Tonight we registered the 100,000 fonero. We also ordered 100K foneras to be manufactured so we can clear the backlog that we have of registered but not yet active foneros. We only place the first large order this week because until this week we were still sorting out bugs on the first 10K shipment we got. They were not very important but we could not until now place large orders. We estimate that between now and the end of February we will place these 100K foneras. Again for comparison purposes T Mobile the largest wifi network in the world until we came around has around 25K public access points. In the last 24 hours alone we placed 800 access points.

I am glad to introduce our team in Japan, led by Junichi Fujimoto as CEO of FON Japan. Tomoyasu Chigahara, President, Munekazu Mishima and Nina Nikkhou are talso team members of FON in Japan.

I know my tone sounds like a FON promotion and in a way it is, as this is the blog of the entrepreneur who is building FON, but I don´t have any problems confessing that my happiness comes from the fact that we were trying to have Junichi Fujimoto run Japan for many months and I am so happy he accepted to do so.

Welcome Junichi and his team!
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This video shows the work of our Fon Labs in Barcelona where we are developing an open source platform that will convert la fonera into an incredibly functional tool for uploading and downloding stuff to the internet without having to keep your laptop or desktop connected to the internet. Here the demo is with a torrent. We call this the Fon Liberator because it liberates you and your laptop from the tedious activities of uploading and downloading. All you do is connect an external hard drive to the Fon Liberator router and leave and watch from wherever you are in the world how those 2 day long torrents are doing.

I just became a member of MP3tunes. I love the service. Basically, MP3tunes is like a Flickr for songs. With MP3tunes you post your songs on the internet and you stream them back when you want to listen to them. Why would you want to do this? Because you, like me, may have many more songs than memory in your devices. In my case it all started with the Nokia 770 tablet and its 512MB of memory vs my 33GB song collection.

Now the main problem of MP3tunes is something that the FON Liberator will solve and that is the cumbersome nature of massive music uploads. Massive music uploads or downloads, say uploading my 33gb music collection to MP3tunes for example, take forever. Say two full days. And who wants to be stuck to a connection with a laptop for 2 days? So the FON Liberator basically liberates you from tying up your laptop in this process. With the FON Liberator, which should be available at FON by January for around $85, you will basically stick your external hard drive or iPod to the Liberator (a FON social router who doubles up as a Linux mini computer WiFi media server) and tell the Liberator over the internet to send all your songs to MP3tunes, or your videos to You Tube, or manage your Torrents or any large upload and download and you will not need to be glued to your laptop.

We are now developing a cool web interface for massive uploaders/downloaders to decide what type of files and where they would like to upload/download. I see 2007 as the year in which the internet migrated to the pocket, WiFi became ubiquitous and devices will start using web storage in a massive way. What is now a geeky thing with less popular devices like the N770 will become massively deployed when handset makers launch most phones with WiFi (Nokia is already making around a million a month of these).

I just read this article entitled I am going to Become a Fonero and I am very pleased that the new software and hardware that we released is meeting the expectations of foneros around the world.

We are considering having all Foneras come with these antennas so that FON Access Points can double their coverage. For the time being, these antennas are sold separately in the FON Shop.

This week in NYC I was interviewed by Ken Li at Reuters. Ken had already done a funny post in the Reuters blog about me at the Sun Valley conference. During this interview we ran into one of those situations where the ethics of journalism may be compromised.

I brought a FON Router to show Ken during the interview and leave behind so he could test it at home, but then the issue came up that this could be interpreted as a gift to a journalist and, therefore, lead to a favorable story on FON. Still we find a way to fix this. Ken forked out $5 and bought the Fon router! Then, while at the Nokia event, I found out that Ken and I had been way too concerned as journalists who attend the Nokia launches get $500 multimedia handsets and other gadgets. Personally, I tend to side with the journalists here. If journalists do not get gagdets for free, how are they going to get to own them, test them and write about them? They would spend their whole salaries in gadgets as most are not $5 Fon routers.

For months now we have explained in our maps that the markings we had in the FON Maps were not access points, but registered FONeros. Nevertheless, everyone at the community felt that we needed to show active hotspots as well as registered FONeros. So we developed software that now queries all access points many times a day. This was done by the team headed by Jose Antonio Arribas and it was not easy to implement. Unfortunately, this software does not work on access points that do not have the latest version of our software, so basically when you see our maps an orange point is a maybe for access while a bright green is guaranteed access.

So how many active access point do we have? We do not know. But we do know now how many are active and with the latest software. Those anyone can see in our maps. We apologize that we were not able to come up with a way to query the earlier installs.