fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog

FONtastic on Second Life March 8, 2007

Last week one of our close friends of Fontastic.org was spotted in a Fontastic T-Shirt during a conference held on Second Life. The conference "Second Life as a business platform" took place on Novatierra island (see here) and at the Faculty of Information Technology of the UPM in Madrid. I guess we are the first FON blog on Second Life, then, no?

The team behind Fontastic.org has just launched a new baby. It's not a whole new thing but we just wanted to come up with something that helps us keeping track with our beloved Gadget blogs and sites. GadgetGlance.com does precisely this and we gonna add on features to it whenever we have time and think of something extremely useful. Thanks very much to those many nice Web 2.0 APIs and developments which helped making this possible. To have at least some sort of connection to Fontastic.org we might want to point out that there is a very fast and lean mobile version available (optimized for Treo 650, that's what I use mostly).

FONtastic.org and FON in the NY Times September 27, 2006

Today (9/27), the NY Times has published an article on FON and I am honored to be part of the story. Tim Gnatek had interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and Michael, a photographer for the NY Times came to my office and took this nice photo. You can find the article here (3rd down) or here but only if you sign-up for the 14 days trial membership (no obligation). Here is an excerpt covering my involvement and fontastic.org:

"ALTHOUGH he runs his own business, Olaf Kreitz is a socialist when it comes to Internet connections. In the window of Braintransfer, his Internet consulting company in Manhattan, Mr. Kreitz has mounted a special wireless router from Fon, a start-up company based in Spain that is trying to build a hot-spot network around the world. He hopes passers-by will make free use of his extra bandwidth.

Mr. Kreitz gets something in return for his largess: as part of a Wi-Fi sharing community being developed by Fon, he can log on free to other members’ wireless broadband connections in a growing network of citizen-powered hot spots.

“I love the idea, sharing your Wi-Fi and being able to surf the Internet wherever you find a hot spot,” he said.

Six months after he joined the Fon community, Mr. Kreitz remains optimistic, despite having had some difficulties logging on to nearby Fon access points, and the fact that his own location had been mismarked on Fon’s hot spot location map (recently updated to show active hot spots and to help users correct errors). He said he thought the company would struggle for some time to solve such network troubles.

“It’s going to be difficult,” said Mr. Kreitz, who writes a personal Web log, www.fontastic.org, that tracks matters related to Fon and its members, called Foneros.(…)"

We are using Google Analytics to track our website visitors on fontastic.org. First of all, we praise Google big time for this awesome tool! We love the Geo Map Overview and it actually shows the geographical distribution of FON fans worldwide. It's hard to see on this map (as we show the top 500 places) but the top 3 locations are New York (by far), Madrid and Taipei (which kind of surprised us). Welcome, bienvenidos and 欢迎 foneros!

Martin Varsavsky just mentioned he wants to bundle Sony's new WiFi handheld device Mylo with FON. Great idea as the Mylo seems to be the ideal device for free WiFi: it features build-in clients for Skype, GoogleTalk, Yahoo Messenger and an Opera Browser. A flip-out QWERTY thumboard allows for fast chatting. Check out the video on YouTube and this article on Engadget.

3 Skype WiFi phones for FON

New FON router firmware features May 9, 2006

Just checked the French FON blog and there are some great news of upcoming features to be included in the next FON router firmware updates:

personalize your AP (access point): SSID, geo-location, local users (some of the features already implemented in FONadvanced firmware)
NEW: user statistics allows you to view who was online and when, plus check the bandwidth used per guest (probably Bill integration here when available)
NEW: you can personalize the homepage/ default login page (your own welcome message/ photos) and allow guests to access 2 websites free of charge

That's really great news. Hope this will all be integrated in both versions of the software. Our FONtastic router runs on FONadvanced, of course, and we would love to customize our AP homepage. We have another idea: why not provide a couple of FON related links to sites/ features that foneros can show on their homepage. We would throw in free blogs for everyone, just a reminder

We are really proud to announce our new service: we want to invite everyone to sign-up with us for your free blog! Yes, that's right, you will get your own blog, your own choice of Wordpress themes and a nice, personalized URL (http://yourname.fontastic.org). We want to give everyone the opportunity to blog about FON and the free WiFi movement so feel free to spread the word. We will add more and more features to the community (e.g. we are currently working on a single RSS feed for all fontastic blogs). Speaking about features for the FON community, we also added our FONtastic board for any help you might seek. The main purpose is to support our free blogs but feel free to use it for any discussion you think is interesting and related to FON and WiFi.

Thanks to William of the official FON blog we have been fonblogged! They also refer to our Nokia 770 review. Thanks for your nice words. But we also want to say hi to all the other blogger out there that help getting the free WiFi movement to receive so much attention these days. Thanks, Steve at FONternet.com and Gerhard at fonblog.de. With our next sidebar update we add a link, too.

