Here you will find the first 4 ideas for R&D projects we have at FON. You are welcome to read them and to comment. You are even welcome to “steal” our ideas, but what we ask in return is that if you copy them, you let us know and make them “FON ready”.

1) To port FON into macs, so macs can get ethernet or 3G internet and send WiFi signal. A FON ready second WiFi USB radio that makes laptop pc’s beam FON WiFi signal when connected to the internet by ethernet or 3G.

2) To port Fon into phones that have 3G and WiFi so they can become Fon WiFi access points for people nearby.

3) To port FON into an 802.11n router (a MIMO router) as so far we are only on 802.11g with shorter range.

4) To have the foneras send two SSIDs rourter, one with WPA and the other with FON.

Yat Siu is a remarkable entrepreneur based in Hong Kong. I am happy to announce that Fon and Yat Siu have reached an agrement by which Yat Siu will
be a key Fonero Leader in the region and help us get organized throughout the region.

For enquiries please e-mail asia@fon.com

Most businesses believe in secrecy. We don´t. Most businesses believe in patents. We don´t. We are an open source company. We are also a blogged company that has so far not done any advertising, nor currently engages a PR firm. We live off the originality of our ideas. So after presenting my latest R&D ideas internally, I have decided to blog them one by one so readers have an opportunity to comment on them.

You are welcome to read them. You are welcome to comment. You are welcome to “steal” our ideas, but what we ask in return is that if you copy them, let us know and make them “FON ready”. We are open source, so you can just download our firmware. If you are a hardware maker you are welcome to conctact me directly. Same if you are a programmer. You should also know that FON licenses its brand at no cost. We pay nothing to have products be FON ready and use our brand and we ask for no money either. We already have very large hardware makers such as Accton, who have signed licensing agreements with us.

As you read these ideas, think that FON will sell 1 million Foneras at whatever price clears the market over the next 12 months. Fortunately, we have the funds to invest in seeding the world with social routers that will create a fertile environment for all sorts of gadgets: mp3 players with WiFi, games with WiFi, WiFi phones, digital cameras with WiFi, printers with WiFi, hard drives with WiFi.

FON didn´t invent WiFi obviously, there´s tons of it. FON is simply a standard, a piece of open source code and an authentication system so WiFi donors can travel with their WiFi signal, roam the world for free, and non donors can purchase it at the price of a bus ticket for a day. So, in a world with ubiquitous WiFi, what would you like to see?

Fon is the largest WiFi community in the world. We now have around 45,000 foneros in 144 countries. We still don´t know how many Foneros have active hotspots because we have not yet finished the sofware that allows us to query routers on an hourly basis but we believe that Fon is larger than T Mobile´s in terms of network as well (T Mobile was the largest WiFi network in the world with 19,000 hotspots in USA and Europe). The key to our success is that as opposed to T Mobile Fon is user generated infrastructure. So far Fon has been promoted only at our web site but as soon as we can handle the massive sign ups, we are likely going to appear at the sites of our partners Skype and/or Google.
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Fon and Planex reached an agreement today for Planex to add the Fon firmware in their routers and make them Fon ready. We chose Planex because we found it to be an extremely creative company. Their CEO, Katsu Kubota, a race car driver and I played a little game during our meeting. I asked Katsu to define Planex in one word and he asked me to define Fon in one word. I said WiFi Community. He said speed. I liked speed and quickly thereafter we signed our agreement. Planex has very cool products, they have a wifi router that connects to a wifi camera with motion detectors that they can make Fon ready. They also have a wifi hub that allows you to have an external hard drive, a network drive and connect printers to it, that also will be Fon ready. I disclose to Katsu my idea of creating the Fon Downloader, a router that can be connected to an external hard drive and run itunes, azureus, bit torrent without a need of tying up your laptop´s CPU, wifi and hard drive. He loved it, he found this to be an original idea and a killer applications. He will work on it.

We launched Fon in Korea and it is going incredibly well! Not only are we getting thousands of Koreans registering for Fon´s offer of free global roaming but our Korean shop is selling so many routers that we are running out. We thought we would have around 500 foneros on the first day, which would have been an important number but we sold around 1000 Foneras (Fon social routers) and we don´t have any more. We will soon put up a sign that says that the new routers can take up to 90 days to be delivered. While I think it may take less we don´t know how quickly we can get them so we´d better be prudent. Thank you Jin Ho Hur!! Thank you to all the Korean foneros!!

Gracias Corea de parte de todo el equipo Fon.

Below you can read some of the amazing press coverage in Korea.
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The cafe´s name was Kafka. There were around 40 bloggers and journalists there. Kafka made me feel at home, the pictures of Che Guevara behind him even more so, and in the sign for the men´s toilet was a picture of Woody Allen, another idol. So here I was surrounded by very familiar faces in a country that is as far from my native Argentina as it can possibly be and yet so close.

The Taiwanese are very, very Linus. Surprisingly the mainland Chinese seem to be more Bills. What a paradox here. In any case they had tough questions for me vis a vis Fon. In the end I got the sense that the Fon movement, that started tonight in Taipei, will be a big success. But the Taiwanese did their due dilligence. I did not mind answering 4 hours of questions. It was all worth it. I also found people from the Open Source movement very interested in developing applications for the fonosphere. I said we would fund cool projects. Same with hardware vendors. Wifi Phones, wifi TVs, wifi radios, wifi games, this is hardware Mecca.

Afterwards we met with Accton and I proposed that we expand the memory of la fonera, our custom made social router to 8MB of flash so hackers can play with it. Now it´s 4MB. We are looking into this possibility. We are also looking at a USB port to add external memory to the mini linux computer router. Can you think what to do with this? Could we include a Bit Torrent client in it for example so your router is bit torrenting to and from your 60gb hard drive while you are at work…with your laptop?

There are many other bloggers covering the event. I will try to link to those in English and some in Chinese as well for those who understand it. In the meantime, thank you YK from Accton! You were great!

This is a blog made to promote the event (chinese) and this one to spread the voice (english and chinese)

Here’s blogger’s Ilya Lee presentation (english).

Here you can see some pictures from the event and from the party we had later. Also blogger Ching Chiao took some pictures.