Fon and Planex reached an agreement today for Planex to add the Fon firmware in their routers and make them Fon ready. We chose Planex because we found it to be an extremely creative company. Their CEO, Katsu Kubota, a race car driver and I played a little game during our meeting. I asked Katsu to define Planex in one word and he asked me to define Fon in one word. I said WiFi Community. He said speed. I liked speed and quickly thereafter we signed our agreement. Planex has very cool products, they have a wifi router that connects to a wifi camera with motion detectors that they can make Fon ready. They also have a wifi hub that allows you to have an external hard drive, a network drive and connect printers to it, that also will be Fon ready. I disclose to Katsu my idea of creating the Fon Downloader, a router that can be connected to an external hard drive and run itunes, azureus, bit torrent without a need of tying up your laptop´s CPU, wifi and hard drive. He loved it, he found this to be an original idea and a killer applications. He will work on it.

We launched Fon in Korea and it is going incredibly well! Not only are we getting thousands of Koreans registering for Fon´s offer of free global roaming but our Korean shop is selling so many routers that we are running out. We thought we would have around 500 foneros on the first day, which would have been an important number but we sold around 1000 Foneras (Fon social routers) and we don´t have any more. We will soon put up a sign that says that the new routers can take up to 90 days to be delivered. While I think it may take less we don´t know how quickly we can get them so we´d better be prudent. Thank you Jin Ho Hur!! Thank you to all the Korean foneros!!

Gracias Corea de parte de todo el equipo Fon.

Below you can read some of the amazing press coverage in Korea.
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The cafe´s name was Kafka. There were around 40 bloggers and journalists there. Kafka made me feel at home, the pictures of Che Guevara behind him even more so, and in the sign for the men´s toilet was a picture of Woody Allen, another idol. So here I was surrounded by very familiar faces in a country that is as far from my native Argentina as it can possibly be and yet so close.

The Taiwanese are very, very Linus. Surprisingly the mainland Chinese seem to be more Bills. What a paradox here. In any case they had tough questions for me vis a vis Fon. In the end I got the sense that the Fon movement, that started tonight in Taipei, will be a big success. But the Taiwanese did their due dilligence. I did not mind answering 4 hours of questions. It was all worth it. I also found people from the Open Source movement very interested in developing applications for the fonosphere. I said we would fund cool projects. Same with hardware vendors. Wifi Phones, wifi TVs, wifi radios, wifi games, this is hardware Mecca.

Afterwards we met with Accton and I proposed that we expand the memory of la fonera, our custom made social router to 8MB of flash so hackers can play with it. Now it´s 4MB. We are looking into this possibility. We are also looking at a USB port to add external memory to the mini linux computer router. Can you think what to do with this? Could we include a Bit Torrent client in it for example so your router is bit torrenting to and from your 60gb hard drive while you are at work…with your laptop?

There are many other bloggers covering the event. I will try to link to those in English and some in Chinese as well for those who understand it. In the meantime, thank you YK from Accton! You were great!

This is a blog made to promote the event (chinese) and this one to spread the voice (english and chinese)

Here’s blogger’s Ilya Lee presentation (english).

Here you can see some pictures from the event and from the party we had later. Also blogger Ching Chiao took some pictures.

I am in China and as we were preparing the launch of Fon in China with our Chinese partners we confirmed that abitcool is indeed a detailed copy of Fon in China. The company behind Abitcool has their code even includes notes that we made in our code. But since our firmware is open source and we want to spread the community on a global basis it is somewhat cool that this is happening (it would have been cooler to be notified). As it stands we just have to make sure we can all roam with each other. If not t would not be even be a bit cool. In the meantime, until our web site in Chinese is ready, Chinese people are welcome to come to Fon and download our firmware.

FON is all about user-generated infrastructure. In order to promote the FON community in Germany, FON is giving several hundred routers for FREE to some cities. We will start in Munich with 300 Routers that will be given to people who want to become FONeros and live in certain downtown areas: business district, pedestrian zone or around the University.

To achieve a good density of FON WiFi signal within these specific areas, we have selected 4 postcodes and will give away free promotional FON routers. The postcodes in Munich are 80331, 80333, 80799 and 80469.

If you happen to live there and want to share your DSL connection with all the Foneros worldwide and roam the world for free, send an email including your Family Name, First Name, Street, Zip Code and your phone number so we can contact you.

Spain used to be a Catholic country. Statistics show that practicing Catholics have dropped from around 80% in the 60’s to around 20% now. While religion in America is as strong as ever, in Europe it is on a steady decline. Aware of this, the MTV´s Spanish ad agency took a gamble and prepared a video that portrays young people who delay sex until marriage as losers. They were incredibly successful. The title of the video is I love Laura (but I will wait until we get married), Amo a Laura, pero esperaré hasta el matrimonio. The lyrics are absolutely hilarious. They basically say that passionate kissing is dirty, that it is better to do crossword puzzles than making love, they never say the words sex, or virginity. The way they make fun of religious principles vis a vis virginity is so elegant, that probably people the few people who are in favor of waiting until marriage were not offended.

Interestingly, MTV´s target audience is exactly the public that is about to have sex for the first time (or recently had it). Their key demographic age group is 13 to 18. As you can imagine, Youtube and Googlevideo went crazy with spoofs of the spoof. Some are pretty gross, some touch gay themes I love Batman focuses on Batman´s tight clothes. There´s also a very Spanish one that was done by the number one comedy Show in Spain and it shows the top politicians of the country saying how they love to negotiate with ETA, the basque terrorist organization.

But why is it that I still feel that they will rip me off?

Well, after what happened to RIM, Blackberry with the Redberry I should not be surprised that they copied Fon in China. The difference though for the 150 foneros we already have in China plus all the ones who are coming is that with Fon you share WiFi in China and you roam not just China but the whole world for free as Fon is already in 140 countries.
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America is a democracy run by the republican party. Surprisingly the republican party has produced something that is pretty close to a dynasty. In Spain we have a dynasty, and a king. But our King´s values are more aligned to those of the American Democratic Party than the Republican Party. So America has a democracy that with elements of a monarchy and we have a monarchy that is mostly a democracy with a King who risked his life to defend democracy. And to top it all Spain is governed by the Socialist party, traditionally anti monarchic but now in a very good relationship with the king.

How does Fon fit in all this?
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