During our meetings with Microsoft, we had heard that the company was preparing a huge move into the music player arena using WiFi as its main weapon.

The lack of WiFi on the iPod is becoming Apple´s achilles hill and companies like Microsoft and Music Gremlin are exploiting it.
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Today I decided to rename our project known as the FON Downloader as the FON Liberator as the key idea of this new device, which we hope to launch around October, is not so much that it allows you to download/upload as you can do that from your laptop as that it frees up your laptop from the hassles of downloading/uploading.
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Today I decided to erase the posts concerning the recent conference that I attended and I can´t even comment the details of the decision. Frankly, it is damn hard to be an entrepreneur blogger.

I blog as much as I can, but I can´t nearly blog as much as I want.

At FON I have been blogging about the possibility of helping homeless people generate income through FON. Many dismissed this idea saying that the homeless are the least technology savvy people but here´s an article on Wired that reinforces my view that they are not. My idea is to get homeless people to go to areas where there´s FON coverage and alert others who carry wifi devices such as PDA´s, laptops, wifi game consoles like PSP´s, Nintendo DS that there´s FON wifi in the area free for foneros and at $3 per day or $10 for 5 days for non foneros and pay them for doing so. Basically they would wear FON T Shirts or carry FON signs.

Talking to Olivier Chouraki, founder of Mobiluck, I found out that Bluetooth flirting is very big in the Muslim world, especially in places where women and men cannot easily talk. I guess this opens a way to a new generation of hackers who, instead of hacking computers, hack women when the firewall is a veil. Of course, women have to be willing participants of this, if not they just reject the connection and it´s game over.

Here´s an idea that a FONero from Canada, Raúl San Martín, sent me.

Routers are just little computers that direct or “route” your data and messages to their destinations on the Internet. Just like your desktop PC, routers have RAM, disks (flash memory), and a processor (CPU). Just like your PC, routers can run small computer programs. With eventually 1 million FON routers deployed we will have a lot of collective computational power that could solve large complex problems, if these can be broken into millions of smaller problems. This distributed computing approach is used today for scientific research, to find the cure of diseases, influenza vaccines, cancer drugs, leukemia, Alzheimer, for climate prediction, to find celestial bodies, simulation, financial analysis, and so on.

Imagine 1 million routers x 8h/day crunching numbers when the routers are idle. That is roughly equivalent to a computer running at 100,000 GigaHertz. Could we all contribute to mankind without even turning our PC’s on? The FON user would be able to select a favourite cause or problem to solve through the router’s GUI, the router will then automatically download the appropriate software agent and run it when the router is idle.

We will have an amazing computational power with FON waiting to be exploited, it costs almost nothing and would require no effort or installation from the user.
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This is a design we are working on for a personalized log in page. People can put their Flickr pictures, Google maps, Youtube or Google videos links to their blogs. This would be my page.

USA is by far our number one country in the world in number of Foneros. We have so many opportunities in the States, that I decided to take advantage of the European summer break and go to the States for a month beginning July 11th. I will first go to the Allen and Co conference in Sun Valley, then to the Bay Area for 2 weeks and then to the NYC area for 10 days.

I have already planned meetings with many telcos, ISPs, content companies, technology companies, our investors Google and eBay and others. It should be a lot of fun. So while I will not get a vacation, I promised my wife and 3 kids that I will work weekdays from 9 to 4 and rest will be with them. Let´s see if this works out.

Family vs work, the TOUGH balance. In any case if you would like to meet with me vis a vis FON pls write contact me and I see what I can do.

Making 3G/WiFi phones, make voice calls through SIP or SKYPE, and paying a tiny fraction of what these calls cost over 3G/GSM, is the holy grail of contemporary telephony. Especially, when these calls can be made not out of a geeky WiFi phone, but from your regular Nokia phone. So when I got the Nokia E61, the Nokia Blackberry Killer let´s say, and saw that EVERY time you made a phone call it asked you if you wanted to make a GSM call or a SIP call, I was really excited.

The challenge was that I could not get this to actually work, nor could anyone at FON for a while. Indeed, the problem appeared so complex that it became an interview question for me. Software engineers showed up for interviews and I gave them the phones to program as a test. Nobody could do it until Anthony Aubry of France got it to work this afternoon not only by doing everything that had to be done to the phone (it´s ABSURDLY complex), but by using Free as the SIP provider, which for some unknown reason worked while the other SIP providers we tried failed (this has to be fixed, because our partner in France is Free´s competitor Neuf!).

Also, we are eagerly waiting for the Symbian version of Skype, so calls can be made with Nokias and Skype. But in the meantime, I have my Nokia working thanks to Anthony and this is his recipe.
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