Yesterday I spent a few hours with Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the MIT Media Lab. I found the Media Lab fascinating as it blends students, professors and industry executives all working in one building. As most people know the most important project going on right now at the Media Lab is the One Laptop Per Child project and I was lucky to be there when the OLPC team chose the designer for the laptop. Here are some pictures I took.

While you cannot see it the famous power generating crank is still there.

My conversations with Nicholas Negroponte and his colleagues at Media Lab centered around two very different topics. One was the work that the foundation I started in Argentina Educ.ar is doing to advise the Argentine government on the possible purchase of a million of these laptops. The other one, totally unrelated is to see if the open source software that this laptops will use to mesh called Roofnet can be made compatible with the open source software we use at Fon. While at MIT I also met with Sanjit Zubin Biswas, a brilliant young hacker and student at MIT and we are going to give him our code and programmer support so we can make Roofnet work with Fon as well. Currently we use versions of Openwrt and DD-WRT At Fon we are very interested not only in our main proposition which is share wifi at home, roam the wifi world for free but also in the fact that neighbors can mesh. This meshing is good cause nowadays Wifi speeds are higher than DSL speeds, because of privacy concerns (traffic does not go through the internet) because of helping ISPs who get less traffic on their network, and lastly because meshing can result in a download and upload accelerator when neighbors pull their connections. All these respecting Fon´s rules of course that to be a fonero you must be a paying customer of an ISP and contribute bandwidth as well as obtaining it.

Today I met with Ron Sege CEO of Tropos Networks. We were both at the Googleplex for different reasons so we chose to meet there. It was a lunch meeting at 1pm. It was one of these awkward days in which I try to pack a lot of meetings to be able to fly back to be with the family in Spain so I actually had two lunches, one with Megan Smith from Google at noon and another one with Ron at one. At Google however this is not a problem because they have the best corporate food I have ever tasted. But let´s focus on the second lunch, the one with Ron. Ron is a very able and experienced CEO whose objective is to build meshed wifi networks. Tropos under his leadership is doing a great job. One of their clients is Google in Mountain View. Our meeting however did not center around Google but around municipal wifi. Fon has been invited to make proposals to some major cities around the world. Cities like our offer because it does not turn them into telecom operators, because telecom operators make more and not less money with Fon, because our solution relies on citizen participation and because our solution is practically free to the cities. Just promote that citizens buy routers and place them by their windows, offer free coverage to those who donate and very affordable coverage ($2 per day) for those who visit the city or don´t donate. Cities then only buy routers at 25 dollars each to install in their spaces namely schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. One problem however with the Fon solution for the city is that it cannot easily provide street coverage in very open areas. Another one is that it provides random coverage that is more indoor than outdoor. Tropos solves this for Fon. At the same time Fon solves indoor and ubiquitous coverage for Tropos so it looks that the two companies should find a way to collaborate. The first thing we will do is to see how compatible our software is with theirs. And then maybe we will make some joint presentations. To me it´s clear that nobody has all the solutions to the coverage problem and that Fon must connect and collaborate with all the key players. I also wanted to thank Christopher Sacca at Google for introducing us. Chris like me keeps a blog of his work and ideas.

Sequoia invested in Fon. This morning we had our first working session with Mike Moritz. It was my first time seeing Mike Moritz at work. I was impressed. Now what defines a top VC firm and a top VC? Two key criteria, adoption and nurturing. Probably half of Sequoia´s time is spent selecting firms to invest in but the other half, equally as important, is spent nurturing these firms. In the case of Fon for example Mike offered that Fon USA be incubated at their offices. Indeed we went on a tour of Sequoia´s offices in Sand Hill Road and Sequoia is building a whole section to incubate up to 5 companies with less than 6 employees at the same time. One office was offered to Fon. Personally I thought this offer reflected a great difference between Sequoia and other VCs I had worked with in the past at the three ISPs that I founded Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com. If you are en entrepreneur selecting a VC a key question to ask the VC is how much time their firm spends selecting companies vs nurturing companies. I don´t know if you will get a straight answer but in the case of Sequoia I think their success is based on evenly splitting the tasks. Mike Moritz and Mark Kvamme his partner had a great deal of positive recommendations and contacts for us. Unfortunately I can´t disclose the exact nature but I can say that some of these were great ideas on key industry people to partner with. One related to a whole new class of ISPs who were not on our radar screen and thanks to their help we will now contact.