No related posts

Nokia 770 - a FON killer device? April 3, 2006

Free, ubiquitous WiFi is great - but you don't want to carry around your 3 lb laptop all the time. So, what is a real killer device for Fon and free WiFi networks? Obviously, browsing the web is the number on application. Email, IM and VoIP are probably the next important tasks you want to do when you are away from your desk. In the course of finding the killer device for Fon we thought the Nokia 770 might be a good point to start. We purchased it for $299 at CompUSA. This promotion has ended unfortunately but it's available for $349 almost everywhere (e.g. here on Amazon). It comes with a nice aluminium cover, a pouch, charger, USB cable and 64MB reduced size MMC. You turn it on and there is the first whoa effect: the display is amazing! Connecting to our FONtastic access point (via the FON network) was easy but unfortunately you have to login each time you turn the device off. The Opera browser also doesn't seem to save form entries of any kind and you have to re-type both email and password every time again. This is a bit of a pain but other that that browsing the internet is just great - as a matter of fact, compared to all PDA-ish devices I used to surf the web, this is the greatest experience ever! Nearly every webpage actually looks like it does on your desktop browser. Despite of the lack of memory and processor power, internet browsing is really fast, too. However, if you open more apps at a time (e.g. the bookmarks manager) slows down the Nokia 770 remarkably. But there are both de.icio.us and Bloglines apps available that help to manage bookmarks a great deal. Almost every application available for the Nokia 770 (which runs a Debian Linux derivate) can be found on the Maemo.org website.

Instant messaging is solved thru a GAIM port and we have been able to IM to Microsoft Messenger and GTalk buddies. Now we can't wait to use the Nokia 770 for VoIP. There is a SIP client out there but currently it can't be downloaded. Skype would be the killer app for the killer device (Nokia 770) on the killer network (FON). There is Debian client available but reading the Skype forum it appears not to be too easy to actually port it to the 770. If Skype was open source it would be there already, I guess, but as it's not we have to wait and hope. Stay tuned for more field reports on the Nokia 770.

YouTube vs. Blip.tv March 31, 2006

A bit off topic, but might be interesting anyways. I am into videoblogging lately and generally we want to visualize more thru video than images here on fontastic.org. That's why I uploaded the 2 short videos seen in one of my last posts. As I am a big fan of blip.tv I used their platform which I think is really great. So far I had only used it with vlogs made on a Mac (iMovie) and this worked fine. The short .avi clips of the Fon box, though, did not work well on blip.tv. As a backup I also use to try YouTube and this worked just fine. Now you find the updated post below and the links should work. The overall quality of YouTube is not as good as blip.tv but at least for .avi files I would recommend YouTube for the time being.

FON movement around the world

It's amazing, we have been online for just a couple of hours and even in Germany another FON blog picked us up. It is great to be a part of this exiting community. We will try to add all of you to our link list in the sidebar. Just comment here and introduce yourselves.

PS: we also encourage FON users from all over the world to comment here and let the world know what you think about FON and free WiFi. Just like Gerhard from fonblog.de. Germany Wir sprechen auch Deutsch und deutsche Blogger sind immer herzlich willkommen! Spain Tambien damos la bienvenida a todos los bloggers españoles que quieran formar parte de nuestra/vuestra 'fontastic(a)' comunidad.

The FON box arrived - we are foneros! March 30, 2006

Hey, what a day! After only 10 days or so the Linksys WRT54GL router arrived. We ordered it on the fon.com website for $25 plus shipping (a little over $30 total). That's about half the price of retail. The only catch is that you are obliged to run a FON hotspot for a year which is something you want to do anyways, right? So no problem here (you might want to check what your ISP says about sharing WiFi, though). See what's in the box here.

Set-up and installation was a breeze. You can actually logon for a limited time as a registered fonero even without being an active fonero (you would be an Alien). Anyways, we wanted the more advanced firmware to play around with it and after all the good things we read about BrainSlayer and DD-WRT. So we downloaded the FONadvanced firmware from the homepage and flashed the software to the router. This is definitely not for everyone as there is no step by step guide. You actually follow the DD-WRT online guide but they speak about a bunch of different versions of firmware (with more or fewer features) but not about FONadvanced. This said, you may want to only do it you are sure dealing with a failed update. Refer to the forum above, there is a how-to-guide in case something went wrong.The new firmware is really super cool! We made a little experiment and walked all the way across our office (about 100 feet away from the router). There we placed a laptop and ran NetStumbler. We changed the routers output power from the default 28mW to 200mW (you can do even more) and almost doubled the signal strength. It's really great what you can do with the router running the FONadvanced software! More about our learnings to follow shortly but here is another short video.