I had the idea of FON in late 2005 in Paris, France. I was desperately looking for WiFi. While I found a lot of WiFi signals, I could not access a single one of them. They were all locked. It was then that the key concept of Fon dawned on me “share a little extra WiFi at home and roam the world for free connecting to other people´s routers”. For a while the Fon idea seemed to be utopic. Now thanks to Fon itself and now to progressive carriers such as Free of France it´s becoming a global reality.

This week, the French ISP Free launched a community WiFi service similar to ours at FON. Owners of a Freebox v5 who share with FreeWiFi will be able to surf off the WiFi router of other Free customers. As with FON, Free customers must share to get access to the FreeWiFi signal, which is a second SSID broadcasted by their Freebox.

Still there is a big difference between the new community launched by French ISP Free and Fon and that is that it is a closed community available only to Free customers and only in France as Free only operates in France. Moreover since this community has no aliens neither Free nor its customers can make money offering their WiFi to non donors as is the case with Fon.

FON grows either by selling its own Fonera and by partnering with Telcos around the world such as British Telecom, SFR Neuf (Free´s competitor) and others. But even though Free is so far not a member of the Fon community itself and some people have asked me if we did not feel threatened by Free acting alone we congratulate Free for the move as it validates Fon´s concept. While it may not be apparent to journalist who cover the Internet and Telecoms sharing a la Fon is a way that operators have to reduce churn, provide more with no additional cost and differentiate themselves from carriers that only offer you internet at home when you pay at home.

We very much apologized for the delays in delivering the Fonera 2.0. We miscalculated demand and ran out of the first order. Good news is that we just received our new cargo and the Fonera is now again available in Continental Europe and Japan. We are sorry that it is still not available in the UK and USA. You can order yours here. Or here. And the Fonera is an open source project. You can follow all the new developments in the blog of the Fonosfera.

I wrote this memo to Fon employees. I edited a few parts that I can´t publish yet and I share it in my blog.

Fonera is now a Computer in a Network:

The Fonera now shows up as a COMPUTER in a PC or Mac. So while you cannot send files to the fonera via wifi using Firefox yet, you CAN send foneras via WiFi by copy and pasting files accessing the hard drive of the Fonera. Soon the Fonera will be able to receive files via WiFi and if you send them to a folder called Youtube it will automatically cue them and send them to Youtube. This is a dream functionality, a real buffer, you have files, you send them via WiFi and they are sent later by the Fonera. No need to use pen drives and actually walk to the Fonera.

Javi is working on a Fontastic Firefox Plug In:

Today I saw the demo of a GREAT Firefox plug in that allows you to choose ANY link on the net, bittorrent, megaupload, rapidshare and http (probably soon ftp) and when you click on it you get a choice to download to your computer or download to the Fonera. It is an intelligent plug in to the point that if you cut and paste a lot of text that is not instructions to download stuff it will decipher the instructions in the long text and do all sorts of different things without you telling it. So it will go to megaupload when it detects a megaupload link, to a direct download when it detects a direct download, to rapidshare, to bittorrent. It is very SMART as it ignores the garbage part of the text. This makes it SO MUCH EASIER than going through the dashboard! Also it has a status bar that tells you what the Fonera is doing while its doing it.

Marketing Inconsistency in the Fonera:

I realized that we have a marketing inconsistency at Fon. In our boxes called our router LA FONERA but the router calls itself FONSPOT. All involved please change this. Fonera has to say FONera not FONspot. Or change the Fon logo to read Fonera but we can´t call it Fonspot anymore. Indeed we should not use the world Fonspot anymore at Fon. Products with two names confuse the hell out of search engines like Google and new search engines like Facebook or Twitter. We don´t have any money to advertise ourselves. We can´t confuse people calling the Fonera a Fonspot. Also let´s drop La Fonera and make it simply Fonera.

Direct Downloads must be Explained:

The Fonera can download ANY FILE on the internet. Not just bittorrent, megaupload and rapidshare. I did not know this and many of you may not know it either. For example if you put below link in the download manager the fonera will get you the latest version of Ubuntu. Pls test this functionality however because it may not work well it is still in beta mode.

http://ubuntu.cs.utah.edu/releases/jaunty/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso

Now this is HUGE. Because there are a LOT of direct downloads on the Internet. There is a lot of content, software for example, that people want you to have and they give you download links. The fonera works very well for all uploads and all downloads except torrents which go slowly and only one at a time. But what works about the Fonera is a lot, let´s communicate it well while we improve the Bittorrent functionality. If you look carefully this IS explained in the Download Manager in the fonera. But you have to be pretty geeky to realize that http means that you can download any direct link over the internet. Marketing should find a better way to communicate this feature and Development should explain this in the firmware as well as it now explains for example how to send files to Youtube.

