I just met Jonathan Rosenberg, the head of Product Management at Google, and told him about the Gmailuploader, the tool we have developed at FON allowing you to send old emails to Gmail so when you open a new Gmail account it’s not empty and you can search them. He loved it. But then I was surprised and asked him why is it that Gmail does not have that functionality. I said that I would not mind giving Google the Gmailuploader as a gift, and all Google had to do in return would be to ad a little thank you note to FON for having developing it. His answer was a roll of eyes that I totally understood. If FON has so many projects to make our services better, the list of Google’s must be endless — that’s what the roll of eyes meant. And it was nice to see the human side of Jonathan. Nobody, even the person who probably has the biggest army of coders in the world at his command, can tackle everything. What I love about Google and have also seen with FON is that they are so open to collaborations.
After Jonathan, I met with many other Google people and we shared other developments like Gspace, the app that mirrors your computer on the internet using Gmail as the backoffice. And while some people have been telling me that Google was going to kill it because storing documents is not the original intention of Gmail, I found that the Google managers are totally open to new apps that make the lives of internet users around the world better (especially if some people use Gspace to empty Microsoft and send those documents to Google :). And hopefully this week we will introduce a new tool that blends Skype and Google functionalities….stayed tune!
2007 19
Blackberry and Microsoft both on the way out…
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Now that I abandoned Microsoft for Ubuntu and Mac I am about to drop my Blackberry as well. Blackberry for Mac sync is very bad and there´s nothing for Linux. Plus on Microsoft it only syncronizes with Outlook which is the source of most problems with Microsoft. Even in Parallels where I still have Microsoft I don´t have Microsoft Office nor do I use Outlook. And now that there´s Gmail for mobile devices the benefit of Blackberry has decreased. Yes on one hand the interface is quick and easy to use but on the other with Blackberry you only have the e mails of the last 3 days while with Gmail you have the whole year and it´s searcheable. Moreover the Blackberry I have comes with only 25MB from Vodafone and it invariably fills up and this forces me to go to the web site to erase the messages something I hate to do. And Vodafone has made a horrible web site for Blackberry that ONLY works with Internet Explorer. Nobody I know still uses Internet Explorer. Firefox rules. So long Blackberry after so many years? Well I dumped Microsoft so Blackberry may indeed be next.
2007 18
WiFi Missiles….
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
When you think of WiFi you think at most, of stone throw coverage. Stand somewhere, throw a stone and that´s how far your wifi signal will get. Now with a new technology based on electrically guided focused WiFi beams, Intel has come up with a way for you (or us at Fon) to throw stones….100kms! And we were so excited at Fon because next week we are introducing the Fontennas and increasing the range of the Foneras 10 times. Well, c´est la vie, there´s always somebody with something longer around…
I am not saying I am bored at FON because there are tons of exciting things going on, but let’s say that I have a hard time keeping my creative impulses under control. So after drowing FON Madrid with development projects, I created FON Labs in Barcelona to continue developing crazy ideas, one after the other. Some we developed on our own, others we found and modified. We started with Gspace. Gspace is a Firefox extension that creates a mirror of your hard drive on the internet using Gmail for storage. This was one of the “found and modified” type of projects. I found it, bought it, and we have developers improving it. This extension is hugely successful, we are getting around 7000 downloads per day. In the last week we added 2 more. GmailUploader a web site that collects your emails from other accounts and sends them to Gmail. This started as a personal tool I needed to upload my old emails into Gmail. I was amazed to see that Google did not offer a tool like this since the key to Gmail is search, but there’s nothing to search when you start a new Gmail account as your old emails are not there. Another tool we just deployed is Fon.gs. Fon.gs is like a TinyURL whose URLs you can remember. Fon.gs is a way to create domains that are memorable and more importantly, Free like www.fon.gs/empirestate. We also created APIs so other sites can use the Fon Get Simple too,l as we call it, to work in their sites.
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2007 14
TechTalk Menorca on Loic.tv
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
The guys at Vpod have come up with a great tool for video bloggers that allows them to create their own channel. Here´s the Loic.tv show on the Menorca gathering.
2007 14
Ya.com sold to Vodafone
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Ya.com one of the companies I founded and sold to German giant Deutsche Telekom has now been sold to Vodafone for 400 to 500 million euros. I just heard about this and have not done research but I am pretty sure that this acquisition is very important not so much for its value but because it means that Vodafone has finally seen value in the fixed line business. My theory is that the world of macro cells is over and that as we evolve to high speed data in urban centers micro cells will be the norm and for that you need to be a fiber/DSL operator like Ya.com. What worries me is that Ron Sommer of DT promised to me when he bought Ya.com that he would not change its brand, and that promise was kept. Will Vodafone keep the Ya.com brand?
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2007 14
TechTalk in Menorca
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
TechTalk was great!. About a 100 people joined us – most of them from Menorca and Mallorca but some of them from as far as the US, Belgium and Lithuania all in a very laid back and relaxed atmosphere. The best links are Loic´s where you have the videos of each presentation.
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2007 9
New Blackberry with GPS
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
In this video along the line of “check out my new toy” I show the new Blackberry 8800 with GPS. Blackberry will soon release a model with WiFi and we will be able to use it with Fon!
This is an invitation to the people of Menorca and my readers in general. You are all invited to attend an informal TechTalk that will be held next Saturday May 12th from 5pm to 8pm at 5pm at my farm in Menorca. To attend you need to register sending your name, email and home address to me.
Here´s a picture of the Farm
Here´s a Google Map. It shows how to get there. The event will be held in Binisegarra, the home that is in the middle of the farm.
Here are more pictures of the Farm and of Menorca in general.
Update 9/5/07: Janus Friis of Skype and Alex Straub of Truphone just informed me they will not be able to come to Menorca due to personal reasons. On the other hand, Michael Jackson, COO at Skype, will come to Menorca.
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I read Jason Fry´s editorial in public WiFi with great interest and mostly agreed with it, except for Dana Spiegel who in typical American fashion takes adversarial views on things she likes just because she sees the world as a collection of opposites instead of as collaborative work. Fortunately Jason Fry takes a view that I share. Ultimately all of us together in the WiFi world will win and that includes Time Warner Cable and Fon of course, plus NYC Wireless, plus muni WiFi. We all share a vision: What we all want is to open our gagdets and play 🙂