Ejovi Nuwere

I studied this video before arriving in Japan this trip. I found it to be very helpful! How to enjoy sushi.

From Joi

Don’t get me wrong. I am not agaisnt the idea of municipal networks. I just think it’s really expensive to do. In the case of Philadelphia it will cost tax payers about $15M dollars for the first year in addition to a monthly fee. I think it isn’t such a great idea for the government to compete with businesses for customers but that’s another argument for another time. What I want to say is this, it will cost about $50K using technology like FON to connect communities. It’s not a replacement for municipal networks, but looking at this map of NYC, who do you think needs a WiFi network more?

The Harlem Project will be like a arrow aimed at those who need the technology the most.

Check out my updated pictures from Japan on my moblog.

So I have arrived in Japan and a friend of mine here complained that I only blog about business. I guess that’s my life these days. A list of the things I would like to blog about if I wasn’t blogging about business:

1. Fighting: If I could start training again I would become a professional fighter
2. Traveling: The kind of travel you do when you are not waking up at 6AM for meetings
3. Women: Sure, I could blog about it now but it wouldn’t be very interesting

But while we are on the topic of business, in Japan there is a convince store every 2000 feet. So if FON could sign a deal with a convince store we could have coverage throughout most major metropolitan cities in Japan. You might wonder, why would someone want to use WiFi in a convince store? I’ve thought of similar companies in America that we could partner and when I ran the idea friends they weren’t to excited about it. But the important thing to remember is that it is not about where people are using it, but how. It’s about ubiquity! Once you have ubiquity then NEW applications and services will become possible. Just imagine how would you use the internet if it were everywhere all the time? If you were a business, how would you take advantage of helping to provide internet everywhere for everyone?

I’ve been in my new apartment for 2 months now. But I’ve only slept in my bed for 1 week. Its been a crazy journey and it hasn’t stopped yet. I’m going to take a vacation and hang out with my friends in Osaka, Japan. I leave Monday. This is my first real vacation in two years. Not one of those semi-work vacations when I wear a suit for one week and jeans for the second week. No suit bag, no shirts with cuffs and collars, no “just in case” ties, no argyle socks because “they add flair”.

It will be a short lived vacation but I am really looking forward to it. This is my travel schedule for January.

Japan December 26th - January 7th (vacation?)
Boston January 9th - 13th (business)
Hawaii January 15th - 19th (PTC06 conf)
San Francisco January 19th - 26th (O’Reilly eTel conf)
Connecticut January 27th (business, birthday)

My paranoid security professional mind prevents me from blogging many of the cool things that happen to me. And I try not to blog anything about FON until Martin has. So, now I’m happy to say that I met Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. I went to the Googleplex for the second time with Martin, Diego (FON’s COO) and Iurgi (lead engineer). Google is a really amazing place. I can’t explain why, but for a young technologist, or even an old technologist, when you walk through the halls you have the feeling of “this is where I want to hang out” it is a campus of smart people doing cool things.

I also visited Yahoo! and it reminded me of being back at Lehman Brothers, cubicles everywhere and eerily silent. Yahoo! had a much more corporate feel while Google was so much more vibrant. They are both great companies, but the culture couldn’t be more different. We visited Netgear and Linksys and seeing all of these different corporate environments has been fascinating. You really start to pick up on the corporate culture, you notice language patterns and discussion styles that are unique to a company. Its sort of like going to your best friends home and finding out that he’s just like the rest of his family.

Well, meeting Sergey was great. He was very unassuming. The way I described him, if you walked into a room of 10 people and said one of these people is a billionaire and the founder of the worlds most popular search engine, without knowing what he looked like, you wouldn’t be able to pick him out in 3 tries.