The Bush administration ran a disastrous fiscal policy and moved the country from budget surplus to budget deficit. Currently over 80% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. At the same time the Fed conducted a very poor oversight of banks and some went or are about to go under. But the paradox here is that the government is a huge borrower in the US economy and as crazy as it sounds for the government things are better now as interest rates are collapsing as everyone rushes to the safety of their bonds. So as opposed to corporations the more you mismanage government the cheapest it is to borrow. Something is not right.

Please give me the answer that you think is the most important reason, the main reason for foneros to disconnect a fonera.

Francisco Suvires, a 19 years old Spanish student with a passion for electronics, has just won the first prize at the MadridBot 2008 competition with its project Fonerabot.

Yes, as you can tell from the picture, it’s an incredible wheel-equipped exploration robot built out of a Fonera! This little moving Fonera can obviously be controlled via WiFi and, while exploring around, it can also get and transmit information like the room’s temperature and lighting conditions.

Francisco opened a Fonera, played with its electronics and loaded open source software on its firmware to control the engine and the sensors he installed on it. A web interface allows him to steer his Fonerabot and get continuous updates from the sensors.

Congratulations Francisco!

My 13 year old son Tom and I were playing a game called Fable on the Xbox in our living room. In this game you become a character who roams a medieval world and you choose to be good or evil, you can fish, you can cook, you can buy a home and engage in commerce. Interestingly you can also find a bride and fall in love, or in this modern day fable, you can find a groom and fall in love (but you can only be a man character in this game). Tom and I were pretty surprised to learn that in this game there is gay love and gay marriage. Much to our surprise a man came towards our male character with a big heart symbolizing his homosexual attraction to us and asking us to buy him a wedding ring. We passed. As much as I am in favor of gay marriage in real life among consenting adults I am not sure that I endorse gay characters proposing to my 13 year old in Xbox games.

I’ve always wondered if there was a way to make a WiFi hotspot out of a smartphone. Now there is and it’s called JoikuSpot. This small application can run on many smartphones with WiFi (like the N95 or E61) and allow you to share your 3G connections with others around you, or simply to provide connectivity to any WiFi device like the iPod Touch or Nintendo DS. To me this is one further proof that what people want is WiFi, not 3G.

Once you have installed the app you can quickly start a connection and your phone becomes an access point, with an open WiFi signal to which you can connect using your laptop or other devices. It’s faster and easier then sharing a connection via Bluetooth!

JoikuSpot is still in beta, but FON is already in talks with the guys at JoikuSoft to provide Foneros with a Fon enabled version of their software so if you want to share but limit the bandwidth you share or charge for it, or only share with Foneros, you can.

The Fonera is a plug and play product in Europe in the sense that if you plug the Fonera into most ISP routers or routers like Linksys, Netgear, D Link and you wait an hour the Fonera works (this issue of waiting an hour is very important as routers get their firmware when they are plugged for the first time). But in the States we get many cases in which the Fonera is not plug and play and we have been getting some bad reviews at Dell because of this. In the States we know the Fonera is plug and play when connected to all the private label routers like Linksys, Netgear, but unfortunately the management console is needed to connect the Fonera to many routers provided by operators such as Comcast, Verizon, Cablevision. One of the problems we have is that in the States large ISPs and Cable Operators change their routers very frequently and we don´t really know their inventory. This is a very different situation from what we find in Europe with BT for example. BT, or Neuf are operators which control the services they give to customers using sophisticated boxes with tons of features including TV over DSL. In the States operators give very inexpensive boxes with very few features and constantly change to find the cheapest suppliers. I don´t know if there are companies in the States that actually do this type of testing meaning that they get a WiFi router and can test it against the most common DSL and Cable Modem installs that people have in the States.

I think it´s funny that this web site says that the walking hotspot is a patent pending solution. At Fon we have been writing about this for two years. One of our ideas was to give foneras connected to 3G to homeless people so instead of begging they would offer WiFi. In any case JoikuSpot is my favorite so far. To me all these solutions only prove once more that if given a choice people prefer WiFi over 3G. And my general view on patents btw is that they should only be allowed in fields in which clear proof can be given that without patents there would not be investments, like medicine. I think patents in software and electronics just don´t make sense. The few times I have done something with patents was as a defensive move. I had a bad experience after inventing CallBack and allowing anyone to copy us and then somebody patented and said that we had to pay him to do call back. We then proved prior art and won.