I am the CEO and Founder of Fon. Fon has built the largest global WiFi network in the world. We have over 650K WiFi access points distributed in many countries with UK, France and Japan being our best markets. Fon is owned by Ebay, Google, BT, Index Ventures, the management and some other small investors who have invested a total of 36 million euros in the company. The basic idea behind Fon is that “you share a little wifi at home and you roam the world for free connecting to other Fon routers known as Foneras”. Fon´s revenues come from people who do not share wifi at home yet they find Fon WiFi signal and want to use it. Fon operates alone or in partnerships with telcos such as BTFon, or SFRfon and many others. After 3 years of operation Fon is becoming a profitable company in the last quarter of this year.

Now Ubiquisys makes Femto cells. Femto cells are a great idea. Its the same concept as a Fonera meaning a box that is connected to ADSL/Cable/Fiber internet on one side and sends wireless signal on the other. Except that the wireless signal is 3G, not WiFi.

So you can see a match in the making here. And this is what is going on.

Fon and Ubiquisys have entered a strategic partnership to develop the first “Femto Fonera”, which will provide mobile 3G data and voice access from a wireline broadband connection. You can share this 3G signal securely with other Femto Foneros, just like you share your wifi with the other Foneras. Apart from experiencing high quality voice and data connectivity at thousands of community hotspots, Femto Foneros could also enjoy tariff discounts from their mobile operator.

The Femto Fonera is a cost effective way to increase 3G coverage indoors and enable high bandwidth applications which are not possible through the traditional cellular network. It can also be used in public spaces without interfering with the operator’s macro network.

Ubiquisys is currently the number 1 femtocell vendor. Their ZoneGate femtocell offers the best performance of any femtocell, it is the smallest and it consumes very little energy. The Femto Foneras, like the femtocells, will require no setup, they will have no buttons and require no admin software. They will be supplied through a specific mobile operator which would be providing the spectrum. The Femto Foneras will detect the user’s presence, which opens up many possibilities for location based applications and services. This Android app, for example, changes the home screen and the applications available when you enter your home and the phone seamlessly connects to the femtocell. Fon and Ubiquisys are in talks with several mobile operators to evaluate the Femto Fonera concept.

Here is the full press release.

My good friend Hans Peter Brondmo just told me that he sold Plum, his start up to Nokia and he is moving from San Francisco to Berlin to run it. Nokia seems to be on a quiet buying spree. They already bought a company I invested in Plazes of Felix Petersen and are looking at many other players in related areas.

Nokia has also made another move that makes sense and is to concentrate social media activities in Berlin. I don´t know if Europe will ever have its Silicon Valley but if it does Berlin will be a contender. It is a fascinating city with a multilingual population in a country that from what I have seen produces the best programmers in Europe and some of the best in the world. Without offending anybody else who works at our company, whenever something really complicated goes wrongly at Fon it is a German programmer who gets us out of the problem. And Berlin is extremely affordable as a city. Living there costs less than in Madrid or any other major European capital. And while the weather sucks if you come from Spain for Nokia´s employees moving South from Helsinki has to be seen as a promotion, at least weather wise.

I hope the censors at Youtube who freak out when they see some nudity leave this ad because whatever you may think of it, it is worth seeing.

Now that Verizon made a deal with Boingo, a deal with Fon in which Fon is installed in their ADSL and fiber connections would be great for Verizon as a company.

First of all, it would lower churn for Verizon as people who have Fon and find Fon when they travel (as it happens in the UK for example with BTFon) tend to continue paying for their broadband even when they mostly travel. Not being at home much is often cited as a reason to interrupt broadband service. Secondly, it would increase ARPU for Verizon because when ATT, Comcast and Time Warner cable users connect to the second SSID of the Verizon WiFi routers, they would make more revenues per ADSL/fiber line as carriers who team up with Fon do. Thirdly it would slow price erosion for their broadband offering as value perception increases in customers who can pay at home and connect everywhere. Other advantages are that the coverage of Fon’s mostly residential wifi network (coming out of residential boxes) would be complementary to Boingo´s commercial network, and Verizon would have an incredible WiFi offering to compete with ATT´s in mobile.

An increasing number of powerful, affordable mobile devices are entering the market and allowing users to run increasingly data intensive applications. 3G makes sense for light data applications such as email and web browsing, but it is not commercially viable for applications requiring large data transfers such as watching movies on smartphones when customers are on flat data plans. Mobile operators can reduce capex on 3G networks and overcome their speed and throughput limitations by offloading data traffic onto wifi networks. This is one of the advantages that E-Plus, the 18 million subscriber German mobile operator, saw in partnering with Fon. Also as an example,  AT&T has quickly seen the importance of wifi as part of a good user experience with smartphones, having sold the pioneering iPhone. In general carriers who sell the iPhone see the future of smartphones and it is a very, very data focused future.

I have been reading about the H1N1 flu since it was first reported in Mexico and most likely, so have you. I have been worrying about it since them and to some extent, so have you. But now I have it and you probably don´t and that´s why you may be interested in knowing what is like.

