Flaptor

This morning I was in a meeting with a number of entrepreneurs including Martin Varsavsky from Fon. He gave a nice presentation about the concept. I got a Fonera (FON’s wifi router) at the from the meeting, which we promptly set up at Flaptor’s office. It’s a neat concept, I won’t explain it here in detail as you can read all about it on the site. Essentially, sharing some of your bandwidth allows you to use Fon’s worldwide network for free. In order for something like this to take off it needs a significant critical mass, obviously there needs to be an abundance of FON access points in major cities. Martin showed some charts that make it look like it could happen in 2007, and it sure helps to have strategic partners like Google and Skype. I’ll keep my eye on it, and will look up FON access points when I travel.

Flaptor is mostly about search but sometimes people want to do other stuff. I read once (I believe it was on Peopleware) that when people feel passionately about a project, it’s usually a bad idea to stop them. This is how Bonoki was born. Mono, Rafa, Pancho and Pasto have been working on it for the past quarter. If nothing else, it was a good playground to learn some user interface technologies, perhaps it will become something more. For now, it’s a good place to post and comment on each others’ pictures. It’s still getting started although we refuse to put a Beta logo on it (that’s so 2005!).

Check it out, all feedback (however harsh) is welcome!

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
(falsely attributed to) Charles H. Duell
Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

When we think of searching for information, we imagine a text box on a white page with a button next to it. Type a few words, get a list of links and snippets of web pages in a fraction of a second. This interface has remained pretty much unchanged for the past decade. Google perfected it by eliminating unnecessary clutter and leaving just the essential inputs and outputs. Now, time for some rhetorical questions. Is this it? What will the experience of searching for information will look like ten, twenty, one hundred years from now? Is there room for a third question?
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