The Firehouse

Today, I received a nice email from Martin Varsavsky of FON, telling me that they have activated the Bills mode. This means that, in theory, you can resell your excess bandwidth to other users via your WiFi router, sharing the generated revenue with FON. People passing by can open their laptop, connect to your signal, and purchase access packs for $5 $3 $2 or 2€ a day – yes, the revenue model has been changing that much over the last few weeks.

In theory I say, since many ISPs have very restrictive terms in the service contracts you sign with them, some in the US even going as far as classifying sharing your broadband with others as a federal crime. So, one of the first items in FON’s Ts&Cs is that you must have your ISP’s permission to resell your broadband. So far, very few ISPs have signed up for this sharing model, one being Jazztel, a company started by Martin himself.

The email also states, this time in size 8 font, lest anyone notice it, the following:

“We would like to inform you that from now on it will be FON WIRELESS, LTD., the entity providing the Service, instead of FON TECHNOLOGY, S.L., and that we have made some minor changes to the Terms and Conditions”

The new Terms and Conditions [PDF] are a further developed version, no doubt washed down with plenty of lawyer juice. The point that most interests me is section 6.6, where the contract states that “As a Linus or Bill, you agree to keep the FON Hotspot active during 24 hours 7 days a week in order for the other Linuses and Aliens to be able to connect thereto.” Additionally, FON USA’s shopping conditions state that you have to keep the router active for one year.

So, apart from FON, who are the big winners? The ISPs of course! Martin was right in saying that FON is good for ISPs, as they are forcing FON members to keep their routers online all year round. Nowhere in the contract one can find what the penalty for not complying is, but some posts suggest they will charge you around $50 to cover the cost of the router they sent for $5.

The only way that you can prove to Fon that your hotspot is active is by allowing the router to phone home on a regular basis, which means that you must have a broadband connection with an ISP for this to happen. If you cancel your broadband, you will automatically violate FON’s terms, and thus be liable to whatever charge they want to levy. Fair?

Last week I attended the WOMBAT 2 conference hosted by WOMMA (Word Of Mouth Marketing Association), at the San Francisco Hilton. The weather was great, most speakers were good, and some networking took place. We managed to take thursday to visit some areas around San Francisco, and ended…you guessed it…in Silicon Valley. More about this in another post.

The most expected keynote was that by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, on their book Naked Conversations. It was good, but way way too short. How can the organisers give their main keynotes only 45 minutes to speak, and almost zero minutes for Q&As? Specially at a conference where the topic is two-way conversations, and word-of-mouth. It was excellent to get my own copy of the book signed by both Robert & Shel – thanks guys!

Robert talked a bit about his new venture, I won’t go over it extensively here, as you can read a lot more about it in his own blog.

It was interesting to see an industry pre-worried about their future, as the last thing they want is to see word-of-mouth and viral marketing go down the dirty slope that email did. So, the first concept that was hammered into us was ethics. How to ethically get a blogger to talk about you, or how to ethically convice drivers to sell the vehicles you manufacture to their friends. Here are the main basic points on ethical WOM:

• Thou shalt not shill – i.e. pay a blogger to speak good about you.
• Thou shalt release good products – or risk having negative WOM blow you away.
• Thou shalt not deface or destroy property to promote your product (!?).
• Thou shalt not lie. Yes, you heard right. They want to convince marketers not to lie.

There are more, but these are the ones worth considering the most. It was actually very nice to see an emerging industry be so careful about setting the standard of conduct so early on.

What sucked most at the conference? No WiFi. Yes, you heard right. The Hilton wanted $24.000 to put an access point in the conference’s main hall, which the organisers refused. Eventually, people managed to get onto a rather weak AP that emanated from somewhere else in the building, and which gave you access to the internet after going through the hotel’s homepage.

Since I first started tinkering with the Linksys WRT54G router a couple over a year ago, replacing the stock firmware with OpenWRT, I have been thinking about making something special with it.

The router itself is a great piece of hardware, having a WiFi adapter, and two wired LAN interfaces. OpenWRT allows hackers to do almost anything with the device – there are plenty of mods, such as the dual serial ports, SD card to add storage space, and more.

