PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Martin Varsavsky is the founder and CEO of FON (as well as being the founder of highly successful companies such as Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com). FON is a community of people who share WiFi. If you sign up with FON you share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and you get free access to other FON points wherever they exist.

FON announced last night that it has just raised €18 million from Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. This puts FON in a very enviable position - they have partnerships with some of the biggest names in the business, they have money and they have a cool mission (WiFi Internet Access Everywhere).

Unfortunately Martin had 80 (I think he said 80) newspaper interviews waiting to talk to him after me so this was the shortest interview I have done to date!

Here are the questions I asked Martin and the times in the interview at which I asked them:

Martin, can you tell me what was the announcement you made yesterday? - 0:38

There have been several efforts to do something like this previously - how is Fon different from these previous efforts? - 1:05

You are going to have an issue with ISPs, I imagine, whose Terms of Service regularly disallow sharing of wifi networks. How are you going to get around this? - 2:32

As you can see, I didn’t quite get around to all the questions I had prepared - nor did I get to ask the questions submitted by readers of my blog - sorry guys - hopefully next time.

Download the interview here (2mb mp3)