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More and more people are mobile workers these days. Laptops with Wi-Fi make it easy to get away from the desktop and any place with Wi-Fi and a power socket can be your office. In my bag I carry an Airport Express, Ethernet cable and power extension cord so I can work everywhere. At the office I am working right now I can choose between 3 open Wi-Fi networks. So which one should I pick? I want the fastest one, right? So how do you determine that?
I used to just pick a random signal and if it seemed slow I would switch to the next Access Point, and to the next, and back again. I knew there were several DSL speedtests you could do but they all seemed so boring. But now I have found Speedtest.net. It is both addictive and fun. I wouldn’t mind having it running in the background all day.
Here is a screenshot of the main dashboard:
As you can see there are maps, meters, colors and counters. They move, shake, update and change color. Everything a geek could want…
Fon, the free hotspot provider that gives away free Wi-Fi routers and wants to build a worldwide, and free, Wi-Fi network has announced closing a new investment round. They raised $9.5 Million from a bunch of investors. The current shareholders (Google, British Telecom, Digital Garage and Martin Varsavsky) invested some but there is also a new investor involved: the US Venture Capital arm of Sistema, Russia´s leading telco. This also means that FON will start expanding into Russia.
Another exciting new plan is the development of a sort of personal proxy server built into a Fon Hotspot. It will up- and download content from the internet for you while you are doing other stuff. It will be called Fonera 2.0 and we can’t wait to get one for free.
And that might take longer than expected because Martin has announced that he is going to be a little more cautious with his money. No more free hardware and slightly higher fees will help Fon decrease their burn-rate from 1.2 million a month to $500.000 a month. There are also plans to upgrade to the updated WI-Fi protocol lovingly called ‘802.11n’.
There is no mention of Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital who invested in earlier rounds. These earlier rounds also brought in a lot more money so it is likely that Fon is less successful than they try to appear. It is very hard to find out how many active Foneros are currently active and estimations range from 125.000 to 1 million+. Fon is not very transparent when it comes to showing the number of routers which are really active. If you have set-up a Fon hotspot in the past you must enter a request to have it removed from their maps. If you don’t they still count you in their media and investor statistics, as a live Fon Hotspot. Of the Fon Hotspots that are actually live only a small percentage will be a an actual hotspot where people accidently stumble upon it.
As a former Wi-Fi Hotspot operator (sold my business in 2003) I’m not very optimistic about Fon’s future. The dream of having free and ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere is extremely alluring and it is clear and understandable that Fon has a large community of eager believers.
Fon makes for a great story but is that enough to build a business on.
In only 3 days The Next Web Conference 2008 will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We will post short daily updates about speakers, initiatives and events here.
A lot of people have been asking us if we would provide Internet access and Wi-Fi during The Next Web Conference 2008. We sort of avoided the question and sometimes even said ‘No’. This has caused concern with some people so I thought it would be a good time to explain our ideas about the subject. But first THE answer to the question: “Will there be Wi-Fi for participants at The Next Web Conference 2008?”
The short answer: Yes.
The long answer: Yes, and a lot more! We will have a special area with wired ethernet connections to a 100mbit Up and Down connection, the fastest connection we could get. This area (front left at the main conference area) will also have enough power sockets to keep everybody online all day. In addition, we will have Wi-Fi connections for the rest of the audience people. We plan to split these up in several groups of 50 people who will all be able to connect to their own access point.
This means that if one of those groups takes the network down, at least the other groups will still be online until we restart the device. And if the Wi-Fi fails we always have wired backup for you. One thing: we DO expect the wireless network to go down. It is our experience that Wi-Fi becomes extremely unreliable when you get more than 30 people in the same room connected.
We hope that the speakers will be so extremely inspiring and captivating that the use of computers will be limited to live blogging, twittering and digitally reporting about the speakers on stage.
The Next Web, just like the current web, runs on love and attention.
We hope you will give our speakers lots of both. ;-)
Written on March 26, 2008 – 3:15 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When traveling through Europe, trains come in handy. It’s cheaper and sometimes faster than flying. Moreover, the train seats are more comfortable than the cramped up Easyjet chairs. You even got the space to open your laptop without having to sit with your elbows in your neck. So far, there’s only thing missing though: wireless Internet. Of course some people have this Vodafone satellite connection, but that’s just slow. No, we need a fast and reliable connection.
Well, vive la France! The French are making my wireless Internet dream reality. Railway company SNCF announced today that the company is running tests with three trains from and to Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg. It’s just six weeks before the first Internet-equipped train will leave the station.
The infrastructure of the wireless connection has been developed by Orange, Capgemini, Eutelsat and Alstom Transport and is suitable for every Train Grande Vitesse.
I think it’s a great way to lure travelers away from planes into trains. A lot of people will save time and money if they can keep working online during a trip. The only thing that might temper my enthusiasm is the price SNCF will charge for a Wifi key.
Written on February 7, 2008 – 4:19 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You probably already heard of Nabaztag, the smart Wifi-enabled rabbit with its famous moving ears. Its Facebook app was a real hype, and thousands of users fell for the rabbit’s charms. While most people might see this rabbit just as a funny gadget, its inventor Rafi Haladjian told during LIFT08 that there’s a lot more to it.
Haladjian is founder of several Minitel start-ups and Internet providers in France. His latest venture Violet is the company behind Nabaztag. One day, he was sitting behind his desk, thinking about how he could promote his Wifi services. His eye fell on a rabbit and he had his eureka moment. “With creating Nabaztag, we wanted to make a statement”, Haladjian said, “If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything.” Just imagine we made a Wifi-enabled frisk. People would have said, ok, so you can connect frisks now. Yet by connecting something absurd as a rabbit, people think: you can even connect rabbits now”.
