Etre06 - Martin Varsavsky and Sachio Semmoto

Filed in archive Events on October 10, 2006

Martin Varsavsky, CEO and founder of FON is at ETRE'06 and has the stage for him alone for almost 30 minutes.

Martin does not discloses any information if he has closed a deal with a cable company in the US yet (seems more that he could not close a deal at all so far).

Martin disqualifies himslef in my eyes with the largely American audience (although we are in Europe) with his American bashing and statements like "Europeans are like magnets and tend to cluster together whereas Americans are poled in the opposite direction..." - Arrgh what a non-sense.

Martin says that Fon is spending (or burning) around 500k a month with 90 people. Fon says its financed for more than 2 years in full with that burn rate and has no idea how much they gonna earn from each hotspot. Right now they simply focus on building hotspots as much as they can using integrated software in subsidized routers.

Fon is a wonderful concept but it seems FON and Martin have become arrogant with the speed of light - that is hardly a wise behavior if you ask me.

Next on is Sachio Semmoto, CEO and founder of eaccess and emobile a serial entrepreneur who specializes in disrupting the Japanese telco industry. He already built from scratch one of Japans largest ISPs and is now moving into becoming a cell phone operator (not sure though if he is about to build a own network or is going in as an MVNO).