Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Fonosfera: The FON Development Community
We're working hard on the launch of our next product, the Fonera 2.0. The Fonera 2.0 is a Fonera that will not only make it easy to provide WiFi for yourself and for your neighbors, it will also provide Foneros with great features like the ability to connect a hard drive to it and autonomously upload or download content from the Internet while you’re doing something else on your laptop or when your PC is off. In short the Fonera 2.0 will manage your daily relationship with the Web 2.0 doing such thing as sending your pictures to Flickr, your videos to Youtube, downloading your torrents, etc. Many of the things that the new Fonera will do a PC can do but why tie up a thousand dollar investment doing menial tasks when you can have a $49 Fonera do them.
The Fonera 2.0 will be an open platform for developers to build their applications on top of, much like a hacked iPhone is now. An open platform is nothing without a community of developers, so we’re announcing today the launch of The Fonosfera, our development community program that will span not only the Fonera 2.0 but all Fon products. We know there are already many communities doing great things with our Foneras, adding new features and fixing bugs. The idea behind the Fonosfera is to bring all the development work the communities have been doing and will do in the future to any Fon user.
The Fonosfera will be a chance for all these communities to keep working independently, while contributing to the development of Fon products including the Fonera 2.0 and the applications that will run on it. The Fonosfera will provide a space for gathering and sharing between developers and to make their projects available to end users all around the world. It will include a framework with development and community tools such as svn, trac, forums, mailing list, wiki etc. We already picked a few communities that have proved they can do great things with the Fonera and sent them a test version of our Fonera 2.0.
The Fonera 2.0 will provide a USB connection and users will be able to plug any sort of USB device to it (as long as there’s software support in the firmware, and we invite developers to add support for any device they might think of). The Fonera 2.0 will provide out of the box the ability to connect a hard drive or pendrive to it, so you can access it on your local network and use it to store the contents your Fonera 2.0 will download from the Internet for you. Another interesting feature we are working on is the ability to connect an HSDPA modem to the USB port of the Fonera 2.0, to share an HSDPA connection on the move or where DSL is not available.
We are working hard to make the Fonera 2.0 as open as possible, and we are willing to take all the help the development community can bring to Fon and Foneros. Our users will still have to wait a few months to get their Foneras 2.0, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait.
Posted by Steve Ross on Foneros
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Saturday, April 12, 2008
FON Raises $9.5 Million!
Great news! We've raised another $9.5 million to grow the movement! We've got lots of great plans for the money. We're going to Launch FON in Russia, launch the Fonera 2.0 (the fonera that uploads and downloads stuff to and from the internet while you are doing something else with your laptop) and develop the fonera 802.11n for an end of the year launch!
I'm really exited we were able to raise so much money, and not just because I'm expecting a gigantic raise ;)! It's a challenging economic climate and an investment this large shows support for our business model. The leading investor in the round was the US Venture Capital arm of Sistema, Russia´s leading telco. Other investors in this C round include Google, British Telecom, Digital Garage and our founder and CEO Martin Varsavsky.
Posted by Steve Ross on Business
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Wednesday, April 9, 2008
The World's Biggest Mexican Wave
BT and FON have launched The World's Biggest Mexican Wave! The wave is a fun way to spread the word about FON. Anyone can participate by following the instructions here. The wave is catching on! You can read more about it in The Sun article. We've got Peter Crouch and Jennifer Metcalfe signed up too!
Posted by Steve Ross on Events
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