After explaining his choice for a Wifi rabbit, Haladjian told about the functions the electronic animal has. I would like to highlight one, namely the speech function. Nabaztag for example updates you on the statuses of your Facebook friends. “Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up. The typical Web 2.0 info”.
Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up
It’s a great idea. By taking Web 2.0 data -such as Last.fm shouts - off the screen with an Ambient Information Device like Nabaztag, they become more accessible for people who are now only interested in content that IS worth the effort looking it up. Haladjian is also using it as a filter for his RSS reader: “Nabaztag is reading the RSS headlines out loud. I look up the ones that sound interesting.”
We’ve learned yet another lesson at LIFT08: next to the fun-factor, gadgets like Nabaztag also have the potential to change the way we use the web.
Written on February 4, 2008 – 6:04 pm Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
Today Fon Japan and Livedoor, one of Japan’s biggest ISPs, announced they would start a partnership to connect their free Wifi access points across Japan.
Livedoor is coming out of some hard times after the very public and very dramatic securities fraud convictions that led to sentences for four executives in early 2007. Most notoriously, founder Takafumi Horie (aka: “Horiemon”) was famous for his brash and aggressive business style and bore the brunt of the blame for the charges brought against the company. Even so, Livedoor still has its sights on going public in 2008. The Fon deal would appear to help their expansion. Fon, launched its wireless network in Japan in late 2006 and is currently the biggest wifi network globally.
The deal lets Livedoor customers connect to Fon’s 31,000 access points around Japan (as well as 240,000 globally) and also for Fon users to connect to Livedoor’s network which is primarily centered around the inner Tokyo area and currently has about 2,200 access points. The combined service will be free until at least the 4th of August, 2008, but there are plans to continue the service as free after that time as well.
The catch for the general user is that you have to be a member of either the Fon network or Livedoor. But from my initial checking, it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to join. To become a Fon network member you need to buy a base station and share a Wifi signal yourself (thus extending the network). However, the simple way to access now seems to be through Livedoor where it looks like a regular login account to the Livedoor portal should get you in.
In 1998 I got my first always-on Internet connection via my cable provider. The move from dial-up to cable was huge. Speed was an important factor but the fact that I could access the internet at any time had an even bigger impact.
After the shift from dial-up to always-on came mobile. Mobile hasn’t caught on as we hoped it would. And it turns out it might look different than we thought. No ordering pizza on a black & white WML generated iMode site. The future of mobile internet looks different. It looks like the iPhone and more important: the Amazon Kindle.
The interesting thing about the Kindle isn’t so much the fact that it has a Wireless Connection built it. It is the fact that this Wireless Connection is free and comes bundled with the device. The seperation between gadget and mobile connection is gone. The Kindle comes with Ubiquitous Internet.
2008 will see more evidence of the Ubiquitous Internet. SanDisk launched a new USB stick today called the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus. This storage device, which SanDisk believes is the first of its kind, will automatically save all data stored on it to Amazon’s S3 storage service via a synchronization service called BeInSync. The device is cheap but comes with a $29.99 a year subscription to the BeInSync online back-up service.
The interesting thing about the Cruzer and Kindle is that they simply provide you with a service and you don’t have to think about this data being on of offline. It is simply there for you and available everywhere.
There have been indications that Google is working on an offline client for their Google Docs Application suite. The interesting thing about an offline client would not just be to work offline instead of online but again to remove the distinction between the two. With a client installed at your computer your documents would simply be everywhere, and always available, forever.
The question is if Ubiquitous Internet will dramatically change business models and enable new companies. Obviously BeInSync will do well and so will Amazon. But what start-ups can we envision taking advantage of an always-on economy?
In september Fon, the free Wi-Fi initiative backed by Google, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, launched a B2B program in an effort to get more coverage in densely populated areas. It promised 50% of all revenues to FONtrepreneurs willing to buy a marketing starter kit to promote and sell FON. This kit included 3 La Foneras, a Fontenna and flyers which people could use to persuade local cafés and bars to offer free Wi-Fi.
Fon has always been promoted as a community effort with hundreds of thousands of happy and cooperative members. So this should have worked. But the program has been terminated before it was launched. Here is why:
Fon originally invited 860 people from 5 countries: USA, Canada, Belgium, Holland and Germany.
Of those, 39 people replied and showed interest.
Of those, 13 people agreed to go through the legal loop holes that the laywers required.
Of those, 5 used the promo code
Of those, 2 immediately put the La Foneras for sale on eBay
Oops!
It is hard to estimate how successful Fon REALLY is. They have previously claimed 200.000 hotspots worldwide and Fon’s founder has a full-time job talking about the imminent success of Fon at every major conference in the world. But how many of those hotspots are connected, active and available for other people is anyones guess. Judging from Martin Varsavsky’s ever present smile all is fine and dandy in FonLand.
Here is an interview with Joanna Rees, the US representative for Fon including a few critical questions at the end of the interview.
Written on April 19, 2008 – 8:44 pm
A lot of people have been asking us if we would provide Internet access and Wi-Fi during The Next Web Conference 2008. We sort of avoided the question and sometimes even said ‘No’. This has caused concern with some people so I thought it would be a good time to explain our ideas about the subject. But first THE answer to the question: “Will there be Wi-Fi for participants at The Next Web Conference 2008?”
Written on March 26, 2008 – 3:15 pm
Written on February 4, 2008 – 6:04 pm
After the shift from dial-up to always-on came mobile. Mobile hasn’t caught on as we hoped it would. And it turns out it might look different than we thought. No ordering pizza on a black & white WML generated iMode site. The future of mobile internet looks different. It looks like the iPhone and more important: the 
2008 will see more evidence of the Ubiquitous Internet. SanDisk launched a new USB stick today called the 
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