For the last few months our USA operations at Fon have been managed by me personally in a role akin to that of a CEO and by Ejovi Nuwere in a role akin to a COO (we just call ourselves lead foneros so I am translating titles). But yesterday I interviewed four candidates to replace myself in the role of US CEO. To team up with Ejovi. It is getting very hard for me to come to America so frequently and now that USA is our first country in number of foneros, we need to focus a great deal on making this country a huge success. I have built 7 companies over 20 years, some in the States (NYC), most in Europe. Until recently however, I had never interviewed in the West Coast of the United States. My impression? I am just amazed at the level of the candidates here. No wonder that the West Coast rules the world on the internet. As an entrepreneur I felt like a kid in a candy shop. What makes this part of the world unique is that it just attracts the best people, period, but this is partly because it educates them (Stanford being a great source of educated talent). Mostly it is because the best people in the technology world immigrate here. It´s not that there aren´t amazing people in other countries. Is that the occasional top candidate in other countries is like the average top candidate here. Now please don´t send me the “DAH” comments. You knew about this, I did not. Now I do.

Yesterday we signed our third large contract with an ISP. So far we have only disclosed one Glocalnet, the second largest ISP in Sweden. The other two we will be able to disclose when we are ready to launch in around 90 days. It´s remarkable how similar all our meetings with the ISPs are. First they mistrust us. They think Fon is about sharing connections, something they clearly dislike as it reduces their potential customer base. Indeed in many cases it is difficult to get the first meetings and if it weren´t for some of our board members and partners we would probably not even get a chance. But when we have our foot in the door and we explain exactly how Fon increases ARPU and reduces churn, ISPs do a 180 on us. The key here is our rules. First on prices. Fon will charge aliens (paying customers who pay because they have not donated wifi) $2 in the States and 2 euros in Europe. This rate is a bargain for 24 hours. With this rate we become the “easy jet” of wifi. But interestingly this rate is not low enough to get a neighbor to want to connect through another neighbor. In France for example you get good monthly broadband connections for 22 euros per month. So at 2 euros per day it just does not pay to be an alien. People in this case prefer to become foneros, sign up at home, pay their local ISPs and join Fon for free and get free global roaming. The Fon rate is good for roaming, not for home use and in this way we protect the ISPs. Still our offer to ISPs who commit to make all their new connections fon ready (customer chooses activation or not of course) is that we give ISPs half of that money in case of a Linus fonero and half of what we get after paying half to a Bill fonero (or 50c) in case of a Bill fonero. Bottom line is that ISPs realize that they are seating on a a lot of unexpected revenues. That with fon they become part builders of a global wireless network that increases the ARPU per connection and increases customer loyalty as after Fon they pay at home and get bandwidth anywhere in the world. And all this comes at no cost to the ISP and we let them use our brand in their promotions. This is how we are converting ISPs and getting new foneros at the same time. Foneros also like to know that they only share with those who share with them. By the way our year end target was 25,000 registered foneros but today we will hit 20,000. Also United States went from being one of the last countries last month to being first in number of registered foneros. We started in Spain but now USA leads which is normal just because of the incredible amount of broabdband connections there are in this country.

If you had reserved your router at Fon now is your time to reenter our web site and buy it. We got the routers and we are delivering them both in Europe and in the States.

