I was interviewed by Tim Pritlove from Chaos Radio. Since I launched FON, I have been giving many interviews. And in this time, Tim conducted the interview so well, that I felt thankful. His questions permitted create the perfect atmosphere for me to explain FON into great and precise detail.

He first asked “What’s FON”. We then chatted about linus, Linksys firmware, Brainslayer, Ejovi our USA Fonero Leader, Wimax, WiFi gadgets, ISPs, the German market, Google and Skype, WiFi city projects… I think both of us contributed to make this podcast valuable for people to really understand and get to know FON.

If you already know Chaos Radio, you may also be familiar with Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It’s a global community with about 1.500 members from eleven German cities and many other countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Netherlands.

They fight against any form of censorship, promote freedom of information and communication. As stated on their website, CCC considers itself a communication platform for Hackers and for those who want to become Hackers. Their philosophy is to study the social and individual impact of Technologies. But overall, the Hackers Ethics posted on their site is fascinating to read. Knowing Tim and thinking about other Chaos team members, I look at their ethics as an Honour Code.

Hacker Ethics promotes making public data available while protecting private data, as well as decentralizing information. But the most “romantic” ethic in the Hacker Ethics is that one can create art and beauty on a computer, thus changing one’s life for better.

Last Tuesday, we did three cities in one day: Munich, Dresden and Berlin. In Munich, we had meetings with Hubert Burda and his team. The professionalism of Burda is unbelievable. We arrived with Christiane where we met a group of 12 editors of magazines and websites. Burda is a type of Prisa but without Sogecable. Hubert Burda himself is a type of Jesús Polana, they’re about the same age, about the same height and both are very successful and very intuitive. One major difference though is that Burda has bet on the internet while Polanco has bet on digital TV. There are great possibilities between Burda and FON but I cannot yet talk about what we’re planning together. When I see the success we have outside of Spain, I wonder why is it that in Spain we don’t meet with Prisa, for example. Nor do we meet with Telefónica. In Germany, we’ve already met with T-Online and they are interested in FON. Many ISPs are realising that converting their clients into hotspots and charging more by doing so is a way to increase both revenue per customer and customer retention.

Then came my meeting with Nicholas Negroponte at the airport in Munich. He was coming in from Switzerland to meet with me and we then flew to Dresden on my plane. I was heading there to meet Brainslayer and Negroponte wanted to present me his $100 laptop because the argentine government is considering buying 1,000,000 of these computers and Educ.ar is in the descision-making process. I really enjoyed listening to Negroponte. He belongs to that small world of big people, big in every sense of the term. He’s a really nice guy, intelligent, concerned and fascinating. Iurgi of FON was with us on the plane, Christiane too and all three of us listened to his presentation very attentively and we then talked a lot about the characteristics of the laptop and the makers of its components. $100 is risky, but for $150 it might be worth it.

Upon arriving in Dresden, we met up with Brainslayer. What a team! Christiane, Brainslayer, Negroponte, Iurgi and myself. Brainslayer showed us around his company and showed us his software. As you know, at FON we have two versions of our open-source software: our openwrt version and our dd-wrt (Brainslayer) version. Negroponte was amazed with all the functionalities of the dd-wrt. It’s truly amazing the things that you can do with a router using this software. You can choose how much bandwidth you want to share, you can block someone from abusing your connection with excessive traffic (eg. using bit torrent for example) etc… You basically can configure it to do ANYTHING you want.

At the end of our meeting, Negroponte left for London and we went to Berlin where we had dinner with a group of foneros. We already have 500 registered foneros in Germany. For me, the country remains the big mystery in Europe. I find it amazing the quality of life here considering the last 10 years have been a real economic disaster for Germany. Apartments and restaurants are cheaper in Berlin than in Madrid. It’s much cheaper because of the economic crisis. There a loads of restaurants but very few clients. And add to that the very high unemployment rate. It’s this kind of phenomena that can be explained in a thousand ways, but none of them matches completely.

I have published job offers for programmers in my Spanish site.

