I am in Tokyo meeting with potential partners including large web sites, ISPs and retailiers. We are also interviewing potential employees to work with us. Joichi Ito, Japan´s lead fonero is doing a great job introducing me to key players.

If you are Japanese and are interested in working for FON please write to me at martin@fon.com

Yesterday I spent my first day working on the launch of FON in Japan. I met many prominent business leaders. I asked many questions and I must say I am confused. FON´s formula of hiring amazing local teams and compensating them with salary and a good stock option package may not work in Japan. Google and Yahoo are a good example of this. Google entered Japan with the salary and stock option formula, and so far it has not succeeded. Yahoo, instead, chose to team up with a local partner. And it is HUGE. There´s Yahoo everywhere in Japan.

What should FON do? Should we follow the Google model or the Yahoo model? At the same time Japan is perfect for FON. Tremendous bandwidth penetration, no large organized WiFi efforts, enormous usage of WiFi enable devices including laptops, pdas, PSPs, Nintendo DS, and now WiFi enabled digital photography.

FON, my company, is building the largest wifi hotspot network in the world. But, as opposed to T-Mobile or others, FON relies on private users to download our software into their routers or buy our plug and play routers with our formula of “share some bandwidth at home and roam the world for free” (the Linus model), or “share some bandwidth at home and get paid for it” (the Bill model).

When I thought of the bills and the linuses I did not have in mind that one day I would meet the real BILLS. Well, yesterday I did. I was at the Microsoft HQ presenting FON to a group of top managers at the company and, frankly, I was impressed. Very impressed. As I previously said, I believe that it is not only for sharing wifi that the world needs Bills and Linuses. It is my belief that the two models, the socialist and the capitalist are needed to change the world. Capitalism alone leads to a brutal and unstable society. Socialism alone leads to stagnation.

Most universities in developed countries have wifi, but few have wifi that is open to all. Fon wants to change this. Fon has a new proposal for universities and is this one: we will give universities as many routers as they need to provide good coverage on campus and will administer over the web free user to all university students and professors. Moreover, Fon will provide free global wifi roaming to these students and professors.

In exchange universities will agree that all of those who are not students or professors, but detect the Fon signal, will pay 2 dollars or euros per 24 hours of usage. In this way, wifi access that is not free -but very affordable- is provided to anyone who is nearby or a guest at the university and is not a fonero.

Fon will launch in Japan and Korea. I am going to be in Tokyo and Seoul on the week of April 10th to announce the fonero teams that we have been able to assemble. My partners and Fon board members Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis will also be in the region that week and we may be able to do some presentations together. Their company, Skype has taken off very nicely in the area. As we prepare Fon in Japan and Korea I have been studying the broadband markets in those countries and they are absolutely fascinating for Fon. Presently the EU has around 65 million broadband connections, USA 60 million, and Japan and Korea combined have around 50 million. But the EU has around 450 million people, USA around 300 million and Japan and Korea combined have around 175 million people. Japan and Korea are broadband wonders. Why? I can think of many reasons. Densely populated areas are easier to supply with broadband, very fair income distribution makes it such that all can afford broadband, extremely well educated populations have an easier time getting on line and a greater interest to do so. Now what can Fon bring those countries? A true broadband wireless network with way more throughput than any of the existing wireless networks they have deployed today. If you are from Japan or Korea and would like to contact me ahead of this visit please do so through my blog.

Here´s an example of a WiFi Networks screen captured near the home of Alberto, a fonero.

At Fon we believe that most urban centers in the developed world now have a wifi coverage and that as Fon becomes widely adopted we will organize some of this signal to build a global wifi network that will be free for Foneros and will cost $2 per day for Aliens (Aliens in Fon are users of WiFi who do not contribute WiFi). As of today we already had 26,000 foneros and 2500 registered Aliens. Some Fon critics have argued that there is not enough coverage in urban centers in developed countries. We think the contrary is true, that there are now too many wifi networks in many places. Personally I would be very grateful if readers could capture screens like this and send them to me at martin@fon.es. In order to capture a screen you need to do alt + print and then paste the screen onto the e mail and send it to me. If anyone is near a window in an urban center and does not capture any wifi signal I would love to know where that spot is. It would be the first open spot without signal that we hear about! At Fon we have not been able to find any densely populated area in developed countries without WiFi signal. We are also trying to understand the proportion of locked vs open networks available. Lastly we are in conversation with companies who can supply a client for us that automatically signs up foneros to Fon networks so we won´t need to first choose a Fon network and then sign up for it.

I got the latest report on fonero figures. As you can see Spain is about to lose its first place in the fonero movement. A month ago Spain was beating USA by a 4 to 1 margin. On one side I am sorry to see that our home country losing global leadership. On the other I am impressed that before we appear in US shops, in the US web sites of our partners, before we have a signed deals with any US telcos, that there´s still so much interest for Fon in the United States and all coming out of our own web site www.fon.com. UK is also pretty impressive as we don´t yet have marketing presence in the UK. Another surprising element to me is that I thought that the Bill model was going to be particularly successful in the US and the UK while the Linus modality was going to be more prevalent in Continental Europe but we have not even started the Bill model yet and these are the results. I guess there are a lot of Linuses in America, they just don´t seem to win elections 😉
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Only a few days ago we mentioned that we had free routers to give away to people in the EU who were facing busy streets. In the past I had metioned that Italians did not seem to be interested in becoming foneros. Now that situation seems to have been completely reversed. In my flickr post you can see how many requests we got from Italy.

You can see the different locations here. But while Italians were the majority we also got requests from Germany, France and other countries. We will be sending those routers in 2 weeks as soon as we get the next deliveries from Linksys who are somewhat delayed.

We are now working on designing our own router. Our plan is to stop subsidizing the Linksys router and, instead, make a deal with Linksys (or their competitors) by which you will find Fon ready routers in the shops of Europe and North America. Instead at Fon we will have our own router designed by us and sold on our web site.

These are some ideas for our own designs. These are outdoor designs and, of course, they are weatherproof.