FON´s idea –that people build their own FON company–, may be replicated by cellular operators according to this interesting article in GigaOM.

PC Home, according to Alexa, is the 60th most visited web site in the world. It´s in Chinese. While it should not be surprising that the 60th most visited web site would be in Chinese, it is remarkable when you find that almost all of its visitors come from Taiwan, an island of less than 30 million people.

In Taiwan over 55% of the population visits PC Home at least once a month. PC Home is also the largest e-tailer in Taiwan and Skype partner in this country. So following the norm that an amigo of your amigo is your amigo, FON and PC Home have become….amigos!! Next week we will start promoting the FON Movement together.

We are very happy to be working with PC Home. We see them as kindred spirits, people who love to see the internet accessible everywhere as much as we do.

I am getting good at winning FON´s office pools or porras. I won the German porra, I lost the Spanish SIMO convention porra, but just now learned that I won the Japanese porra.

The Japanese porra was a Y500 investment per employee and we had to get how many Japanese were going to go for the FONero promise, which in the case of Japan only lasted 5 days. I guessed 8000 and the final result is 8278. Next closest guesses were those of Alex Puregger, who runs biz dev for Asia at FON with 9000 and Nina Wiegand who is in charge of our communications who guessed 7500.

Interestingly, all the Japanese employees were more conservative and had lower numbers. My objective was to have more access points than NTT, who I understand has 7000 (this figure is not confirmed).

As it is customary with the office pools at Fon whoever wins donates the funds inviting everyone else for drinks. So…. kampai!

We are making ISP deals around the world, but in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan ISPs have been the fastest in implementing these deals. The ISPs in this countries quickly realized that FON increases their ARPU, decreases their churn (cause FONeros don´t disconnect even when they travel, if not they lose roaming priviledges), decreases their advertising budgets (FON is viral) and makes it easier to sell broadband.