FON has opened two research labs, one in Barcelona and one in Paris. The lab in Barcelona is working in the FON Downloader: the new version of our social router that will also address an issue that is dear to people who frequently upload and download, and that is a FON social router that can be directly connected to your iPod or external hard drive and that allows you to separate your uploading downloading activities in bittorrent, youtube and other sites from your computing activity. We believe we can have this product in the market for around $50.

In Paris we are working on managing our relationship with many other open source companies and doing projects in common. These will be announced in the next 30 days. Now here´s a general commentary. In Europe, most people don´t want to move and companies must go to them. In America, most people move to where the companies are. So FON is decentralizing and making small labs in different cities. We would like to do our next one in Asia.

At FON we are not as crazy about Bluetooth as we are about WiFi, but now that phones like the Nokia E61 or N80 have Bluetooth and WiFi, we see a great opportunity to create a Symbian version of FON and we are going for it.
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Now that we are becoming big I am getting comments from people who are turned off by our “Spanish leftist” look. I hear them, but I am not planning to change our image. FON is a telco revolution, FON is made of people who are fed up of the slow speed and the high monopolistic charges of the mobile operators and want to see free WiFi succeed. FON is user generated infrastructure: you give up some of your wireless bandwidth at home and you get it back anywhere else in the world without having to pay extra. You roam the world for free.

FON is people who have been promised the wireless internet and got tired of waiting. And that to me, is progressive. Why should it not express our views? And as a CEO, why can´t I express my views? I believe CEO´s CAN and SHOULD be political, because CEOs are citizens and all citizens should be political. So here´s a random list of things I believe in.
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We will subsidize a million routers. And the story appeared in Reuters before it did in my blog. Sorry! I was too busy working on the total overhaul of our web site and systems that will happen this week. More to follow.

The two largest internet shareholders of Fon are Google and eBay. As Fon grows and we try to look into how to collaborate with these two giants and FON, who seemingly have so little in common between them and with us, I realized that there is one element in which we are all in sync: we all specialize in making better use of what there is, of what exists.
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Does anyone know how we could port FON functionality say chillispot into a Symbian 3G/WiFi phone like the N80? If so please write to me. I see a great potential in taking the Fon Movement into mobile phones and have 3G to WiFi converters. Just look at the WiFi Alliance site and see how many gadgets have WiFi while there are almost no gadgets that are not phones with 3G.