2006 20
Wengo, Vodafone and Orange
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Yesterday I met with David Bitton, the founder of Wengo. Wengo is a new company, very similar to Skype but in open source and not p2p. Skype is of course much much larger and still growing at amazing speed but Wengo while three months old, is getting its own group of fans within the opensource community around the world. They are also doing some remarkable software developments. At one point in the meeting David took out this Qtek phone with a Wengo client. I was impressed. It is a beautiful phone and the fact that operates both over wifi and gprs makes it very useful. It is a phone that is crying out “please give me FON: wifi everywhere”. It is the first good looking wifi phone I ever saw.
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2006 20
Brainslayer Rocks
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
In the world of firmware one figure truly stands out and that is Brainslayer, the famous German hacker. I came accross Brainslayer enquiring about who the best firmware writers in the world were and when I found out that his software was in use by around 100,000 access points I was super impressed. I contacted Brainslayer, Sebastian Gostchall over Skype and he responded. Two days later he was collaborating with FON in Madrid. We are very lucky to have him.
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2006 18
Netvibes and RSS feeds
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I have been an avid user of Netvibes since Tariq Krim, its founder showed it to me in Paris a month ago. Using Netvibes I came accross the whole culture of RSS feeds and OPML files. Basically an RSS feed is distilled content from a web site as seen in another website, it´s pure text content without the graphics. An OPML file is a collection of RSS feeds. Thus if you and I exchange OPML files you will get my collection of RSS feeds and I will get yours. I already did this with Lance Knobel for example and through him I learned about many interesting new interesting feeds. Looking at this new environment two opportunities come to mind. The first one is adding graphics to RSS feeds. Graphics say a lot about a site, when I am deprived of graphics I am deprived of information. The second idea is to start an OPML exchange where people on the net exchange OPML files basically revealing their reading preferences to each other.
2006 15
How is FON organized and managed?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
FON is being organized as follows. The central headquarters are located in Alcobendas. Alcobendas is a town close to Madrid that is developing so quickly that there’s no building within a km of ours that is older than 10 years. Fon is so far only funded by myself and as of today is 4 months old.
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2006 15
Do Predators Sleep Better?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I was watching a cat sleeping and remembered that most felines seem to sleep very well. Is this because they are predators? Do predators sleep better? What a life! Mostly sleep until you… kill.
2006 15
Forcing People to Vote
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Is Argentina much more subject to populist presidents than Chile because in Argentina it is a illegal not to vote while in Chile voting is a choice? Are voters who are forced to vote as bad making community oriented choices as the kids who were “not aborted” that Freakonomics talks about?
2006 15
NYC Cockroaches
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I lived for 18 years in New York City, I started in the East Village as a student at NYU, went on to W118th St as a grad at Columbia and ended up at 5 story elevator townhouse, 47 E63rd St as a very successful entrepreneur. Still those cockroaches were always there utterly disregarding my changes in Manhattan social standing. Why is it that wherever I lived there were tons of cockroaches? Why is it that since I moved to Europe cockroaches are not a problem anymore? Don´t they travel?
2006 15
Vatican: The Most Succesful Immigrant Country
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Considering that the Vatican inhabitants mostly can´t have children… Does that make the country the most successful immigrant state in the world? Can you have a country in which its president is always born someplace else?
2006 14
German Foneros
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
I will be in Munich arriving the evening of January 23rd and speaking at Digital Life. Hope to see you there!
2006 14
Om Malik, Google and FON
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Om Malik covers FON today where he discloses that we have been having meetings at Google. This he obtains from the New Google Blog who picked it up from the blog of Ejovi, our lead American fonero. Yes, it is the case that we have been meeting with our friends at Google. Why? Google and FON share one passion and that is for the internet to truly be everywhere, on many devices as possible and at great speeds and that is something that so far only WiFi accomplishes. What did we do at Google? We basically explained to different managers how Fon works and how the movement is spreading. FON is a global movement started in Spain and supported by a software download that allows people who already have broadband over WiFi to contribute excess bandwidth at home (foneros) and obtain bandwidth from other foneros anywhere in the world. So far FON has grown very well by word of mouth but who knows, we may have to buy some google ads at some point. BTW, the concerns that some express at Om´s blog are reasonable and we are addressing them. We will have answers to some of these issues at eTel on January 25th in San Francisco where I will be introducing FON in America.