How is it to have “swine flu”? Well in my case it started as a cold but in a few hours it degenerated into a nasty flu with high fever and all sort of aches throughout the body, especially in the chest. When I called my doctor in Madrid and told him what was going on, he advised me not to come to the hospital as they are concerned about patients like me going into the hospital and making others sick. While I could understand the policy of keeping sick people at home, the “have somebody pick up the Tamiflu” proposition left me somewhat surprised. Especially since I wanted to get a confirmation that I did have H1N1. My offer to send him some saliva a la 23andme fashion was politely refused. Flu I learned, it´s a social disease. You do not have one person with flu and flu is always part of an epidemic. And right now, still in the summer, the little flu there is H1N1, especially considering that in the last week I have been flying through the world´s busiest airports. So no going to the hospital and no test. Testing was done on patients that were in bad enough shape to end up at the hospital (a policy that probably leads to tremendous under reporting of the disease). I was also confused about the other piece of advise “if things get out of hand do come and check in at the hospital”. Out of hand in what sense I asked? Not being able to breath was one example. Mmmm. Not being able to breathe, I wonder how I could make it to the hospital in that condition. But whatever I decided to follow my doctor´s advise and hope for the best.

After talking to the doctor yesterday my fever kept rising, all the way up to 38.5C in spite of the heavy dosis of Paracetamol I was taking. And I couldn´t stop coughing. During the early afternoon I started taking cold medication and Tamiflu. Now a day and a half later, the good news, is that I am doing considerably better. Fever is around 37.5C and all symptoms are back to what I would call a normal flu. I am in bad shape but no worse than you have been in the past when you had any flu.

Was it the Tamiflu that made it turn around so quickly or my own immune system? Frankly I don´t know but whatever it is it is nice to be able to say a few words without coughing, a novelty of the last few hours.

Interestingly nobody around me got the flu so far. Nor Leo, Tom, Isa, Nina who were all with me. Nor people who work with me. In any case I am now keeping considerable distance from the few people I see. Wash my hands frequently and where a special 3M mask when others are around.

Update at 10pm: now the symptoms have gone from being severe and nasty, to being those of a normal flu, to being those of a normal cold. I am doing much better than last night. If this is all there is to the “swine flu” I would summarize it as 12 very tough hours. Hopefully the rest will be a quick recovery.

…is that in America you can´t sell health care reform by telling the truth. The truth would be something like this.

“We live in a country that has 50 million people without insurance. This is unfair and immoral. The right thing to do is for all of those who have insurance to get slightly worse medical care, so everyone can be insured. And that is what people do in other countries. And that is what we should do here.”

But solidarity does not sell well in a country where the 80% of people who have insurance don´t really care about the 20% who don´t. To use a public transport analysis what is going on here is that as 20% more passengers board the train some people may have to ride standing up. But the passengers in the train don´t want more passengers. They don´t care if the others have to walk. So then, aware of this Obama paints the plan in a too optimistic fashion, by telling the 80% who are insured that everything will be the same for them. And the vested interests in the status quo nail him because that´s just no the case.

In democracies it is very hard to pass measures that improve things for minorities because democracies are the rule of the majority and if the majority is better off, they just don´t care enough about the minority.

Ok, I am not an expert on this matter. And maybe reading my post is a waste of time as I am sure many other people have given more thought than I have to the issue of drunk driving. But governments around the world spend fortunes trying to find out if people are driving drunk by randomly stopping them and testing them. This leads to enormous amounts of lawsuits and all sorts of miseries. And while I think the intentions are excellent and drunk driving is the cause of an incredible amount of death maybe some of their efforts are misguided. What society should really want to know is not if a person is a dangerous driver. And the two are not exactly related. Take my case. I am a terrible drinker. I rarely drink. When I do is a glass of wine. The few times I have had 3 glasses of wine during dinner I got drunk, silly smiles, poor coordination and all. And wine is all I drink, no beer which I dislike, nor hard liquor that except when greatly diluted in fruit juice, I also dislike. Gin? Ron? Tequila? Vodka? Not for me. My body seems to have very little tolerance for alcohol. So what I am trying to say here is that while I could pass alcohol tests better than my friends as I drink much less, I know that my friends can drive much better than I can after drinking, say, 2 glasses of wine. I am very sensitive to alcohol. The point of drinking and driving is not to find out how much you drink but how well you can drive. If that is the case how about testing THAT. For example my neighborhood in Madrid is full of speed bumps. How about replacing those with serpentines that not only would slow you down but also be very hard to navigate when drunk? Or how about having cars make you do a simple coordination test in order to turn on? What we would like to know is not how much people drink but if their reflexes and ability to drive is still there. And this could be tested for all drivers in 30 seconds before they get going. In that sense the tests they used to do in the States when I live there made more sense. They did not test you for alcohol but made you walk tight rope style on the road dividing line. At least they were testing coordination and that relates more to driving than alcohol itself.