Right now FON is only router based. We chose routers as people tend to leave routers always on. So we are happy with our solution. But occasionally I can see how foneros may want to share wifi through their laptops. So we would like to launch another FON modality and that is those of laptops who become FON hotspots. As you may know I am not a programmer. If anything I am a dreamer at FON, probably the Chief Corporate Dreamer. So this is what I am dreaming from the little I know about laptops. This is an invitation for developers out there to send us proposed solutions with their budgets so these ideas can become a reality.

There are three main kinds of laptops, Windows, Mac and Linux.

Mac laptops are great for FON as they already have a built in functionality that turns them into hotspots when they receive internet over lan or 3G. What we need here is a download that turns them into FON hotspots.

Linux laptops are great for FON cause our two software developments openwrt and ddwrt are linux based. But the problem is that not all of them become hotspots. I need more information on this, on how Linux based laptops could become FON hotspots.

Windows based laptops are even more challenging as our software is in Linux. But maybe somebody out there can think of a solution.

And lastly none of this laptops can become hotspots when they use their radio to get wifi signal, so I am interested in FON selling a USB wifi pen drive that turns this laptops into hotspots through the pen drive, so they get wifi normally but they emit wifi through the pen drive.

If you have any ideas along these lines please write to me.

Our 2006 targets were to have 25,000 foneros by the end of 2006. But we went from 3000 to 17,500 in 15 days and this is without yet activating ISPs to be Fon ready, without having routers makers sell their routers fon ready and without executing our strategy to appear in other major web sites. At this point our 20 employees are seriously overworked. It´s been a crazy two weeks. We are hiring, looking at the best way to grow from 20 to around 40 people. We need people in biz dev country by country as well as software and systems people. I also want to apologize for those who have had trouble signing up or buying our routers. I know there were moments in which our servers were down. But anyone who joins FON these days should know that this is a start up and that we are all doing what we can to deliver routers and simplifying the overall process of becoming a fonero. It is clear that we underestimated the interest that FON would generate. But we are getting there. Now the great news is that while our first firmware version had created a lot of complains our new firmwares both dd-wrt and openwrt as modified for FON seem to be very robust and the first installed routers are operating well.

As FON prepares to service different countries we are interested in having foreign nationals working for us in Spain doing business development from Madrid. FON develops software in Germany and Spain but has its systems in Spain. We are looking for candidates from Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, England, China and USA who may be living in Spain now and may want to manage the interaction between FON and their native countries from Madrid. Please send your CVs to the address in this blog. It is not necessary to speak Spanish.

These are our top 5 countries so far at FON. Spain because it is our home country. America because it´s huge. France because we launched there in December. UK is a pleasant surprise, we don´t have anyone working for FON in the UK yet. In Netherlands we do have lead foneros who have been spreading the word. We estimate that it will take us 90 days to have as many active foneros as we now have registered foneros. In other words we estimate that these users will become hotspots by then.

Spain – 4287 registered users

United States – 3406 registered users

France – 1466 registered users

United Kingdom – 595 registered users

Netherlands – 529 registered users

I have known Marko for years. I have tremendous admiration for him. Marko is one of those unusual techies who can combine art and technology. When Marko talks to you about things on the net he is aware not only of the technology platform underneath the site but his insight also combines a thorough understanding of design and social function. In the past I have frequently consulted with Marko on many ideas for different ventures. Indeed when I first thought of FON as a pan European WiMax operator Marko was a great critic of that project, positive yet clearly pointing out to me the difficulties of WiMax as a new technology. And when I thought of the “second coming” of FON as a software download that turns wifi routers into members of a global family of routers who share wifi Marko was much more enthusiastic. Now let me disclose exactly what arrangement we have with Marko. Marko is a full time employee of Nokia, not of FON. His job as a lead fonero is similar to an advisory board position, Marko will advise FON on how to start the FON movement in Finland. For those in Finland reading this post and unaware of FON let me explain that FON is a global community of people who share wifi freely with each other. But FON is a private company belonging to its employees, Skype, Google, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and the fonero leaders in each country and the for profit element of FON comes from users who are not wifi donors. We share those with fixed and eventually mobile operators who will partner with us.

So welcome Marko to FON and we stand ready to support you in explaining FON to the Finish people so we can turn Helsinki and other cities into shared wifi areas.

FON, share little, gain a lot.