At Fon, we are currently designing the retail box of the new Fonera SIMPL. We already sold over 1 million of these wifi routers wholesale to mobile operators. We will soon go retail with this product in Europe and the USA.
Now what we would like to do is to illustrate one side of the box with a comic strip that explains what Fon is in something like 6 squares and in English. We are offering a €300 appreciation prize to the fonero who draws the comic strip that makes it to the box.
So what is Fon? It’s in our web site. Some say, “you share a little WiFi at home and you roam the world for free”. Basically, a Fonera SIMPL is an 802.11n router (connects faster and farther than wireless g) that allows users to connect to WiFi themselves via an encrypted and secure SSID (WiFi signal), but that also has the unique capability to create a second FON SSID that allows people who live nearby or pass by your home to connect to your router and use a small portion of your bandwidth. In exchange for opening a second SSID, you get two major benefits, one is free global WiFi roaming at well over a million hotspots around the world, and the second is that you can make money selling WiFi passes in the Fon network to those who do not have a Fonera (fon router), and therefore do not share their home WiFi, and so have to pay to connect when they find your signal. You keep half of the money and Fon keeps half. Notice that you are selling access to the whole network not just to your router. Another benefit of the Fonera SIMPL is that it auto-connects to iPhone and Android smartphones.
Ideas? Somebody suggested a comic strip telling the story of a lonely WiFi user who had no friends with his conventional WiFi router until he got a Fonera router and then had lots of friends and traveled the world connecting for free. Somebody else added that now he has money and travels the world (clearly a joke as very few make the kind of money you would need for a trip, though many do make enough to subsidize the cost of their broadband). We are open to any ideas that describe the benefits of Fon in a comic strip. Please send your proposals to matias@fon.com.
update: we already have one that we are likely to use.
2010 25
We are down in Portugal today
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I would like to apologize to all visitors to Portugal and Portuguese Foneros because Fon is down in Portugal today. We are down because the routers that Zon@fon uses in Portugal were sending us so many requests that they were bringing Fon services down around the world. This is why we had to disconnect Portugal for a few hours. We are working on a fix for this and we should be up and running. We are very sorry for this inconvenience. As CEO of Fon these situations pain me.
2010 17
Flying low to avoid the ash cloud
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We were trying to get to London from Madrid in my plane to attend Google Zeitgeist. As I insisted in going there, and as the airports reopened, my pilots alerted me to the fact that the trick airlines are using to avoid the ash cloud is to fly long distances at very low altitudes.
This is something that I haven’t heard in the media. Flying long distances, at say 3000 feet, may be good to avoid the ash cloud, but it’s terrible for the environment. Aircraft consume twice the fuel to fly the same distance, and in general it is less safe. While most people think that low and slow may mean safety, the opposite is true in aviation where high and fast somehow works better.
We did not go in the end. We did not think it was safe to fly long distances at low altitude. And we did not know what effect that would have on the range of our small Citation Jet.
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I came across the Mein Kampf article in the Wikipedia. The horror and weirdness of his antisemitism aside, what is remarkable is how well he described his war strategy, how his plan was laid out so ahead of its execution a decade later. How nobody seemed to believe him until he actually implemented it.
Hitler predicts the stages of Germany’s political emergence on the world scene: in the first stage, Germany would, through a program of massive re-armament, overthrow the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and form alliances with the British Empire and Fascist Italy. The second stage would feature wars against France and her allies in Eastern Europe by the combined forces of Germany, Britain and Italy. The third and final stage would be a war to destroy what Hitler saw as the “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime in the Soviet Union that would give Germany the necessary Lebensraum (literally “living space”).
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2010 4
Tweets
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Overheard on FB: what the iPod did to the CD the iPad will do to print, some people however say you cannot read novels from backlit screens
Chatroulette should come up with widgets for web sites so people know that the randomers who show up, at least are from that site.
Best about MAIL in Mac is quick look!! It is great
Happy to be going in Paris tomorrow night to see this play. I love Sam Mendes http://bit.ly/biQ0Mn
Great site on contemporary art http://blablart.com/
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2010 23
Tweets of the day
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Bravo Google http://bit.ly/bMPv1B
While riding my bike in the Sierra I take a break and reply @om why Europe? Because http://yfrog.us/6g1omz
Great argument wrong conclusion: The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped by @pegobry http://bit.ly/b3xvV2 /via @alleyinsider
Design is not great when it clashes with use. Example? iPhones that fall out of pockets.
Hillary Clinton may become for all Israelis what Sharon was to Gaza settlers http://bit.ly/cZ4ajA
Greece spends twice as anyone in the EU on the military. EU should defend Greece but demand cuts before helping http://bit.ly/9rRRcR
When two people on Twitter want to engage they leave. DM is not enough. Unlimited DM or DM chat would be better.
2009 12
Living in the Dark
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We live in Madrid. It is at this time of the year, when the days are shorter, that I realize what living in the dark can mean. And I find it very sad. No matter how many Christmas lights there are around. I guess people in the North of Europe get used to it, but I haven’t seen the sun for 5 days now and I miss light, brightness, colors and the dimension that sunlight ads to objects. In Europe, the word immigrant means immigrant from the South. But in Spain, we have 60 million tourists every year. While they come for many reasons, fun, landscapes, food – they mostly come in search of…light.
As of next week the thousands of 2009 buyers of the Fonera 2.0g will receive an email from Fon offering a substantial discount for the purchase of the newer and faster Fonera 2.0n. We have received many requests along these lines and find them reasonable.
2009 19
Adios to Trolls
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This is my goodbye post for trolls. Trolls: I have had it with you. I want you out of my blog. Each day around 20,000 people read my Spanish and English blogs in feeds or visits. I get a lot of comments on Twitter on Facebook and they are sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but never written with the intention to hurt. In my Spanish and English blogs I get illuminating comments, both positive and negative. But I also get you guys. You may not be more than 10 people. But you are one pain en el culo. Your mission in my blog seems only to be to prove I suck. Well guys if I suck why do you read my blog? Why do you spend so much time analyzing every little thing I say to prove it wrong? Why don´t you just leave and go to any other of the 55 million blogs out there. So today I will do you a favor. I will throw you out of my blog. You are out of here. Adios. And don´t come back.
USA is in pain. Serious pain. But after spending all of July travelling around this country visiting places as different as Miami, Sun Valley Idaho, San Francisco, Kona Hawaii, New York City and Southampton in Long Island I think that USA is implementing the necessary changes to get out of the slump. Living in Europe I just don´t think the same can be said about the Old Continent. I don´t think USA will recover sooner because it is implementing a flawless plan while Europe is not. I believe to the contrary that USA will recover sooner because what I saw in the middle of the deep real estate crisis of Miami, in the painful cuts in the tech companies of Silicon Valley, in the restructuring of the mortgage and hedge fund industry in New York, in the reinvention of tourism in Hawaii is that what gets Americans out of whatever mess they get in, is their trial and error mentality. In the middle of the crisis I saw innovation everywhere while in Europe I see paralysis, unwillingness to change, unwillingness to try, unreasonable fear to fail. And without constant experimentation there is no way out. It´s as simple as that.