We are in the cover of Red Herring this week!

Just got la foto. Elisa rocks. La más guapa.

Expansión (the leading business newspaper in Spain), published an online article today (for its subscribers) where they pit me against Luis Lada, of Telefónica Moviles, arguing that he is leading an alliance against FON. Knowing Luis Lada a bit, I really doubt that the Telefónica press machinery is behind this article, bearing in mind that pitting FON against giants like Telefónica, flanked by Telecom Italia and Portugal Telecom, gives FON a lot of relevance. This being said, I am honoured by the fact that these three giants have imitated our formula that lets your roam for free if you pay for internet at home.

Indeed, this is a good formula, although in their case, they only connect you to the public hotspots of their network, which are few. For me the key is that in the future, we all give roaming so that there is effectively everywhere and we can all enjoy the internet wherever we are, whenever we want without having to pay a cent more than what we pay at home. This will increase the value of all the offers on the internet and will help enormously to one day have a mobile broadband internet which is essential for building an information society.

At FON, we have probably become in these last couple of hours, the leader in hotspots in Spain although, I admit that we might have more foneros than they have hotspots but their hotspots are more strategically located and for this reason, it is in everyone’s interest to collaborate. They have quality, we have coverage.

I’ve known Luis Lada since the Jazztel days. He’s a great manager of big companies. He will most certainly be César Alierta’s successor. For now, I only met César once to talk about FON and he was very friendly. I think there is a lot of mutual respect and admiration; I think he admires the way I can build a company from an idea and I admire how Telefónica outranked other telcos under his leadership. At our respective levels, we both sign deals outside of Spain – for example O2 in his case and Google and Skype in my case. But what’s interesting is that we’re both based in Madrid.

All this to say, I don’t think Luis Lada or Telefónica isagainst FON, but rather, I see great opportunities ahead to work together and do roaming deals. The most important for FON is that what we do creates a larger and wider network with more WiFi access points equipped with software that can be integrated into a roaming platform. I have just returned from the US where I was studying 802.11n and MIMO. If FON is viable the way it is now, with the 802.11n that has a signal range of 300 meters and which will soon become “fonable”, the WiFi nation will become a reality.

Last Friday I gave a talk at the Berkman Institute at Harvard. David Weinberger who works at the Institute and is also an advisor to Fon attended the presentation. David made a very good summary of what I and other people said. Personally I am amazed at people who can type in real time. David is not only a great writer and blogger but now I see that he is a great reporter as well. Thank you!

You can also watch videos of the talk at Andy Carvin´s blog.

I am very happy to report that we have recruited Robert Lang to lead Fon´s growth in Europe. Hiring Robert was an easy choice. We first interviewed him with Christiane Zu Salm in Munich two weeks ago and we thought he was an outstanding candidate. Then Robert came to Madrid where Mike Volpi our board member from Cisco and Danny Rimer our board member from Index Ventures were visiting and met them and the rest of the Fon team and we all thought he was the right person for the job. Of all of Robert Lang´s career what was key to Fon was that he was the Founder and CEO of one of Europe´s largest WiFi operator: WLAN AG. WLAN AG was sold to Swisscom Group in 2002 and renamed Swisscom Eurospot. While Fon has a very different model to Eurospot Robert´s experience building WiFi networks is very important to Fon. We all give a warm welcome to Robert who begin his work at Fon tomorrow.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the MIT Media Lab. I found the Media Lab fascinating as it blends students, professors and industry executives all working in one building. As most people know the most important project going on right now at the Media Lab is the One Laptop Per Child project and I was lucky to be there when the OLPC team chose the designer for the laptop. Here are some pictures I took.

While you cannot see it the famous power generating crank is still there.

My conversations with Nicholas Negroponte and his colleagues at Media Lab centered around two very different topics. One was the work that the foundation I started in Argentina Educ.ar is doing to advise the Argentine government on the possible purchase of a million of these laptops. The other one, totally unrelated is to see if the open source software that this laptops will use to mesh called Roofnet can be made compatible with the open source software we use at Fon. While at MIT I also met with Sanjit Zubin Biswas, a brilliant young hacker and student at MIT and we are going to give him our code and programmer support so we can make Roofnet work with Fon as well. Currently we use versions of Openwrt and DD-WRT At Fon we are very interested not only in our main proposition which is share wifi at home, roam the wifi world for free but also in the fact that neighbors can mesh. This meshing is good cause nowadays Wifi speeds are higher than DSL speeds, because of privacy concerns (traffic does not go through the internet) because of helping ISPs who get less traffic on their network, and lastly because meshing can result in a download and upload accelerator when neighbors pull their connections. All these respecting Fon´s rules of course that to be a fonero you must be a paying customer of an ISP and contribute bandwidth as well as obtaining it.

Today I met with Ron Sege CEO of Tropos Networks. We were both at the Googleplex for different reasons so we chose to meet there. It was a lunch meeting at 1pm. It was one of these awkward days in which I try to pack a lot of meetings to be able to fly back to be with the family in Spain so I actually had two lunches, one with Megan Smith from Google at noon and another one with Ron at one. At Google however this is not a problem because they have the best corporate food I have ever tasted. But let´s focus on the second lunch, the one with Ron. Ron is a very able and experienced CEO whose objective is to build meshed wifi networks. Tropos under his leadership is doing a great job. One of their clients is Google in Mountain View. Our meeting however did not center around Google but around municipal wifi. Fon has been invited to make proposals to some major cities around the world. Cities like our offer because it does not turn them into telecom operators, because telecom operators make more and not less money with Fon, because our solution relies on citizen participation and because our solution is practically free to the cities. Just promote that citizens buy routers and place them by their windows, offer free coverage to those who donate and very affordable coverage ($2 per day) for those who visit the city or don´t donate. Cities then only buy routers at 25 dollars each to install in their spaces namely schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. One problem however with the Fon solution for the city is that it cannot easily provide street coverage in very open areas. Another one is that it provides random coverage that is more indoor than outdoor. Tropos solves this for Fon. At the same time Fon solves indoor and ubiquitous coverage for Tropos so it looks that the two companies should find a way to collaborate. The first thing we will do is to see how compatible our software is with theirs. And then maybe we will make some joint presentations. To me it´s clear that nobody has all the solutions to the coverage problem and that Fon must connect and collaborate with all the key players. I also wanted to thank Christopher Sacca at Google for introducing us. Chris like me keeps a blog of his work and ideas.

Sequoia invested in Fon. This morning we had our first working session with Mike Moritz. It was my first time seeing Mike Moritz at work. I was impressed. Now what defines a top VC firm and a top VC? Two key criteria, adoption and nurturing. Probably half of Sequoia´s time is spent selecting firms to invest in but the other half, equally as important, is spent nurturing these firms. In the case of Fon for example Mike offered that Fon USA be incubated at their offices. Indeed we went on a tour of Sequoia´s offices in Sand Hill Road and Sequoia is building a whole section to incubate up to 5 companies with less than 6 employees at the same time. One office was offered to Fon. Personally I thought this offer reflected a great difference between Sequoia and other VCs I had worked with in the past at the three ISPs that I founded Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com. If you are en entrepreneur selecting a VC a key question to ask the VC is how much time their firm spends selecting companies vs nurturing companies. I don´t know if you will get a straight answer but in the case of Sequoia I think their success is based on evenly splitting the tasks. Mike Moritz and Mark Kvamme his partner had a great deal of positive recommendations and contacts for us. Unfortunately I can´t disclose the exact nature but I can say that some of these were great ideas on key industry people to partner with. One related to a whole new class of ISPs who were not on our radar screen and thanks to their help we will now contact.