2007 11
Censorship and Orgasms
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
This morning I discovered two curious web sites. Both intriguing but for different reasons. One is about censorship, the other about orgasms. I start with the censorship site. It´s called the Great Firewall of China and it is a site that when you put a URL it tells you if it´s being censored in China. The problem with it though is that I put Fon and it did appeared as censored but we have already quite a few foneros in China and have not seen reports of blocked access so maybe the site is not correct.
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2007 10
Fon and Grupo Zero launch Chueca WiFi
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Chueca is probably the most beautiful neighborhood of Madrid. It is also the gay neighborhood. Grupo Zero is the largest gay publishing group of Spain. Fon and Grupo Zero have launched an initiative to have Chueca WiFi enabled in anticipation of the Euro Pride so when a million people come from all over Europe to Chueca, Chueca is WiFi ready. This is a video shot from the Chueca WiFi headquarters.
This article says that ABI research forecasts that by the end of 2007 there will be 179,500 hotspots around the world. They forget to count FON Spots. FON has around 140K WiFi hotspots now and we should have around 300K by year end. Maybe more. And now that we have introduced the La Fontenna, our coverage which has certainly been one of our weaknesses, will greatly increase. By the end of 2006 FON became the largest WiFi community in the world. By the end of 2007, we will be larger than all of the other networks combined. And all with the same software, in open source and ready to receive developers apps. If you have a cool app that you would like to make part of FON please send me an email and I will forward it to the right teams.
2007 6
CUTEC i-Teams
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Today I went to CUTEC (Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club), Cambridge, where I was invited as one of this years keynote speaker.
One of the activities they organize and that I liked the most is i-Teams, which is basically a group of entrepreneurial post-graduate students who work with real inventions to determine the best route for their commercialization. They present the results at CUTEC’s annual Tech Ventures Conference. Here’s the video.
2007 6
In Dublin
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in International with No Comments
In this video, while walking around Dublin, my friend Antoin O Lachtain and I speak about broadband situation in Eire and the world in general. To watch only if you have some free time….
2007 6
We Launched the La Fontenna
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
The La Fontennas are signal extenders that stick to windows, are the size of a PSP and boost your La Fonera’s WiFi coverage by 10 times more than what it is now. Today we started an e mail campaign directed at our most successful Foneros, those who capture the most roaming linuses and aliens to try these out for free. If you live in a high density area and think you qualify but did not get one please write to me with your name and address. I do not promise to deliver one to everyone but I do promise to spend some time looking up the location in our maps and give out at least 100 to my readers.
2007 6
User generated content, user generated problems
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Last night I was having dinner with my friend Lars Hinrichs of Xing but the dinner was soured by the fact that somebody had posted antisemitic remarks in Xing and the press was accusing Xing´s management of being antisemitic. Other than the fact that as a buddy of Lars and being Jewish myself I can say that Lars is clearly not an antisemite I think that as Youtube and many others are seeing, “user generated content” also implies “user generated problems”. Will the traditional press ever understand that web 2.0 web sites cannot hire armies of people to police their own user generated content web sites? The only way user generated web sites can be managed is flagging offensive content. It is only then that web sites responsibility begins. And indeed if Xing had failed to remove those remarks it would be at fault. But they reacted immediately. And that is the only way the web 2.0 can truly function.
2007 5
Time to reform the British Educational System
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
In this video, while I walk around Cambridge I talk around what I believe is seriously wrong with the British educational system in which high school ends when kids are only 15 and at 16 they are forced to choose only very few subjects to study.
2007 5
Robots and Communities
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Yesterday I met with Sir Martin Sorrell and we spoke about the incredibly high market cap of Google compared to that of his company WPP, the largest ad agency in the world ($18bn compared with $160bn). During this conversation I came up with an explanation for this paradox that partly explained the enormous market cap differential of two companies in the same field with similar profits. Namely that WPP is a standard company which trades at a predictable P/E. But that there are only two kinds of companies that can achieve sky high valuations and go beyond the traditional valuation rules and those are are companies in the fields of building robots and building communities. Today at CUTEC I presented this idea at Cambridge and it was very well received.
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