Tonight I was having dinner with a Korean CEO who surprised me with the story that some 3 year old children in Korea take supplementary lessons in music, math, English to get into competitive schools. By the time they are 13 most Korean children are taking supplementary lessons to prepare for university exams.

In Spain where I live, most children never have supplementary classes, not when they are 3 nor when they are 10 nor when they are 15. Spaniards are by nature not very competitive people, nor are they ambitious, indeed “ambitious” is a derogatory term when applied to somebody´s personality. Now if Koreans work so hard and Spaniards are so relaxed about education and work, how can it be that Spain still ranks ahead of Korea in terms of GDP? And even in terms of PPP this is true.
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I am in China and as we were preparing the launch of Fon in China with our Chinese partners we confirmed that abitcool is indeed a detailed copy of Fon in China. The company behind Abitcool has their code even includes notes that we made in our code. But since our firmware is open source and we want to spread the community on a global basis it is somewhat cool that this is happening (it would have been cooler to be notified). As it stands we just have to make sure we can all roam with each other. If not t would not be even be a bit cool. In the meantime, until our web site in Chinese is ready, Chinese people are welcome to come to Fon and download our firmware.

FON is all about user-generated infrastructure. In order to promote the FON community in Germany, FON is giving several hundred routers for FREE to some cities. We will start in Munich with 300 Routers that will be given to people who want to become FONeros and live in certain downtown areas: business district, pedestrian zone or around the University.

To achieve a good density of FON WiFi signal within these specific areas, we have selected 4 postcodes and will give away free promotional FON routers. The postcodes in Munich are 80331, 80333, 80799 and 80469.

If you happen to live there and want to share your DSL connection with all the Foneros worldwide and roam the world for free, send an email including your Family Name, First Name, Street, Zip Code and your phone number so we can contact you.

Today I had to fly from Paris to Hong Kong and while there was a direct flight with Air France I added 3 hours to the trip and took Lufthansa for only one reason: I knew they had WiFi on board and I had never experienced it. Considering this one of the ultimate fonero experience I decided to trade bad food for internet connectivity and here I am, blogging at FL380. What can I say, this is AMAZING and I am saying this not only because I am a net addict but because being on line takes away the stress of being disconnected while flying. Personally I don´t have fear of flying, I am a pilot, my paradox is that on long haul my anxiety did not relate to what would happen to the plane but what was happening to the world! And here I mean the macro world in the sense of CNN or BBC and the micro, my family, friends, fon, etc. Now I can fly with my Netvibes on, my e mail, chat and even speak on Skype and even upload my latest Paris pictures from this weekend on flickr. I wonder how do I appear on Plazes as I fly?

Spain used to be a Catholic country. Statistics show that practicing Catholics have dropped from around 80% in the 60’s to around 20% now. While religion in America is as strong as ever, in Europe it is on a steady decline. Aware of this, the MTV´s Spanish ad agency took a gamble and prepared a video that portrays young people who delay sex until marriage as losers. They were incredibly successful. The title of the video is I love Laura (but I will wait until we get married), Amo a Laura, pero esperaré hasta el matrimonio. The lyrics are absolutely hilarious. They basically say that passionate kissing is dirty, that it is better to do crossword puzzles than making love, they never say the words sex, or virginity. The way they make fun of religious principles vis a vis virginity is so elegant, that probably people the few people who are in favor of waiting until marriage were not offended.

Interestingly, MTV´s target audience is exactly the public that is about to have sex for the first time (or recently had it). Their key demographic age group is 13 to 18. As you can imagine, Youtube and Googlevideo went crazy with spoofs of the spoof. Some are pretty gross, some touch gay themes I love Batman focuses on Batman´s tight clothes. There´s also a very Spanish one that was done by the number one comedy Show in Spain and it shows the top politicians of the country saying how they love to negotiate with ETA, the basque terrorist organization.

But why is it that I still feel that they will rip me off?

Well, after what happened to RIM, Blackberry with the Redberry I should not be surprised that they copied Fon in China. The difference though for the 150 foneros we already have in China plus all the ones who are coming is that with Fon you share WiFi in China and you roam not just China but the whole world for free as Fon is already in 140 countries.
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America is a democracy run by the republican party. Surprisingly the republican party has produced something that is pretty close to a dynasty. In Spain we have a dynasty, and a king. But our King´s values are more aligned to those of the American Democratic Party than the Republican Party. So America has a democracy that with elements of a monarchy and we have a monarchy that is mostly a democracy with a King who risked his life to defend democracy. And to top it all Spain is governed by the Socialist party, traditionally anti monarchic but now in a very good relationship with the king.

How does Fon fit in all this?
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