I keep getting asked where the Fonero event is on Tuesday morning. It is at Cookie’s Cream Restaurant, Unter den Linden / Friedrichsstrasse (next to KPM) at 1030. At this event we will introduce the Fonera 2.0 which is a new Fon social WLAN or WiFi router that does many more things than allowing you to share a little signal at home and roam the world for free.

The new Fonera 2.0 is the open source router that allows you to manage your relationship with the Web 2.0. Examples? You can stick a USB pen drive full of pictures and have the fonera directly send the pictures to Flickr while you take your laptop along with you somewhere else. Same with videos, torrents, etc. More tomorrow.

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Some time ago at Fon we decided to improve on TinyURL and came up with Fon.gs or Fon Get Simple as we call it. The idea was that as opposed to TinyURL at Fon.gs you could both shorten and choose the name of your domain. Plus Fon.gs is already consideraby shorter than tinyurl.com. But of course what we wanted to do is to find an inexpensive way of having our company name, Fon circulate on the internet. I am glad to see that our “Toovertorial” worked and already over 2 million fon.gs have been served. Other Toolvertorials from Fon include Gspace the free cloud storage tool which is used by half a million people around the world. And Twitxr, the twitter with geolocation and picture upload to Facebook and Flickr that is used by around 70K people per month. Less successful ones such as Unfolding News (the search engine for news as they unfold real time) which allows you follow a certain topic minute by minutes as news are written about it and Gmail uploader, a tool that allows you to load old Outlook emails into Gmail (Gmail is great for search but when you open an account you wish it had your emails). Now of all these tools the most successful one has been the Fonspots software that allows your Linux or Mac connected to 3G to turn into a Fonspot. This tool is the most relevant to our business at Fon. My advise to other start ups is that in difficult times when advertising and even PR is outside of your budget try having your coders spend a few hours developing “toolvertorials” people will remember you and like you more when they use them.

Polls have shown that the majority of Iraqis want US forces out of their country. Bush, in his last months of his horrendous presidency should at least make life easier for his successor and call for a referendum in Iraq with a simple question. Should US stay or go. And most likely Iraqis will say go. And Bush will say what a wonderful democracy we now have in Iraq, they voted for us to go. And USA will save American lives and $10bn per month and focus in Afghanistan and the Taliban which should have been the only occupation to begin with and where Al Qaeda was.

Sequoia is a small investor in Fon. Sequoia is probably the most famous VC firm in the world. But Sequoia, as you can see from this presentation is confused and in a state of panic because first they made all these investments some very recently, and now they are telling their own companies to Get Real or Go Home. Plus they are coming very late in the “we warned you” advisory role. Allen and Co is another investor in Fon and Allen and Co advised us that markets were drying up for start up fund a year before Sequoia. At Fon we listened to Allen and Co closely and made the necessary adjustments. These painful cost reductions were done at Fon half a year before the other Sequoia companies who are only getting their warnings now, in the midst of the hurricane. So we are ahead of the game thanks to Allen and Co. We now find ourselves losing around 300K euros per month still significant but down from 1.2 million euros a year ago. With revenues and margins growing we are going towards profitability in 09. September was our best month in terms of revenues, margins and cash burn. Sequoia now only owns around 1% of Fon but if I had Sequoia as my lead investor I would wonder why is it that it took them so long to warn their companies. Maybe because Allen and Co is in NYC they seat at the center of the current financial hurricane and were able to warn us so much earlier but my advise to Sequoia would be to stop panicking and take advantage of the crisis to make more opportunistic investments.

Here´s the whole show.

When I was in college Prince used to sing “we are going to party like it´s 1999“. That´s what the markets are singing now. The problem is that 1999 was almost a decade ago. But the value of stocks now is the value of stocks in 1999. If you had kept a 1999 newspaper it would do now. The world however has grown around 40% since then. World GDP that is. So what are the markets saying? That we are going to shrink to the levels of 1999? I don´t think so.

I think we will have a bad recession, negative growth, a rise in unemployment. But I don´t think we are going back to 1999. That´s why I started buying stocks last week. And I am down 21% on around 20% of my portfolio, the rest is still in cash. What did I buy? Not C and BAC, I sold banks and those account for most of my loss now. I was shocked to see that Citigroup and Bank of America shares collapsed after the bailout. Banks may turn around but buying them is for government watchers. They are the epicenter of this hurricane and so subject to the whim of some ex GS employees that traditional business logic does not apply to them. Why did Lehman go under and Bear Stearns was helped? I think what Paulson is doing has no logic and I was wrong in thinking that I could understand him or the markets as they relate to government intervention. Instead last week I bought utilities, huge pharmaceutical companies like Merck or Lilly, and Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and some other very large tech stocks. And if this week they go down another 10%, I will buy more. My rule now is that for every 10% stocks go down I put another 10% of my portfolio in top stocks. And my objective is to keep those stocks for my 4 children. Looking back a month ago when I started buying some stocks of course I wish that I had resisted my instinct for hunting for bargains and waited. I would be 21% better off today. Still I am sure that we are now or in the next months in the buying opportunity of their generation. And then we can party, buying in 2008 at prices of 1999.

I just found an article in the New York Times that makes the same point I make but it´s much more elaborate and better.

Lunch with BankersBankers are so scared. I have never seen anything like this. Of course everyone else is scared as well. In this video I talk about my last meetings with different bankers.

Today we are announcing the launch of the first Fonera 2.0 Beta DEVELOPERS ONLY Edition in our French, German and Spanish online shops. It is a limited edition of 1K units at a reduced special price
of Euros 39.95 (VAT included). This first Edition of Foneras 2.0 is intended for Developers to be able to start playing around with and programming their own applications for other Foneros out there. It comes with a firmware that has the Basic USB functions implemented so Developers can use that to create attractive apps with multiple USB devices attached to it.

THE DEVICE
Fonera 2.0 Beta DEVELOPERS ONLY Edition works just like a Fonera+ in terms of the WiFi and FON Community Feature and shares the same housing as Fonera+ with an extra LED (USB). The big difference is the USB 2.0 Port that allows several USB devices to be plugged into the router. Devices
like USB Hard Disks, USB Printers, USB Scanners, USB Webcams and many others that will slowly be added to the USB Supported Devices list for Fonera 2.0. New USB 2.0 devices perform best on this unit but some legacy USB 1.1 may not work well. We suggest you always use a USB 2.0 HUB so you can plug in several devices in order to get the best performance and connectivity with Fonera 2.0 Beta.

I know that the markets suck right now and everyone is feeling depressed so here it is, la Fonera+ that allows you to hack your dreams away for only 39.95 euros (sorry for that 95 cent thing) let´s say 40 euros, still a good price. And if you come up with a cool app for the Fonera 2.0 write to me and I will personally send you a refund for the Fonera. And just in case you are coming to the Facebook Garage in Madrid with Mark Zuckerberg that Fon is hosting next Monday we will be showcasing it there as well.

THE APPLICATIONS
Fonera 2.0 Beta latest firmware comes with the following USB Beta Applications:
1. File Sharing: using the Fonera 2.0 Beta GUI
2. Printer Server: for USB printers to be shared as a Network Printer
3. Scanner Server: for USB Scanners also to be shared
4. USB Webcam: you can see your USB Webcam from any computer connected wired or wirelessly to the Fonera 2.0 Beta (only some chipsets supported)
5. Plug In Interface: this is were new apps will be able to be loaded just with one click

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