Martin Varsavsky (CEO of Fon , which I advise) has posted what may be the first photos of the new designs of $100 laptop being created by the project Nicholas Negroponte heads. Very cool!

In the same post, Martin talks about the desire to have Fon routers mesh. This to me is one of the great hopes of the Fon project. Right now, the selling point to users for Fon is that if you share your bandwidth, you can use any other “Fonero’s” bandwidth anywhere in the world. (The selling points to ISPs are that Fon encourages people to get broadband and Fon will split the $2/day access charge for those who don’t share their bandwidth.) But imagine that your wifi router (Fon-ized) is also able to mesh up with other wifi routers in your neighborhood. Now you can have a neighborhood LAN that’s a new social infrastructure. There are other benefits to meshing as well, but the social possibilities are to me the most exciting.

You know the “network effect” from which unpredictable properties emerge? Meshing could bring a neighborhood effect. [Tags: nicholas_negroponte martin_varsavsky wifi fon]

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Here are my predictions, based on a studious not-seeing of any of the major movies and a failure to correctly predict Oscar winners for 25 consecutive years. (The numbers indicates my degree of certainty.)

Picture: Brokeback 1.0
Directing: Brokeback 0.9
Actress: Reese Witherspoon 1.0
Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman 1.0
Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams 0.6
Supporting Actor: George Clooney 0.75
Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit (0.8)
Cinematography: Brokeback (0.9)
Costume: Geisha (0.8)
Doc. Feature: Penguins (0.8)
Doc. Short: God Sleeps (0.7)
Foreign: Paradise Now (0.4)
Score: Brokeback (0.6)
Song: Crash (0.7)
Makeup: Cinderella (0.5)
Editing: Crash (0.5)
Effects: King Kong (0.8)
Sound editing: King Kong (0.5)
Sound mixing: Memoirs (0.5)
Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback (0.7)
Original Screenplay: Crash (0.9)
Short film, live: Last Farm (0.4)
Short film, animated: Band (0.3)

Now that you know who wins, you can relax and enjoy Jon Stewart. You’re welcome!

[Tags: oscars stupid_predictions]

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When you check in for a flight by going to a counter staffed by a live human being, the human does a prodigious amount of typing and the whole process takes longer than if you used one of them new-fangled automated check-in kiosks.

So why don’t they just put one of those kiosks behind the counter for the check-in people to use?

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China and Kenya

Ethan’s got some excellent posts, pointing to and contextualizing some other excellent posts on the meaning of China’s new top level domains and on the Kenyan government’s shutdown of a TV station and newspaper that it didn’t much care for.

Ethan’s conclusion, based largely on Steven Murdoch’s post, about the Chinese TLDs is that China is not trying to “create domain conflicts over .net or .com, but is instead creating some new TLDs that will work primarily in China.” Still, it’s a regrettable rupture in the Net. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman china kenya]

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Martin, the founder and CEO of FON says Fon is “a software download that turns your router into a global family of routers.” [Disclosure: I’m on Fon’s board of advisors. Also, as usual, all of this is me typing quickly and paraphrasing, and I’m certainly getting much of what Martin says wrong in content or tone.] He says Fon will soon be the largest wifi network in the world: There have been 20,000 registrations that need to be converted into hotspots. Fon hopes to build a “wifi nation.” “We unlock the wifi nation that already exists.”

Fon has found a model liked by the ISPs, he says. “If you’re a Fonero [subscriber] and a bandwidth donor, you get wifi for free [when you leave home]. If you’re a fonero and not a donor, you pay $2 a day.”

Fon raised $21.7M from Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Martin says that the day he had the Fon idea, he blogged it. People thought he was nuts for not keeping it secret.

Fon will give each Fonero a page to show her neighbors who she is. He hopes there will be little apps, such as one that lets people virtually knock on a neighbor’s door to see if they’re in, etc.

Fon will grow, he says, through blogs, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and Web sites. He says that while Fon has a relationship with Cisco, it’s not bound to use Cisco equipment, or to use any of the other investors.

Right now, Martin says, it’s not so easy to download and install the Fon software. It’s better to buy a Fon router for $25 (which costs the company $20).

Q (David Isenberg): Has there been any feedback from Sprint about the fact that their stock symbol is FON?
A: Nope.

Q: How are individual Fon users going to be billed and how will Fon providers be provided?
A: We’re trying to figure these things out. We’ve hired a billing company that does a lot of billing for mobile operators. There are lots of choices presented to us: Credit card, bill, pre-pay, PayPal. I’m guessing that the first time you use it, you’ll pay $10 for five days you can use any time in a year. We’ll reimburse the ISPs when the expense is incurred. If you’re a Bill, most of the money goes to you, and we and the ISP split.

Q: (Isenberg) Are any functioning Foneros getting flack from their DSL/Cable provider so far?
A: No. They are waiting and seeing. The ISPs like the fact that with Fon you only share with people who have paid. And it’s an incentive to switch from dial-up. We’re friendly to ISPs and to users; we think we have found a new balance. We think we have a sustainable wifi system: You pay at home and have wifi anywhere in the world.

Q: How do you limit bandwidth for visiting Foneros? Do you have an idea what the standard will be? And what about security?
A: (Ejovi) The user can limit how much bandwidth and/or how many simultaneous accesses. We don’t know what the minimum amount of bandwith will be. For security, we separate your private network from the one the Foneros connect to.

A: (Martin) Our software is based on open source: OpenWRT.org and dd-wrt.org. [Urls corrected – dw] We contribute to the person who does this open source work. Over 100,000 hotspots use this software. We haven’t had complains about the functionality of the firmware.

