Knaddison.com

Fon's continuing struggles in the US Market

I've remained pretty unimpressed with FON recently. Their expansion in the USA has gone in fits and starts of free giveaways that seem to result in basically no growth of their network. We can no longer see the real numbers after the inaccurate data problems they had...

However, I have kept a close eye on the statistics for certain areas and have noticed two consistent situations:

1. Growth of active hotspots in the areas I watch on the FON Maps is stagnant or declining
2. The majority of access points are still in suburban areas - the freeloading "Linus" model is more popular than the Bill

This isn't a real surprise. Their model rewards people who live in low density zones and sign up simply to get access to free routers. The result is a low quality network. On a recent trip to upstate New York I was amazed that there were basically no routers in the towns I visited and those that existed were in the middle of nowhere. The US is a spread out land, and the availability of the Linus model just might not work here.

Fon's deal with TimeWarner

So, I'm writing from Drupalcon Is Drupal an Enterprise Solution? which is an interesting and awesome presentation.

Web application security

Secondly, Rasmus this morning had some great quotes this morning. jeff captured one that I really liked:

When I'm surfing around to find hackable sites, I love to find hand-rolled CMS systems. I know I can hack them in a heartbeat. If I see a site is running on Drupal, or Joomla!, or another CMS? I know there may be a hole, but as soon as they fix that hole, everyone using them is safe.

But there was another fun one from Rasmus. He was talking about his XSS XSRF scanner and how about half of the major banks that he scanned with it had major security problems. He wanted to release his tool as an open source tool, but was concerned about the frequency of the bugs it found and how many companies would be exposed overnight with problems that would ruin their banks/customers. That would be sad. So, as he discussed this he was like "yeah it would be nice to release to the world because it works pretty well but..."

"I didn't want to be the guy that released the tool that broke the whole web."

Yeah. I think we all agree that we don't want to be "that guy."

Open Source in the "enteprise"

Someone from the audience (who works for the US government) dropped this quote:

"build" vs. "buy" vs "assemble and extend"

That's really valid and I hadn't heard it before. "build vs. buy" we're all familiar with. But where does open source fit into that equation?

Getting More Folks to Adopt Drupal

Final quote I just heard was in response to the question of how do we get everyone to drink the Drupal "Kool-Aid"?

Chant! Chant! Drink! Die!

So, not many people understand programming. Here's a funny/interesting way to describe programming in terms of cooking. I like it.

Similarly, I once heard an analogy about asking a software engineer to build a bridge from San Francisco to Hawaii. A software engineer would say "no problem" and then do:


while (notInHawaii) {
buildbridge();
}


Well, I didn't have any idea two months ago when I first wrote about www.angieslist.com that it would have quite such a strong reaction. There have been about 50 comments on the post and it has been growing daily. Yikes.

Last weekend we went on a hut trip with friends Sleeper, and Steve and Kaycie Rosen. See all the wonderful scenery in a gallery of photos from Harry Gates Hut Trip.

After seeing the innertee.net site I was pretty impressed. Then I heard that they are up for an award at SXSW and I got really impressed. The idea is really cool and the implementation looks attractive and very custom. I got a chance to speak with Miles Sims one of the cofounders of the site.

innerTee Company, Community, Site

First and foremost the site is an artist community. The site provides the artists a way to share and be creative in a new format. The format that they are currently using is tee shirts and remixes of tee shirt designs. Artists contribute artwork (elements) which then must be approved before they are available to the general public. This keeps the quality high. Visitors of the site can combine into mixes of multiple elements to create a custom and pleasant design. It's basically an "open source" approach to tee shirt design.

innerTee and Drupal

The ideas for the site really launched about a year ago. That explains why, when you check out their blog why it's written in wordpress. A year ago that made the most sense. Once they had a blog up they started looking for technologies to make an artist community site with an ecommerce twist and - no surprise here - they found Drupal. They started with no outsider funding and still don't have any, so building from scratch seemed daunting. According to Miles, "Drupal gave them a leg up in development of a full site."

FON has just announced in a variety of places that they received 10million euros to help them spread more routers around the world. That's great news for them as a company and recently they've taken steps that I believe will make the business more sound as well.

Flaws with old FON business model

FON's original model was to give away routers for free. This got them lots of new "subscribers" and lots of new "foneros" (people who have a router) but it didn't necessarily grow the network very much. There were lots of posts on this topic when they originally released their maps product which allowed users to figure out that in fact, FON has a large number of "subscribers" but very few people have turned on their routers and get any real use out of them for making money for anyone. FON's response wasn't to justify the rate of conversion, but to disable the ability to gather those statistics. That was really dumb.

FON's current model - downplay the Linus and Focus on the Bill

I've believed all along that the "Linus" model was flawed and especially flawed when combined with a free router (an old post if Linus and Bill in terms of FON are new to you). If people are not motivated to earn money from their router AND they can get that router for free then they will get a free router and never turn it on (or reflash it and turn it on). That FON should instead focus solely on the "bills" or should charge more money for their routers has always been my feeling.