RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

Since the announcement on Sunday evening, that Fon have secured €18M investment from Skype, Google, Index Ventures and Sequoia, a whole lot of new things have popped up on the fon websites, both Spanish, English, and French.

Firstly, the amount of media coverage being generated by the news release on Sunday has exploded! Google News has plenty about the Fon news release. Technorati is tracking 36,482 posts containing “fon”, the vast majority of which have sprung up in teh last 2/3 days as the graph below shows

Posts that contain Fon per day for the last 30 days.

One of the big things that newsmongers are trying to drag up is Fon’s mentioning the US ISP SpeakEasy as a partner. The media guys really hyped this out of proportion. As already written, Speakeasy have a programme of Internet sharing for a long time. But it would be a good idea for Speakeasy to welcome Fon users as another revenue maker for them.

ISPs will have to welcome the idea of Fon, as it will help them “keep up” with the idea that: people want cheap Internet access whereever they are. Once Fon can create a interesting enough pricing, and revenue share scheme between the ISPs, the Foneros, and Fon they will be happy.
They will have to keep up with the idea, otherwise their customers will migrate to ISPs that are more friendly to ISPs.

Secondly, the map sites for Germany, France
, England, and of course Ireland have been created. The Google Maps feed has not been created on these map sites, but they are coming very soon.

The fon boards (French
, English, Spanish) are also up.Since Sunday, approx 200 of the 235 forum members registered! There is alot of interest being generated on the forums. If your not a member join now
!!

Tom Raftery, the Irish Tech Podfather (I hope Tom doesn’t mind me calling him that!), has managed to grab about 4 minutes of Martín’s time (when it was supposed to be 30 minutes…well thats what happens when you have 100 other media interviews to do!) and get a quick podcast out.

For those who might think Martín is Spanish, listening to Tom’s podcast, it becomes apparent that he is not. He is in fact Argentinian, muuuuch different accent! You can get a full bio on Varsavsky.net

As a secondary though, Ireland’s Chief Fonero, Antoin O Lachtnain, responded to alot of the questions Tom’s post raised. Well done to Antoin for that. It raises the Irish awareness of Fon.

We (can I say we? Probably not..)..Fon have registered fon.ie which will have maps, information, (hopefully) a blog for updates, and links to the fon boards.

TCal.net have asked me to write a feature on the whole Fon “thing” for TCal.net. This will be up on TCal.net in the next few days. Its not going to be an overly technical piece, more an idea of what is going to happen (hopefully) when Fon gets up to speed.

What can you do? BUY A FON ACCESS POINT. At the moment there is a special offer on at the Fon online shop where you can buy a Fon access point for €25! Thats a Linksys WRT54G access point for approx. 1/4 of the price you could buy one in an Irish shop
!

So, BUY IT, set it up, and register on FOn.com. Then let me know. You can e-mail me at: fonireland@runningwithbulls.com, or use the contact-us page. If anyone needs any help, or information, please let me know.

So, thats what is going on so far! Please leave me some feedback if you so wish.

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