We are growing fast. We were 12 people at the beginning of the year, we are 29 now, we will be 40 soon. We need a controller. Nationality is not an issue, good level of English is. Our controller needs to have budgeting and transactional experience. Has to be VERY hands on, a spread sheet wiz. Job is in sunny Madrid. Please send cvs to Antonio Fuentes.

Today we were covered by Business Week.

We signed with 2 more large telcos in Europe but we can´t yet announce who they are.

Today we started negotiating with our first mobile operator. Making a deal with them would be a breakthrough as many analysts argued that we could make deals with fixed operators but that mobile operators will hate us. Some however seem to be realizing that at the pace we are growing we can become a great way for them to alleviate the heaviest mobile traffic, videos, games and songs in particular which 3G networks are poorly equipped for. Also for indoor coverage.

By now we have had meetings and conversations will most American telcos and cable operators.

I will be in the States again from tomorrow until the following Wed evening.

Fon is a company, but Fon is also a movement. Fon has a for profit part, the bills and the aliens, and a free environment, the one for the linuses. And I am happy to see that there are so many people who want to see wifi everywhere and free for linuses become a reality. That´s why I am so appreciative of efforts such as Fonternet which I discovered today.

Eric, Robert, Diego and I spent the day in Milano today. It was the first day in which Fon employees went to Italy but it was amazing to see that we already have over 800 foneros in Italy and Telecom Italia only has around 1000 of their hotspots and we had NEVER been to Italy as a company (I lived in Italy when I was in college and speak Italian).

In Milano we met great people who showed tremendous interest in Fon. Basically we spent all day in a hotel room greeting Italian Foneros and people who we wanted to contact. On the unusual side we learned that Italy is one of the only countries in the world in which a significant portion of the DSL customers pay by the hour. I personally wanted to thank Stefano Vitta who has been helping us as a volunteer in Italy since we started. ¡Grazie Stefano!

We are in the cover of Red Herring this week!

Just got la foto. Elisa rocks. La más guapa.

Expansión (the leading business newspaper in Spain), published an online article today (for its subscribers) where they pit me against Luis Lada, of Telefónica Moviles, arguing that he is leading an alliance against FON. Knowing Luis Lada a bit, I really doubt that the Telefónica press machinery is behind this article, bearing in mind that pitting FON against giants like Telefónica, flanked by Telecom Italia and Portugal Telecom, gives FON a lot of relevance. This being said, I am honoured by the fact that these three giants have imitated our formula that lets your roam for free if you pay for internet at home.

Indeed, this is a good formula, although in their case, they only connect you to the public hotspots of their network, which are few. For me the key is that in the future, we all give roaming so that there is effectively everywhere and we can all enjoy the internet wherever we are, whenever we want without having to pay a cent more than what we pay at home. This will increase the value of all the offers on the internet and will help enormously to one day have a mobile broadband internet which is essential for building an information society.

At FON, we have probably become in these last couple of hours, the leader in hotspots in Spain although, I admit that we might have more foneros than they have hotspots but their hotspots are more strategically located and for this reason, it is in everyone’s interest to collaborate. They have quality, we have coverage.

I’ve known Luis Lada since the Jazztel days. He’s a great manager of big companies. He will most certainly be César Alierta’s successor. For now, I only met César once to talk about FON and he was very friendly. I think there is a lot of mutual respect and admiration; I think he admires the way I can build a company from an idea and I admire how Telefónica outranked other telcos under his leadership. At our respective levels, we both sign deals outside of Spain – for example O2 in his case and Google and Skype in my case. But what’s interesting is that we’re both based in Madrid.

All this to say, I don’t think Luis Lada or Telefónica isagainst FON, but rather, I see great opportunities ahead to work together and do roaming deals. The most important for FON is that what we do creates a larger and wider network with more WiFi access points equipped with software that can be integrated into a roaming platform. I have just returned from the US where I was studying 802.11n and MIMO. If FON is viable the way it is now, with the 802.11n that has a signal range of 300 meters and which will soon become “fonable”, the WiFi nation will become a reality.

Last Friday I gave a talk at the Berkman Institute at Harvard. David Weinberger who works at the Institute and is also an advisor to Fon attended the presentation. David made a very good summary of what I and other people said. Personally I am amazed at people who can type in real time. David is not only a great writer and blogger but now I see that he is a great reporter as well. Thank you!

You can also watch videos of the talk at Andy Carvin´s blog.