Message 22139931
<FON wif system en.intranet.fon.com
<Skype Technologies, Google and two high-profile venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, have invested 18 million Euros ($21.5 million) in a tiny Spanish company called FON Technology SL of Madrid with the goal of building up a global network of wireless broadband hotspots.
“FON is trying to make it easy for anyone who has already invested in broadband and a wireless access point to securely share their Wi-Fi, so together we can build a unified global wireless network which is easy to access, safe to share and reasonably priced,” Skype’s co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis said in its main News Web log on Sunday.
FON's ability to attract big-name investors is attributed to the notably reputation of its founder and CEO Martin Varsavsky. Before starting up FON three months ago, Varsavsky also founded Ya.com, Spain’s second-largest Internet company, and Jazztel, the second-largest publicly traded telecom company in Spain.
Since FON launched, it has already signed up over 3,000 registered users, which the company affectionately calls “FONeros” as a tribute to its Spanish heritage, Varsavsky said in his own blog. The entrepreneur said that puts FON at about 10 percent of his 2006 objective of becoming the world’s largest hotspot operator. Currently, the largest hotspot network has around 30,000 nodes. Longer term, FON hopes to have 1 million hotspots in 4 years. ... continued...>
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