I tried to look for a GSM/GPRS mod, which would add a module to the router, allowing it to communicate with the outside world using data and SMS – but there was no such thing, at least integrated into the router’s casing. So, the challenge was born, to design a PCB that would hold an SD card reader, a GSM/GPRS engine, and a GPS receiver. What could you do with this device? Here is a short list:

• An autonomous wireless IDS with logging and SMS alerts. This could warn you when a pirate is trying to break into your network via WiFi. It would be completely autonomous, only needing a power source to run.
• Self-contained wardriving box, which can save logs to the SD card, and be controlled via SMS messages. It could also periodically send you a status report to your mobile phone.
• Mobile hotspot – by bridging the GPRS data connection to the WiFi signal in AP mode. Not very fast, but wait until 3G modules come out…

Here is a first picture of the PCB mounted onto the WRT54G. It doesn’t show the mess of cables that covers it, but gives an idea of what it will look like.

So, my new 17″ MacBook Pro has been delivered today by TNT, curiously one day late, as Apple shipped it with…no address. Still, I’m very happy. I hope the date is not a premonition, as Tuesday 13ths are as unlucky as Friday 13ths in english-speaking countries…but I digress.

The laptop looks fantastic. From the moment you take the box out of the wrapping, you realise you’re in for a different experience – this is my first Mac since I had an SE when I was a kid. The reason for getting it was partly fueled by the ability to dual-boot Windows. Yes, I do most of my developing in Windows, and until they invent decent circuit design software for Mac, I’ll be stuck there. The Dark Side has been defeated…partially.

My first observation: the keyboard is too far back towards the screen. The reason that this may be a problem? If you’re like me, and wear a watch with a titanium strap, when you rest it on the laptop, it makes this most uncomfortable screech, plus it’s likely that the nice aluminium finish will get scratched in the long run, ruining the cool Apple style.

A few hours into it, none of the reported problems with early versions have been noticed. No noises, whines or heat buildup. I have yet to stress it, but I have to say it looks good.

One curious bit of info the TNT driver gave me – he was surprised that the MacBook had been sent from Shanghai, as most Apple hardware he delivers comes from the U.S. Can anyone confirm where the first-gen MBPs were coming from?

I ordered a Fon router when they dropped the price to 19€ from the usual 25€, to try the service and see how it performs. My feelings right now are mixed, as had I waited one day, I could have purchased it for 4€.

This ‘rubbery price’ approach was explained a few days ago in Martin Varsavsky’s blog, as a demand elasticity test. Basically, you drop the price, and see if hordes of people jump on the offer. Yesterday, after having been back at 25€ for a few days, they changed the price to 1€, but only for a few hours.

I have recently been following Fon, a movement that aims at creating a worldwide WiFi network, with Bills, Linuses and Aliens sharing their broadband with others, some for free, others for profit – split with Fon. The basis of Fon is that you connect a Linksys WRT54Gx WiFi router running special firmware to your broadband internet connection. This firmware turns the router into a captive portal, which then allows you to control access to the internet.

During the last couple of weeks, there has been some noise at Fon about having finally achieved production of their own WiFi router – they call it La Fonera. The move may seem obvious, as right now, they are buying the Linksys routers at full reseller price, in turn reselling them heavily subsidized at $25 a piece $1, as I’ve just read a minute ago. What I still don’t get is the title of the recent post in Martin Varsavsky’s blog, ‘Fon, the Social Router’.

A few days ago, Fon announced the purchase of 1.000.000 (literally!) of these new routers from the taiwanese manufacturer Accton. This company already manufactures WiFi routers, amongst other devices, and so it’s perfectly plausible that they can manufacture a customized router for Fon.

The main reason for manufacturing anything in China or Taiwan is the labour costs are extremely low. The electronics aren’t cheaper over there, and as a matter of fact, most of the core components are sold by western companies, such as Broadcom, Intel and Atmel. Labor conditions in chinese plants vary, from outright slavery to pretty good, but even then, one thing is a fact: they work all year round, including all weekends, only having ten days off for the Chinese New Year.

Reading Accton’s site, it appears that they treat their workers very well, and I applaud that. But this also means that they cannot produce as cheaply as the sweatshop-style manufacturers. A WiFi router with the horsepower required to run Fon’s platform is not cheap – let’s estimate roughly $22 per unit, for a purchase of 1 million units. If this estimate is correct, Fon would have blown on these routers a tad more than the entire funding they got from Skype, Sequoia, Index and Google.

