Martin w/ the social router
Originally uploaded by Ching Chiao.
The FON party last night was fun. Martin, the founder of FON, is really a crowd drawer. Bloggers, journalists and folks from local open source community packed the house in a rainy night. What attracts Martin to make a stop here this time is because Taiwan's reputation to design and deliver world-class network products for any brand-name company. The product, now called "FON--social router", is elevated with more values because of FON and Martin's effort. The crowd appreciated it and I hope FON could be as successful as Skype in Taiwan.
"Let me show you this wifi router!" Martin took this compact, good-looking router from his jacket. I found this interesting. Even 2~3 years ago it's hardly to imagine that someone would show you a router taking out of his pocket. Now this thing could possibly change the look of the whole Internet infrastructure. Router itself has been considered a boring, hard-to-understand device that no
one but techie will touch it. Martin now wants everyone to have it,
play around with it, and share excessive capacity of your home/office
Internet bandwidth. It's brave and it could work.
See how Martin feels about his first day in Taiwan.
Instead of making a formal presentation he decided to simply tell us what is FON, who is he, and "it's just good to be here and knowing you guys". I love this spirit. Martin is a great speaker with a charming spanish accent, and he certainly delivers great enthusiasim of what he believes in. Schee, ilya and myself were then asked to make three short presentations (here's mine) about our ideas of FON Taiwan. I think the crowd loved my "FON girls" concept especially :-P
I'd rather spend more time on FON + IPv6 and many other things, I really did. But time was limited.
One funny conversation we had, at the end of the party, is that we were curious about FON in China. But it turned out that we, the out-of-mind Taiwanese bloggers, came up a name for FON China, called it PRC...People's Router of China. The router will be painted in red with a yellow star in the middle.
Well, good luck with that Martin!
note: Accton generously gave everyone who stayed 'til the end a router for free. That's cool. But I did not get it...:-(