Q: Why separate the Linuses from the Bills? A Linus in a lonely spot gets free service without providing any actual bandwidth.
A: We have other incentives for becoming a Linus. For example, we’re working on meshing capabilities so you can have a neighborhood LAN. We’re also doing some work on a download accelerator: When you want to get something, you pool the connections of your Fonero neighbors. (This is R&D, Martin says, not an announcement of features.)

Fonero isn’t your neighbors, Martin says. Your neighbor isn’t going to pay $2/day. The typical Bill, though, is a cafe or bar owner.

Q: (me) How does Fon get over the critical mass issue?
A: This is the big issue. So far so good. Indifference could kill Fon. If we don’t capture the imagination of people, I guess we won’t succeed. We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm. A lot of people want to share. We have to work on all the elements: The meshing, the downloading, the social aspects. And we hvae to work on our communication so people agree to do this.

A: There’s a trade off in range and bandwidth. Our software allows us to tweak that. Maybe we should think about playing with this depending on the topology of the location.

Q: Fon can make the traffic less bursty and more flat, but the ISPs business model is based on burstiness.
A: It depends on the ISP. It’s more monopolistic in the US. If Foneros are using the same ISP, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important to me is that everyone have access to the same content — preferential treatment by the ISPs is bad because the little guy should have the same chance as the big guy.

Q: What about municipal wifi?
A: It seems reasonable for a city to put wifi into public places, but not that it should become a provider. In the Fon way, a city collaborates with its citizens. The $2 saves the telecom operators; without them, we wouldn’t have the Internet. I think the best model is muni wifi in public places and citizen wifi for the rest. It’s hard to imagine how Fon could provide coverage in Central Park; for that you need a company like Tropos. I see an opportunity for many compatible models, but not for a city to take over and try to become the telcom operator. A city could provide free routers to low income areas. We are talking with many cities; Andrew Rasiej is working to cities in the US. [Tags: fon wifi martin+varsavsky]

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Wanna see a global corporation with some guts? Take a look at Benetton’s new blog. It’s a great example of marketing by not marketing. [Tags: blogs benetton]

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Jeneane posts about using tags to provide commentary on and context for a post, the way some magazines and blogs use headlines to comment on the text. (Doc Searls sometimes does this, and Esquire’s Dubious Achievements used this effect to great comic effect.) Such tags may not help us find the posts, but they can help us understand them. They can also make us laugh. [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous jeneane_sessum tagging]

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I met so many interesting people in the three days I spent in Europe, but there’s always something special about meeting bloggers. Last night in Milan, about a dozen of us went to dinner, including Massimo Moruzzi, Mafe de Baggis, Luca Vanzella, Gaspar Torriero and Luca De Biase. (I pick out these because they were the “organizing committee” and thus I have emails from them, so I may possibly be spelling their names right.)

I should probably learn from experience and cease being amazed at how well bloggers get along even when we’ve just met. I can’t imagine sitting down with another dozen people, most of whom I’ve never met, and feeling so immediately comfortable. And in this case, it’s not because I’ve been reading all their blogs; my grasp of Italian is nowhere near good enough.

On the other hand, I don’t want to cease being amazed. [Tags: blogosphere italy]

Gaspar has flickred some snaphots…

Giorgio Zarrelli has also posted some photos.

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Well, sort of. Reflecting on what Katrina tells us about the scale of life, Ernie has decided to set up practice on his own.

Good luck, Ernie. [Tags: ernie_the_attorney]

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I’m writing this on the early morning plane to Milano, sitting next to Guillaume de Gardier, the European online communications manager for Edelman PR and a blogger; Edelman is sponsoring my three-day tour (Disclosure : I consult to Edelman). The distressingly multi-lingual M. de Gardier comes to this as an Internet believer first and a communications guy second, which is refreshing.

I spent yesterday in Hamburg. I’ve never been there before, but all I saw was the inside of the Edelman office and the inside of a lovely hotel. Hamburg, I’m told, has more bridges than Venice, although I think I managed to cross only one of them.

I gave a talk about “What Blogging Isn’t” to a group of business people most of whom are at best skeptical about blogging; there were also a a couple of dozen German bloggers in the audience, which was a treat. Over the course of the day, the general consensus was that blogging hasn’t caught on yet the way it has in the US and much of Europe. Many theories were advanced, from national personality traits to the cost of broadband. I have no theory to offer.

It was quite a fascinating day. As usual, the chief business objection to blogging seems to be that blogging is risky: An employee might say something indiscreet and customers might post nasty comments.

The first I think is not much of a worry. A blogging policy can make clear what employees already understand: Give away company secrets and you’ll be fired. Be a whiny, complaining jerk who continually slags off your boss in public and don’t count on that big Christmas bonus.

The second concern is real: Some customers are undoubtedly unhappy with you and will express themselves quite clearly in comments on your corporate blog. That can magnify the perception of disgruntledness: If you have a million customers and 1% are unhappy, and 1% of those post negative comments, that’s a hundred angry remarks, which will look like quite a lot. But there are ways to ameliorate that risk, including by being refreshingly honest. Perhaps other customers will come to your defense, which is a strong positive…and quite heartening for a company. Besides, there is a risk to not knowing about your unhappy customers. They’re out there anyway, so is it a bigger risk to engage with them or to not even know about them?

Besides, if avoiding risk is your highest goal, you’ll never get married and you’ll certainly never have children. Loving your children increases your exposure dramatically!

I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it’s only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.

Anyway, Germany was fascinating. The event drew an impressive range of people, and for me it was a day of interesting conversations and a chance to meet with people who share the unexpressed knowledge that the Internet is a new social world in which we are friends already. Now it’s on to Milano… [Tags: blogging]

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