It is interesting to see that the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which killed from 3% to 5% of the population of Berlin, Paris, New York started slowly in the Spring and Summer and then went wild in the Fall killing most of its victims then. Flu spreads by proximity and physical contact. In the Fall schools start, people go indoors, and the chances of contact greatly increase. But what´s different now is not the medicine itself that has advanced very little against viruses but that we have the Internet. If the current Flu epidemic killed over say 300 people in Spain I would probably tell people at Fon to work at home over the Internet. I would not ask people to risk their lives to work at Fon. I would not send my children to school either and would ask them to study over the Internet. I would establish a plan to limit contact with the outside world, would stop traveling and would wait. I see Skype type products usage exploding if the Pandemic happens. I just hope it goes away though. News from Mexico were encouraging this weekend.

The majority of deaths came in the Fall

graph via www.investorconundrum.com.

Yesterday BT, who is a fixed and mobile operator who owns its fixed network and resells GSM/3G services made an announcement that explains why it makes sense for BT, SFR, Zon and many other operators to team up with Fon. As the review that I quote says:

£15.65pm is all it now takes to secure an 8Mbit home connection plus a 7.2Mbit HSDPA capable dongle with 1GB monthly data allowance. BT claims the combo provides savings of more than £125 per year compared to current alternatives from the likes of Vodafone and Orange and from my calculations (let me know if you find out differently) that seems about right.

Now how is it that BT can offer such an amazing deal in which for only around $20 per month it can offer both ADSL and HSDPA? The answer is thanks to the amazing WiFi network that it built together with Fon that is known as BT Fon. HSDPA is good but it has two drawbacks, it is slower than WiFi and it comes with throughput limitations. So BT has developed a great technology whereby its USB dongles look for WiFi first and then HSDPA. And because together with us now BT has hundreds of thousands of WiFi points chances are that WiFi will be mostly available except situations in which the customer is in a car or somewhere away from densely populated areas. BT has made this a part of its margin calculations and it can therefore offers that are so much cheaper than Vodafone and Orange.

I found Benjamin Button, the film, obnoxiously boring. But I loved the short story by F Scott Fitzgerald that the movie is (not) based on. I read it today on my new Kindle, a device that is making me read again. Thank you Jeff Bezos. I used to read a lot but since the ’90s the combination of active parenting and the Internet slowed my book reading to a crawl. Yet today, I was taking Friday afternoon off in Menorca, and had the new Kindle at hand. Being a fan of free content I went to ManyBooks.net and found The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, the story as one of the most downloaded books. I went on to download the story because even though I had been terribly disappointed by the movie, I could not believe that the author of The Great Gatsby, had written a character that was as dull as the one portrayed by Brad Pitt. And I was right. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which I encourage you to download here is funny, original, and if it had been expanded into a well scripted movie it would have had all the elements of excitement that the soporific movie directed by David Fincher does not have. What surprised me the most is how is it that a movie that has nothing, and I mean nothing to do with the story plot, can still be said to be that story turned into a film. Think of the many books you read turned into movies and after you read the story you will see how fundamental the differences in the plot between the two are. In any case I am sorry if you are one of the many who loved the movie. I guess we just don´t need to agree.

As you can see in these 62 different articles gathered by Google News, BT, Fon´s exclusive partner in the UK, won access to all Starbucks locations (more than 650 Starbucks coffeehouses in the UK and Ireland). Unfortunately this does not mean free access to all foneros around the world for wifi at Starbucks UK, but it does mean free access for Foneros who are also BT Broadband customers. And for the rest, we are working on a lower Fonero discount. We will keep you informed. We also wanted UK foneros to know that we are trying to see how we can legally sell the Fonera 2.0 in the UK.