Today I spoke at SIME in the session called “Meeting of minds: the Real New Things – sizzling without hot air”.

The rest of the panelists were Carlos Bhola, Managing Partner of Celsius Capital, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, entrepreneur and founder Reboot conference and Alexander Bard, pop star (Army of Lovers, Bodies Without Organs), producer and writer. Moderator was Thomas Crampton, from the International Herald Tribune.

I go to a lot of conferences, but none are as fun as the show that Beata and Ola put on each November in Stockhom. SIME is where FON was launched globally, a year ago.

I wanted to apologize in my blog for the over 20,000 FONeros who are right now waiting for their Foneras. Tomorrow we start a shipment of the next 5000. Next week another 5000 and the week after the next 10,000. Again, my apologies, it is our objective to ship within 5 days in Europe and USA, but demand has been enormous lately and we had to rush and manufacture three times as many Foneras as we were planning to make between now and year end.

But pls do not send me any more e mails asking about your Fonera! Or at least let´s agree that if you don´t get it in 3 weeks then you send me one…

For a year now I have been using OpenBC, my favorite business network. I just found out that OpenBC is now officially Xing. Xing is more than a rebranding, the new site has a friendlier, easier to understand interface and new features for all of us….xingers? For those of you who don´t know who don´t know what Xing is here´s a description taken from its web site:

XING makes your professional network an active part of your life. Far more than a directory of business contacts, XING enables its members to discover professional people, opportunities and privileges through its unique discovery capability and advanced contact management tools.

Personally, I use Xing to find employees and partners for FON. Xing´s founders, Lars and Bill, have been friends of FON since we started and we at FON are very grateful to them and the Xing community as a whole. In order to show our appreciation and join Xing´s launch, we decided to give the Foneras (FON’s WiFi routers), which retail for 29,95 euros or dollars for free to new premium members of Xing, who because of their frequent travelling choose to share a little bandwidth at home and roam the world for free connecting to the WiFi connections of other FONeros.

In collaboration with our friends at Accton who own SMC, Skype and Fon have jointly launched an offering that includes a Skype WiFi phone. For only 139 euros, 99 pounds or $159 you get a Skype WiFi phone and a Fonera. Now users can see the benefit of the Skype Fon alliance. The largest virtual phone network in the world, Skype and the largest wifi network in the world, Fon, team up to jointly launch a wifi phone that connects for free wherever you find other foneros (fon community members).

Firefox and Fon through a party together in Taipei. Fon is Fun and Fon events are always parties.

This came out today in Hi Tech Weekly, a very popular electronics magazine in China.

After having fought for years through Jazztel and Ya.com to end Telefonica’s monopoly and to reach the so-called liberalization of telecommunications in Spain, it ends up that now with FON I have found another monopoly in which not even Telefonica has a chance: the Airports in Spain.
Read More