Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Some nice FON news today. First of all I am one of the good foneros and hence got the Fontenna for 2 EURs. The Fontenna extends my FON signal five times and due to the fact that across the lake from my home they are building a beach club, this might make sense.

Additionally, the difference between Linus and Bills seems to have been removed and now you can make money either way. Choose to be a Bill and you can make money at your own hotspot and roam for free. Nice and makes sense actually. Third, but this does not seem to be online yet, WifiAds are a further monetization part of the entire system that has something to do with ads. We’ll see what that is all about.

Also you can now add FON Hotspots to your GPS and there is a new Symbian client out. All good things. I am looking forward to try out the new Fontenna when it arrives to see if I reach the beachclub

Georg Pagenstedt blogs about Martin Versavsky’s talk at the Medienwoche Berlin Brandenburg. Lots of interesting stuff in there especially that fon is now burning through 500k EURs a month and are looking at having 500.000 Hotspots in 2008 to break even. I am so happy to be part of the community and am already running two routers here in Cologne. And hey, I beat Georg in my Linus-Fonero number. He’s in the 20s and I am in the 10s, 13095 to be exact. The post has a picture of Martin holding up the Fonera, their own router coming out soon, by the way.

Update: Another bit from this Spiegel Interview. Martin expects each FON Hotspot to earn them 1 EUR a month on average. Very sound numbers I think. All in all it is nice to see an experience entrepreneur talk about numbers a little bit, finding out how he convinced people of his idea at least partly.

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