I just met Jonathan Rosenberg, the head of Product Management at Google, and told him about the Gmailuploader, the tool we have developed at FON allowing you to send old emails to Gmail so when you open a new Gmail account it’s not empty and you can search them. He loved it. But then I was surprised and asked him why is it that Gmail does not have that functionality. I said that I would not mind giving Google the Gmailuploader as a gift, and all Google had to do in return would be to ad a little thank you note to FON for having developing it. His answer was a roll of eyes that I totally understood. If FON has so many projects to make our services better, the list of Google’s must be endless — that’s what the roll of eyes meant. And it was nice to see the human side of Jonathan. Nobody, even the person who probably has the biggest army of coders in the world at his command, can tackle everything. What I love about Google and have also seen with FON is that they are so open to collaborations.
After Jonathan, I met with many other Google people and we shared other developments like Gspace, the app that mirrors your computer on the internet using Gmail as the backoffice. And while some people have been telling me that Google was going to kill it because storing documents is not the original intention of Gmail, I found that the Google managers are totally open to new apps that make the lives of internet users around the world better (especially if some people use Gspace to empty Microsoft and send those documents to Google :). And hopefully this week we will introduce a new tool that blends Skype and Google functionalities….stayed tune!
2007 21
Google Zeitgeist 07 goes up in Space
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I am at Google Zeitgeist in The Grove outside of London. Just had lunch with Mark Shuttleworth. While we had emailed a lot and he knows that I am a huge fan of Ubuntu, we had never personally met. What I loved about our lunch, that included Tariq Krim, Ola Ahlvarsson, Marc Samwer and Jonathan Zittrain, was that it made me dream. I grew up the son of an astronomer. I heard about space throughout my childhood and probably first landed sometime during adolescense when my cousin was killed by the Argentine Fascist Military and we were forced to emigrate (my father was considered suspicious by the military because he managed the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy, and the military did not understand about space and thought it dangerous).
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2007 21
Fonero.be
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Today we are launching fonero.be together with our partners Scarlet and Tidings in Antwerp Belgium. Fonero.be is a new ADSL wireless broadband provider, and by combining their innovative WiFi services with the FON Community, Fonero.be customers and Foneros can easily connect to Internet using WiFi around Belgium and for a discounted price. Pricing for this service is 29.95€ per month for 6MB service. Thanks to teaming up with Fonero.be, and Scarlet as ADSL and voice supplier, the Belgian market will provide a dense network of FONspots that are not only important for Foneros in Belgium but also those who visit Belgium.
2007 19
Blackberry and Microsoft both on the way out…
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Now that I abandoned Microsoft for Ubuntu and Mac I am about to drop my Blackberry as well. Blackberry for Mac sync is very bad and there´s nothing for Linux. Plus on Microsoft it only syncronizes with Outlook which is the source of most problems with Microsoft. Even in Parallels where I still have Microsoft I don´t have Microsoft Office nor do I use Outlook. And now that there´s Gmail for mobile devices the benefit of Blackberry has decreased. Yes on one hand the interface is quick and easy to use but on the other with Blackberry you only have the e mails of the last 3 days while with Gmail you have the whole year and it´s searcheable. Moreover the Blackberry I have comes with only 25MB from Vodafone and it invariably fills up and this forces me to go to the web site to erase the messages something I hate to do. And Vodafone has made a horrible web site for Blackberry that ONLY works with Internet Explorer. Nobody I know still uses Internet Explorer. Firefox rules. So long Blackberry after so many years? Well I dumped Microsoft so Blackberry may indeed be next.
2007 18
WiFi Missiles….
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
When you think of WiFi you think at most, of stone throw coverage. Stand somewhere, throw a stone and that´s how far your wifi signal will get. Now with a new technology based on electrically guided focused WiFi beams, Intel has come up with a way for you (or us at Fon) to throw stones….100kms! And we were so excited at Fon because next week we are introducing the Fontennas and increasing the range of the Foneras 10 times. Well, c´est la vie, there´s always somebody with something longer around…
2007 17
Are Entrepreneurs Hypomanic?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
My friend Joshua Ramo just introduced me to the concept of being a Hypomanic. I felt at home with it. Both with the good and bad aspects of it. This is what he wrote.
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I am not saying I am bored at FON because there are tons of exciting things going on, but let’s say that I have a hard time keeping my creative impulses under control. So after drowing FON Madrid with development projects, I created FON Labs in Barcelona to continue developing crazy ideas, one after the other. Some we developed on our own, others we found and modified. We started with Gspace. Gspace is a Firefox extension that creates a mirror of your hard drive on the internet using Gmail for storage. This was one of the “found and modified” type of projects. I found it, bought it, and we have developers improving it. This extension is hugely successful, we are getting around 7000 downloads per day. In the last week we added 2 more. GmailUploader a web site that collects your emails from other accounts and sends them to Gmail. This started as a personal tool I needed to upload my old emails into Gmail. I was amazed to see that Google did not offer a tool like this since the key to Gmail is search, but there’s nothing to search when you start a new Gmail account as your old emails are not there. Another tool we just deployed is Fon.gs. Fon.gs is like a TinyURL whose URLs you can remember. Fon.gs is a way to create domains that are memorable and more importantly, Free like www.fon.gs/empirestate. We also created APIs so other sites can use the Fon Get Simple too,l as we call it, to work in their sites.
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For many years now I have worked with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, probably the two best investment banks in the world. These two banks helped me financed my previous start ups. But for the two capital rounds of FON I did not work with them, nor with any other investment bank. FON raised a total of 28 million euros with a first round of 18 million and a second round of 10 million for, and we did it all ourselves. Investment Bank disintermediation in the case of FON is probably due to two reasons: one personal, one less so. On the personal front after having raised funds for Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com and other companies I created, it is easier for me to go out and raise funds on my own. But in general I think that investment banks left the start up scene in 2001 never to come back.
2007 14
TechTalk Menorca on Loic.tv
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
The guys at Vpod have come up with a great tool for video bloggers that allows them to create their own channel. Here´s the Loic.tv show on the Menorca gathering.
2007 14
Chris Shipley interviews me at Innovate
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Chris Shipley interview me at Innovate and then the organization gave me the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Thank you!