Looking for new apps to include the Fonera and testing Pando and Dropbox I found Files Over Miles and it seems great (thanks Raul Chevalier). The key about the new Fonera, the Fon WiFi router that allows you to offer a little extra bandwidth to others and in exchange getting paid and roaming the world for free is that it also manages your file transfers. That´s why we call it the Fonera 2.0, because it manages your relationship with the Web 2.0 namely uploading and downloading content. For Fon this ability to allow people to upload and download while they leave home with their laptops has been a big plus. People are eager to let their Fonera routers connected to their hard drives do the TEDIOUS Internet work such as uploading your videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or downloading their torrents. As a result of this new development at Fon we have been able to stop subsidizing the growth of our network and are reaching profitability earlier than expected. Probably this summer or fall.

But now that the selections of the obvious apps are ready, I was looking for other killer ones – apps to sync folders or send large files from computer. Point here is that instead of being glued to your computer as the huge files are sent, say when you use Pando, your router does the job sending that family video in HD while you are away from home. Moreover you can then access your Fonera from the office say to see how your downloads, uploads, torrents and file transfers are going. But while Pando is great and so is Dropbox, FilesOverMiles is the piece of cake type of app that could be a killer in the Fonera 2.0. It just sends files from browser to browser.

Now we have to see if it´s Open Source and if we can include it in the Fonera. But try it. It is a brutally simple way of sending files from your browser to somebody else´s. Pity it seems to be capped at 1GB and that it only works if you open ports which is not something everyone knows how to do. Other than that you can also get lucky as FilesOverMiles tries to pierce your ISP´s firewall and sometimes succeeds.

Btw we are launching the Fonera 2.0 in USA and UK in September. Sorry that it is so far only available in Continental Europe and Japan.

The Menorca TechTalk 09 has just finished. This is the third time Nina and I have hosted the TechTalk, an event attended by about 80 entrepreneurs from all around the world to spend four days at our farm in Menorca. This year we had participants from every major world region: Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, North America, the Far East and, if we include the sailboat crew, the South Pacific. The goal of the Menorca TechTalk is twofold. First, it aims to offer a relaxed atmosphere in which the entrepreneurs can get to know each other and establish business networks and friendships. Secondly, the event provides the people of Menorca with a technology forum since it is open to the public for one of the days. This post will grow as I continue to read articles and receive pictures about the event.

Here is one article from Barak Kassar to begin with.

The following two are in Spanish: One by Mariano Amartino and another one by Santiago Bilinkis, co-founder of Officenet in Argentina, a great e-tailer that was sold to Staples.

These are some great pictures from Rodrigo Sepulveda. And here are some others from Eduardo Arcos and Alec Oxenford.

eRepublik Labs announced that it has raised €2 million in a series A round from AGF Private Equity, after a seed round of €200,000 in 2007 and an angel round of €550,000 in 2008. The money will be spent in the next 12 to 18 months to develop more features in the game and new products based on the eRepublik platform.

eRepublik is a strategy Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) with a social component. Alexis Bonte, co-founder and CEO of eRepublik, described it as a “mix between Civilization and Facebook”. It is set in a mirror version of the real world in which players can participate in all kinds of activities, from the mundane day to day tasks (buying food, working, traveling) to national politics, setting economic policy and war waging between countries.

eRepublik is special in that it has been created openly and interactively from a very early stage. The founders began with a live prototype that they improved based on user input. This, combined with its heavy emphasis on user generated content, has allowed eRepublik to quickly and cost effectively grow into a rich gaming experience.

While I am not an investor in eRepublik I am a friend of Alexis Bonte and it is great to see your friends doing very well in tough markets. Alexis was a the Menorca TechTalk.

I used to think that fanaticism and hatred tempered with age. I was wrong. The murderer is 88.

WASHINGTON — An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, opened fire with a rifle and fatally wounded a security guard before being shot by other officers.

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• Sources: Shooter is white supremacist (cnn.com)
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No, this is not an invitation to the Menorca TechTalk. Those went out already. Nina and I are looking forward to seeing our friends next week. This post instead is about an idea to radically improve the economy of the island of Minorca converting it not into a tax haven but into a wedding heaven.

If you are American you probably don´t know that in Europe, it is very complex to get married. In the USA, where Nina Wiegand my fiancee and I, will get married in December, you just show your ID, sign an affidavit in which you swear that you are fit to be married and you get married. In Europe there are waiting lists to get married and even in places where there aren´t, it is unbelievably bureaucratic to get married. Moreover getting married itself is a rigidly structured event with little opportunity to make it your own as people do in the States. And if the bride and groom come from two different European nationalities, something that is more and more common every year since in the EU, as opposed to NAFTA, citizens can freely migrate from country to country, the request for translated paperwork can be endless.

So my proposal is to combine the beauty of the island of Menorca with a new regime that would be unique in Europe and that would make it very easy, and truly special, for people to get married in this beautiful island. A set of rules about marriage similar to those that exist in USA.

First of all, for this new regime there is already the advantage that Spain allows Gay marriage. That in itself should be of help to attract more tourists who want to get married there. But what Menorca should do is to make it easy and fun to get married there. It should make it very simple to get married through affidavit and not this absurd certificates in which people must prove that they are single as if they had to prove they don´t have a “lien” on them. It should also make it simple for anyone, after a day course, to be allowed to officiate weddings – so Menorca would be the only place in Europe where people can get married by their friends. Getting married by your peer is what the Facebook generation wants. Menorca can change the rules to allow that. This is also important because getting married is a very cultural experience and people prefer to get married by somebody akin to them or close to them.

If Minorca created this new “wedding friendly regime” it would do something similar yet distant to what other islands do. The Canary Islands for example have created a tax haven regime. So have Bermuda and many other fiscal havens. But I find an island of florists, bakers and musician somehow nicer than an island of dodgy bankers. If Menorca did become the marriage capital of Europe – celebrating say 1000 weddings a week – the island´s GDP could grow by half a billion euros per year, something huge in an island of only 60,000 people. Let French Polynesia and Maldives do the honeymoons. Menorca should do the weddings!

And the slogan would of course be “Come to Menorca and live happily ever after.” But as it is right now, so beaurocratic and complicated, Nina and I will marry on another island, Manhattan, away from dodgy bankers, and enjoying the close company of our friends and family.