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.

I just got the latest numbers on registered foneros around the world. They are shockingly good. FON´s stated objective was to be the largest hot spot network in 2006. We were looking at Boingo a super successful and very well managed hot spot aggregator who says in their home page that they have 25,000 hot spots from many different telcos around the world. They were our benchmark. When we presented to Skype, Index Ventures, Sequoia and Google we stated our objective as being the largest hot spot network in the world by the end of 2006. But 10 days ago we had 3000 registered foneros. Today we have 15,615 in the process of becoming active hot spots. And this is all happening before our ISP partnerships start delivering FON ready customers, before Linksys and other router makers start selling FON ready routers in their shops, before we show up in the web pages of our partners and other web sites, before we make agreements with cities to use FON as their muni wifi project, and before our management structure is in place in most countries to make it all work. Frankly I don´t know how many foneros we will have by the end of the year but 25,000 foneros by year end looks very doable now. In the meantime I would like to thank everyone for their trust and again apologize for the delay in delivering routers. I guess the good news is that we buy them for $50, we flash them and we sell them for $25. The other good news is that we did not take anyone´s money when we realized how swamped we were and we only took reservations. The bad news is that it will take us a month at least to fulfill the orders. But we will.

I would like to apologize to those who tried to buy the FON plug and play routers and only got to reserve them. What happened is that we ran out of them and we had to buy more and hire more people to flash them. We are taking orders again now and we plan to deliver the orders in less than 30 days.

This is a problem that we were trying to figure out how to solve.