great product, but one that is also complex in nature as gmail is (gmail is not so easy to use for emigrants from the outlook world), invitation rights are a great way to spread the usage. Invitation rights involve not only a nice gesture on behalf of a friend, but also an implicit element of training and that is what Fon needs. So at FON we decided that FONeros who have successfully connected their Foneras will get the right to invite friends, so they do not pay 29.95 euros or dollars, but get foneras for free. What follows is a description of the program that Fon will shortly announce.
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Building FON you realize why certain countries are doing poorly and others well and a lot of it has to do with lack of transparency. Argentina is one example of a country in which absurd red tape rules and that is why we have around 900 registered FONeros, but very few active hotspots.
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Link: sevenload.de

In this video I tell the story of how I gave myself a break…. under the Brooklyn Bridge. That´s all, it´s nothing special.

Yes it is! I am pleased to announce that we are now a McAfee partner! If there´s still somebody who does not know McAfee, they are a world leader in security products for your computer.

McAfee is also partners with Skype, who is our investor and who helps us grow the movement big time! Thank you McAffee, thank you Skype!

FON´s idea –that people build their own FON company–, may be replicated by cellular operators according to this interesting article in GigaOM.

PC Home, according to Alexa, is the 60th most visited web site in the world. It´s in Chinese. While it should not be surprising that the 60th most visited web site would be in Chinese, it is remarkable when you find that almost all of its visitors come from Taiwan, an island of less than 30 million people.

In Taiwan over 55% of the population visits PC Home at least once a month. PC Home is also the largest e-tailer in Taiwan and Skype partner in this country. So following the norm that an amigo of your amigo is your amigo, FON and PC Home have become….amigos!! Next week we will start promoting the FON Movement together.

We are very happy to be working with PC Home. We see them as kindred spirits, people who love to see the internet accessible everywhere as much as we do.

I am getting good at winning FON´s office pools or porras. I won the German porra, I lost the Spanish SIMO convention porra, but just now learned that I won the Japanese porra.

The Japanese porra was a Y500 investment per employee and we had to get how many Japanese were going to go for the FONero promise, which in the case of Japan only lasted 5 days. I guessed 8000 and the final result is 8278. Next closest guesses were those of Alex Puregger, who runs biz dev for Asia at FON with 9000 and Nina Wiegand who is in charge of our communications who guessed 7500.

Interestingly, all the Japanese employees were more conservative and had lower numbers. My objective was to have more access points than NTT, who I understand has 7000 (this figure is not confirmed).

As it is customary with the office pools at Fon whoever wins donates the funds inviting everyone else for drinks. So…. kampai!

We are making ISP deals around the world, but in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan ISPs have been the fastest in implementing these deals. The ISPs in this countries quickly realized that FON increases their ARPU, decreases their churn (cause FONeros don´t disconnect even when they travel, if not they lose roaming priviledges), decreases their advertising budgets (FON is viral) and makes it easier to sell broadband.