This week in NYC I was interviewed by Ken Li at Reuters. Ken had already done a funny post in the Reuters blog about me at the Sun Valley conference. During this interview we ran into one of those situations where the ethics of journalism may be compromised.

I brought a FON Router to show Ken during the interview and leave behind so he could test it at home, but then the issue came up that this could be interpreted as a gift to a journalist and, therefore, lead to a favorable story on FON. Still we find a way to fix this. Ken forked out $5 and bought the Fon router! Then, while at the Nokia event, I found out that Ken and I had been way too concerned as journalists who attend the Nokia launches get $500 multimedia handsets and other gadgets. Personally, I tend to side with the journalists here. If journalists do not get gagdets for free, how are they going to get to own them, test them and write about them? They would spend their whole salaries in gadgets as most are not $5 Fon routers.

For months now we have explained in our maps that the markings we had in the FON Maps were not access points, but registered FONeros. Nevertheless, everyone at the community felt that we needed to show active hotspots as well as registered FONeros. So we developed software that now queries all access points many times a day. This was done by the team headed by Jose Antonio Arribas and it was not easy to implement. Unfortunately, this software does not work on access points that do not have the latest version of our software, so basically when you see our maps an orange point is a maybe for access while a bright green is guaranteed access.

So how many active access point do we have? We do not know. But we do know now how many are active and with the latest software. Those anyone can see in our maps. We apologize that we were not able to come up with a way to query the earlier installs.

I see this article in the NY Times. Wish I was still in NYC to get the paper.