Some of the best router hackers of the world came to FON headquarters in Madrid last month.

Felix Fietkau aka nbd, a young Computer Science student based in Hamburg who is one of the big boys behind the openwrt, Sebastian Gottschall aka Brainslayer (seen in RedHerring), a fancy hacker that leads all alone the dd-wrt project with the help and back of some other developers and Imre Kaloz, a Hungarian hardware integration artist, also one of the pilars of openwrt, came to visit us at FON.

Felix has been helping us since february. He started supporting us from the OpenWrt side and now is very integrated and a crucial guy in our development. He is still a student, but works better, faster and more than any other guy I met previously.

Sebastian joined us also in the same time Felix did. Initially he made his very advanced firmware be FONready, but as time passed, we noticed one version ofthe firmware was enough work to cope with and now, we are all focused on the OpenWrt based firmware, including Sebastian himself. Of course, every bit of work he can reuse for his personal project, he is allowed to.

Imre is the newest incorporation. As Felix and Sebastian do, he works from home. Being an expert on hardware integration, he is doing the background work on the future fonera device. He works hard and even though he didn’t have that much time yet, he already demonstrated that getting him was a worthy movement.

Florian Fainelli, also developer member of the OpenWrt project was here to. He came from France (he is currently studying in Paris). He is very busy right now with his studies but is eager to help FON and join the great team we are building. He already did a very nice patch for our next firmware and will take more projects in the future.

As I said, they came to Madrid, to see what FON is like in the inside; to feel integrated with the team (everybody was very nice with them, even though the Spanish non-techies were thinking of them as crazy geeks); to see what the future plans are and what do we count with them for.

The encounter was a great success. we all enjoyed a lot and even went out for dinner on the second day. We took some brown tequila (Sebastian’s favorite) and Rhum. Imre and Sebastian, who were not very friendly to each other in the past (some geeks might know this), got on VERY well and ended up taking tequila altogether.

Teo (backrow in front of Felix) and Florian (front row rightside) also joined the dinner

FON is really gathering the best talents of the world in OpenSource firmwares. They enjoy the kind of work we offer them and they are happy because they get what they like: new drivers for bleeding edge devices, amazing routers, gadgets, support from manufacturers (atheros, accton, Linksys,…). It’s a great symbiosis. And me, personaly, I’m learning a great deal of things!We will, for sure, make another meeting like this. Hopefully, we’ll have an even better team with many more great hackers! (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/iurgi for some nice pics of the event)

Meeting with Negroponte, the promoter and charismatic leader of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and prominent member of the MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology), is already something that someone would hardly everforget… but doing it in a private JET with Martin Varsavsky (and the beautyful German Christiane zu Salm) is just unbelivable.

Martin, appart from him business life, is a very enthusiastic man and is very keen on culture, design, music, art, politics etc. Negroponte is an authority in his fields as well as a very well educated american man, and Christiane is simply so intelligent and has such a delightful conversation; shee always seems to have something interesting to ask or offer.

He was waiting for us at Johan Strauss airport in Munich. He was sitting in the lobby with an IBM laptop and trying to unsuccessfuly connect to a WiFi signal: “They are all locked” he said when he spotted us, “I hope FON can change this someday!”. That got us.

The flight was so interesting: I really felt sorry to be a little out of my place because the conversation was about big business, the Davos conference, the UNO… international politics, humanness and business. But I was delighted.

Martin and I were very interested both in a professional but even more in a personal way on the olpc project. The project is all about producing fully functional and featured laptops (with WiFi, hard drive, meshing, imaging soft, etc.) for 100$:

• Isn’t 100$ way to low? Is it really possible?

That’s a question a lot of people make. It’s a simbolic number: what’s the difference between 100$ and 130$ for example? The price will vary. The thing is to be on that frame and to have a very cheap yet useful laptop.

• Why did you start all this?

Because I love Internet. And I think Internet can REALLY (I really believe this) help the so called Third World to develop.

This is some of the hundreds of thinks we talked about. He later that day, after a meeting (this time at ground level :-D), showed us a model of the OLPC laptop.

We also talked about FON; we wanted to know about his impressions regarding our project. We were happy because he knew about us before Martin and him could arrange the meeting. Actually his knowing about FON was what really triggered this meeting that, in their words, had been uncomprehensively delayed for years.

“I think FON is gonna do it”

or

“You guys really have it in your hands”

are just some of the remarkable elogiums he gave us.

The impression I got from him is that he was an intellectual, coming from a good and stablished american family who had had a very good education and made an impecable career and undoubtfuly made the most of what he had in it’s hands everytime.

The fancy thing? I was often distracted with his joker-like smile. I have this trend to usually pay attention at little unimportant details

‘Disruption rocks’

That’s the motto today at FON. We have done an announcement: Google, Skype, Indexventures, Sequoia capital, Janus & Niklas from Skype and some more people have invested in FON! 18M € (21.7M USD), not bad.

Google rocks: it has disruptive products, such as Google maps, Google pack, Google, Google, Google… quality becomes standard at Google.

Skype rocks: VoIP made easy, good quality and cheap! Another disruptive product.

And now it’s FON who is going to bring disruption to the Internet Cloud. FON will build a WiFi ’standard’. Anyone with a broadband connection at home will provide connection to the by-passers and will get connection everywhere in exchange. WiFi will never be a messy and anarchyc network again, where there’s no relation between one WiFi node and the other. I will become a global network, like taxis, like buses, like bars; you can find them in every city, in every country anywhere. But FON is for free!

Soon, in part thanks to FON, we will be able to have internet connection wherever we are. We will pay a monthly fee to our provider and will be allowed to use it all over the world.

Welcome to the FON era!

Look at what others say:

Martin Varsavsky, FON president and CEO

David Isenberg

David Weinberger

Mariano Amartino

Ethan Zuckerman

Wendy Seltzer