If they were to give away the routers, to recoup this investment Fon would have to sell approximately 11 million 24-hour access packages, at $2 each. That is assuming Fon takes 100% of the money – with the Bill model, they would only get 50% of the income, as it is shared with the person providing the broadband and maintaining the hotspot. If they were to sell the routers at cost, they’d still have a huge logistics nightmare in their hands. Failure rates in mass-produced electronics range between 1% and 3%, meaning they could have up to 30.000 returns, costing them $1.32 million in hardware, plus logistics and other costs. One thing is to be a promoter of social WiFi – another is to turn into a hardware manufacturer – be it by ODM contracts, or by making the devices yourself.

So, I leave some open questions: has Fon chosen a company that respects human rights, treats its workers with dignity, but won’t give them a good deal as they could have gotten somewhere else, thus affecting their ROI expectations? Does investing in 1 million routers make economic sense with their current business model?

Answers on the back of a postcard to……no, really, just kidding – comments welcome!

If you’ve done a more expensive one, I’d like to hear it!

Today I had to get to the center of Geneva from the airport, and in a bit of a hurry as the meeting I had to attend was getting close. I decided to take a taxi, which would also allow me to do a quick wardrive using my Qtek and a Bluetooth GPS. Finding almost 80 WiFi access points on the way was great, but the bill was painful! In all, the round trip from and back to the airport cost me 60 euros, some quick math makes each AP cost 75 cents (around $0.96).

Tomorrow, I will post some stats and a quick map of the captured APs. The stats will of course go to WiGLE, and the map will be made using an updated version of StumbVerter I’m working on – this will use MapPoint as usual, but you will also have the option of creating maps in Google Earth format. However, they will not look like the usual 2D icon maps that can be made using existing scripts, but will feature the traditional Netstumbler towers in 3D. How to show the signal strenght is being worked on, any suggestions?

Today, I attended a business meeting in Geneva, and on the way back, noticed the info panel at the airport was on a bit of a vacation. Click the picture for a higher-res version.

Sometimes, I feel like a human GPS navigator. And there are probably many more of us out there. Ever get a call from your wife, asking you to direct her to some remote place she is trying to drive to? My solution was to get a TomTom 500 navigator for her birthday. It comes with the maps for Spain in full detail, and a basic map of Europe, with main roads and cities. It can also be used as a Bluetooth handsfree for your mobile phone, so it’s quite a convenient device.

We set about trying it during a trip to visit my mother – since I knew the way, it would be a good sanity check on the navigator’s ability to lower our phone bills. When I told it where we wanted to go, and it told us to turn west instead of east, I started imagining what would happen. After a few minutes of following the navigator’s instructions without even looking out the window, this is where we ended up:

Yes. It wanted us to go up a dirt path that only horses (and fit ones at that) can manage. Take a close look at the full-resolution picture, and judge by yourself.

After turning around, and following the route we always take, we had to turn off the sound for almost half the trip, as it kept insisting that we should “turn around as soon as possible” so we could take the easy-going dirt track.

GPS navigator manufacturers only make the devices, but not the data that’s in them. There are a few companies, such as Navtech and TeleAltlas, who take care of that, and license the use of the data. In this case, it seems that overzealous cartographers had simply taken anything that looked like a road in survey maps, and turned them into navigable paths. The result is my unfortunate experience. The collateral is that my wife doesn’t trust the device, unless it’s for navigating within city limits – thus limiting it’s usefulness, and not limiting my phone bill so much.

I’m going to start a section called Hacked-up displays, or HUDs for short. I welcome your contributions to this, please send your entries to mike@tech.am

HUDs are public displays, screens and panels which are caught showing something they shouldn’t be, by fault or by hack. There is a classic roadside HUD here, as a good example. I’m posting this phonecam pic of an infoscreen at the Barcelona Metro, which usually shows videos, news and other stuff to bored passengers waiting on the platforms – and with which DirectPlay was not happy.

The rules:

1. Any image of a HUD is allowed, unless it contains foul language and/or explicit images.
2. Pics taken must be submitted with a short explanation of context, or if a hack was involved, a more detailed story of events.
3. Please advise if you want credit or want to remain anonymous. Confidentiality of submissions is guaranteed (thanks Apple!)