I was interviewed by Tim Pritlove from Chaos Radio. Since I launched FON, I have been giving many interviews. And in this time, Tim conducted the interview so well, that I felt thankful. His questions permitted create the perfect atmosphere for me to explain FON into great and precise detail.

He first asked “What’s FON”. We then chatted about linus, Linksys firmware, Brainslayer, Ejovi our USA Fonero Leader, Wimax, WiFi gadgets, ISPs, the German market, Google and Skype, WiFi city projects… I think both of us contributed to make this podcast valuable for people to really understand and get to know FON.

If you already know Chaos Radio, you may also be familiar with Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It’s a global community with about 1.500 members from eleven German cities and many other countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Netherlands.

They fight against any form of censorship, promote freedom of information and communication. As stated on their website, CCC considers itself a communication platform for Hackers and for those who want to become Hackers. Their philosophy is to study the social and individual impact of Technologies. But overall, the Hackers Ethics posted on their site is fascinating to read. Knowing Tim and thinking about other Chaos team members, I look at their ethics as an Honour Code.

Hacker Ethics promotes making public data available while protecting private data, as well as decentralizing information. But the most “romantic” ethic in the Hacker Ethics is that one can create art and beauty on a computer, thus changing one’s life for better.

Last Tuesday, we did three cities in one day: Munich, Dresden and Berlin. In Munich, we had meetings with Hubert Burda and his team. The professionalism of Burda is unbelievable. We arrived with Christiane where we met a group of 12 editors of magazines and websites. Burda is a type of Prisa but without Sogecable. Hubert Burda himself is a type of Jesús Polana, they’re about the same age, about the same height and both are very successful and very intuitive. One major difference though is that Burda has bet on the internet while Polanco has bet on digital TV. There are great possibilities between Burda and FON but I cannot yet talk about what we’re planning together. When I see the success we have outside of Spain, I wonder why is it that in Spain we don’t meet with Prisa, for example. Nor do we meet with Telefónica. In Germany, we’ve already met with T-Online and they are interested in FON. Many ISPs are realising that converting their clients into hotspots and charging more by doing so is a way to increase both revenue per customer and customer retention.

Then came my meeting with Nicholas Negroponte at the airport in Munich. He was coming in from Switzerland to meet with me and we then flew to Dresden on my plane. I was heading there to meet Brainslayer and Negroponte wanted to present me his $100 laptop because the argentine government is considering buying 1,000,000 of these computers and Educ.ar is in the descision-making process. I really enjoyed listening to Negroponte. He belongs to that small world of big people, big in every sense of the term. He’s a really nice guy, intelligent, concerned and fascinating. Iurgi of FON was with us on the plane, Christiane too and all three of us listened to his presentation very attentively and we then talked a lot about the characteristics of the laptop and the makers of its components. $100 is risky, but for $150 it might be worth it.

Upon arriving in Dresden, we met up with Brainslayer. What a team! Christiane, Brainslayer, Negroponte, Iurgi and myself. Brainslayer showed us around his company and showed us his software. As you know, at FON we have two versions of our open-source software: our openwrt version and our dd-wrt (Brainslayer) version. Negroponte was amazed with all the functionalities of the dd-wrt. It’s truly amazing the things that you can do with a router using this software. You can choose how much bandwidth you want to share, you can block someone from abusing your connection with excessive traffic (eg. using bit torrent for example) etc… You basically can configure it to do ANYTHING you want.

At the end of our meeting, Negroponte left for London and we went to Berlin where we had dinner with a group of foneros. We already have 500 registered foneros in Germany. For me, the country remains the big mystery in Europe. I find it amazing the quality of life here considering the last 10 years have been a real economic disaster for Germany. Apartments and restaurants are cheaper in Berlin than in Madrid. It’s much cheaper because of the economic crisis. There a loads of restaurants but very few clients. And add to that the very high unemployment rate. It’s this kind of phenomena that can be explained in a thousand ways, but none of them matches completely.