FON: joining the Wifi movement
My friend the Spanish/Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky is speaking on the panel about blogging and business at Les Blogs. He says that his new wifi company, FON, hasn't spent a cent on marketing and advertising. Business is spreading largely through the online word-of-mouth.
FON actually got started just a couple months ago with a blog post Martin wrote, brainstorming about how one could create a new kind of distributed wifi network. In early October he started the company. In late October he got Boingboing-ed. Now it's a rapidly-growing company, launching today in France, already launched in Spain and Sweden.
In a nutshell FON creates a system, using P2P principles, by which members can share wifi with one another. The objective, Martin writes, is "turning millions of wifi installations into a unified wifi FON network with a standard interface to accept all kind of wifi enabled devices."
Martin just asked me to join the company's U.S. advisory board. We've got a dream team going, including my friends Ethan Zuckerman, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger, Joi Ito and Ejovi Nuwere. Very exciting!!
For more about FON, click here.
UPDATE: Ethan has a very good post explaining how FON works. He discloses, as should I, that Martin has offered to share some equity with advisory board members. Ethan mentions that his participation has more to do with his confidence in Martin and interest in the idea - and its potential application in developing nations - than in the equity. In my case, I agreed to be on the board before Martin said anything about equity.
Martin indeed said that FON hasn't spent a cent on marketing and advertising. However it's just that they did not spend a dime on traditional/mass advertising. But come on! their logo on the conference sponsors list, all the tags and goodies sporting their colors here didn't come for free. They ARE spending money on marketing and ads, just differently than with his previous start-ups.
Posted by: padawan | December 06, 2005 at 07:01 PM
Point taken padawan.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | December 06, 2005 at 09:16 PM
What a great idea! When is it coming to the US? Huh? Huh? I want to sign up *now*. (I wonder what nastiness Verizon will pull out of its weapons closet to fight this?)
It's also interesting how many new developments no longer start in the US. New cell phones appear first in South Korea. Stem cell research is shifting elsewhere. Now the best idea in wifi comes from Spain. I wonder if the god-guns-and-guts mentality has just set us back, or put us out of the running entirely? Time will tell.
Posted by: quixote | December 07, 2005 at 12:20 AM
Rebecca:
Have you come across the comments from Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews.com, which he posted on Om Malik's blog (at gigaom.com)? He seems pretty skeptical about the FON idea, I think in part because of coverage issues, the difficult of managing such a shared resource and -- last but not least -- the fact that the terms of service most people sign with their ISPs expressly forbid sharing a network connection in that way. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Mathew Ingram | December 08, 2005 at 01:25 AM
Hey, what's going on? The trackback from my rather respectable blog (changingway.net) doesn't show up here, but a comment from "penis enlargement" (perhaps not his real name) does?
Andrew, aka Baffled in Boston.
Posted by: Andrew | December 08, 2005 at 02:35 AM
Andrew, I'm afraid not all trackbacks show up on Typepad blogs for some reason... while other undesirable ones do, then I have to delete them.
Mathew, sorry for the delayed response.. been on the road. To answer your question about ISP's, FON will be building partnerships with ISP's that do not forbid resale in their user agreements.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | January 02, 2006 at 08:57 AM
about fon: i don't think that Varsavsky nice idea need to involve the word money (at least, when you are obtaining profit from resources other person is paying for). that's the reason why i am collaborating in a project named WiFree
WiFree is open source and is based on a fully non-centralized P2P authentication and reputation model so you can share your bandwitdh limiting freeriders. by using WiFree in your router you can be sure when you open your wireless hotspot!
there's a version for linux and the linksys wrt54g family too.
we propose a simple model: you get internet access from any WiFree hotspot if you also provide WiFree access to other users in a fair way
you can have a look and get the WiFree from http://www.wifree-project.net
have a nice wifree!!
jooe
Posted by: jooe | February 08, 2006 at 02:30 AM