Once I asked a gay friend of mine why was it that gay men had so much sex. He replied….because there is nobody to say no. I remembered this today when trying to understand why Twitter is growing much more than Facebook per dollar invested. And it became clear it´s also because in Twitter there is nobody to say no. You twit, somebody follows you, you don´t need to accept them. Twitter has no formal acceptance process. In Facebook instead there is a pretty complicated acceptance process, and that leads to less connections, to more thinking, more hesitation. Less sex. Twitter is less inhibited, you speak to the world, you don´t care if what you say can be heard by all, the more the merrier, you twit. Facebook is more about balanced relationships, hence less sex. Which for members of course, it´s a good thing. But not for a growing business. My guess is that Facebook will continue to strip down the acceptance process or create a default category of followers which then whose status can then be elevated to friends when you follow them back or in some rare cases block them. It´s interesting that Twitter considers rejection rare and makes you feel awkward when you say no to a follower.

Over the last couple of years I have been asked a question that I had no answer for: what is the successor of the Web 2.0? What comes after user generated content or P2P? Well I think that the next web is the Visual Web. And I mean visual as opposed to text based web. No, I am not saying that text is dead but I do believe that text as the main driver of the Internet is becoming less and less important. And all other audiovisual means of communication are becoming more important. And that is why I call this new web the Visual Web.

In terms of Telco traffic and ISP the trend towards visual is felt in the enormous traffic increase of TV, high quality pictures, high def video, movies of ever increasing quality, P2P video communications like video calls on Skype, music, and gaming including the new trend to play web served games. Traffic. If the textual web was 90% of the web a few years ago now it´s more like 10%. Even this blog, or the more active version of this blog which is in Spanish, has become more and more a video blog, a photo blog, an image blog. And even text itself is increasingly populated with emoticons, a new type of “letters” that other than the smiley do not exist outside of the web. Text on the web is rarely seen without a visual effect. So much so that when I read books now I find them sorely lacking in visuals, I suffer over long textual descriptions of events or images that would be so much better represented via graphics or art. But this is much easier to do online.

Today I was in Barcelona, going from meeting to meeting. And totally by chance I saw the Gas Natural Building. I had to stop. I took these pictures.

Later on, at home, doing research I found out that one of the architects. Benedetta Tagliabue was a friend of mine from the 80s in NYC. I was pleasantly surprised. It is interesting that before anyone of us did well in life, we all new each other. And I don´t mean Benedetta alone. There are many people who I know from when I was at school in NYC in the 80s who have done extremely well in life. This is something that never seizes to surprise me. But in any case there aren´t many who have done such beautiful work. This is their web site I recommend you spend some time looking at it.

Barcelona is one of the best cities in the world. But unemployment is also one of the highest of the cities of Europe. Attending SIME in Barcelona I had the following idea. In the past tax free areas were created at airports, or in countries that wanted to have tax free zones for manufacturing. Barcelona still has a Zona Franca. But in the service economy that we live in now there are new impediments to entrepreneurship. Especially in Spain where entrepreneurs are always personally liable for their ventures, where it is hard to create a new business, where the government is always on your back. So I propose that Barcelona starts a Zona Franca de Emprendedores. Now how could an Entrepreneurship Zone work? Well it would be a closed area in which rules are different. For example social charges are not 50% over salaries as they are in some cases but they are say 10%, and so are taxes that employees pay, but also social benefits are low, no unemployment insurance for example cause as we know to find the winning start up an economy has to accept many start up failures. Barcelona already has @22, the entrepreneurship district. It just needs to change the working rules for those who work there. No income tax, no unemployment insurance.

Last night, at Google Zeitgeist, Google Called Home. Or at least my original home, South America. Samba, Capoeira, Tango, it was a fantastic party.

Here´s the video

And here are some pictures

And these are Loic Lemeur pictures, as you can see we were hanging out together. My pictures are taken with a Nikon D90 with an 85mm 1.4 lens. His pictures some of which I took myself are taken with a Canon Mark II D5, 85mm 1.2. I think I am soon trading my $2000 solution for his heavier, more expensive ($5000) but undeniably better camera.