2006 14
Launching FON at Aula 2006
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I am in Helsinki at the Bio Rex theatre attending Aula. At Aula, you can find an extremely diverse group of people whose only common characteristic seems to be that they are highly creative and intelligent in whatever they do. There´s Joi Ito, the famous blogger, World of Warcraft guild manager, VC, entrepreneur, ICANN board member and on top of all that fonero leader of Japan. Also Clay Shirky, an extremely talented professor from NYU who coined the phrase social software, Alastair Curtis, Nokia’s Head of Design, a great saxophonist like Jukka Perko and Marko Ahtisaari, founder of Aula, Nokia executive and fonero leader in Finland.
It is at Aula that a few hours ago I launched Fon in Finland, the home of Nokia. Considering that 3G is the staple of Finland it was great to see how everyone, including many Nokia executives, loved Fon and said they would become foneros themselves. To accompany the launch if you visit Fon, now you will see that we have the 5 euro offer for the routers, but only for people who live in Finland (sorry!).
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martin varsavsky on June 15, 2006 ·
Nikita, when we arrive at a country that´s what some people always say. Contracts are the same everywhere. But when carriers realize that to be a fonero you have to first be a paying customer of them and that it is paying customers who travel the world with their signal they see that Fon decreases their churn (people tend to disconnect if they travel frequently) and increases their sign up (now you pay at home but roam the world) and they embrace Fon as many have done. IF they help us sell fon like Neuf Telecom in France we give them a revenue share and they like us even more. So we will probably make a deal with Finnish ISPs. We are in 140 countries and have not had any problems.
slydell on September 23, 2008 ·
FON sounds great. would be cool to do this in Guyana and the Caribbean.
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Nikita Zhuk on June 15, 2006 ·
I was at the Aula seminar and really enjoyed your presentation. Fon sounds like an interesting idea (even in sparsely populated country like Finland), but there will be problems with Finnish ISPs and their service terms. For example, Finnish ISP Saunalahti strictly forbids sharing the Internet connection with anyone else outside the client’s household, and it’s my impression that most if not all of other ISPs have similar terms.