My blog is not a blog of links, but a blog of my ideas and activities as a company builder. Still, I just read this article at the Technology Review that Bob Stumpel, our FONero leader in the Netherlands, sent to me and it is right on the state of WiFi.

Truphone is especially interesting. And so is this announcement by T Mobile in the States whereby dual wifi gsm phones will connect for free in their hotspots mostly at Starbucks.

This is how we started

This is where we are now

And on top of our mass production of Foneras, we are thinking of also producing small runs of design routers such as this one

In 3 days we have received over 5000 orders for Foneras from Germany and Austria. This is an enormous amount, much more than what we expected. We will be able to ship some of the Foneras next week, but not all. We apologize for the FONeros who will not receive their Foneras next week, they should get there before November 15th. We will ship on a first come first serve basis.

In any case we are extremely excited at FON about these results and want to thank all the enthusiastic new FONeros from these two countries and soon you will all have your Foneras. Please remember to connect them near an outside window.

Lately some people have been complaining that we have not disclosed the code of the Fonera. We have not done so because we have just launched the Fonera and are still working on the GPL compliance with Atheros, the chip maker. We are sorry about this delay and will probably publish the source code within a month Also we invite developers to write code for the Foneras and after certification we will include it as a choice for people to add to them.

At FON you can be a Bill and you can be a Linus. Most people are Linuses. Indeed, around 85% of the FONeros prefer to roam the world for free than to make money. But Greg, who I met at a business meeting yesterday in London, is a happy Bill. Interestingly, he is offering a service in euros in a pound economy, but British people still buy his passes.