FON announces Liberator, adds NAS

Remember Fon, that new startup straight outta Spain? Yeah, the one that got funding from Google and Skype and then started selling subsidized Linksys routers? Well, Fon is doing all it can to bring more members into the fold, what with its giving away free routers in San Francisco not long ago and all. However, Fon's not quite done yet; according to our main man Mr. Malik, the one behind GigaOm, Fon has just acquired GSpace for an undisclosed sum. For those of you who aren't familiar with this Firefox extension, it turns those empty gigabytes on your Gmail account into online storage space with an FTP-like interface. GigaOm goes on to tell us that GSpace will be included in the new FON device, known as the FON Liberator and will be launched in February 2007. It's basically the same thing as the current FON router (pictured), except with the addition of a USB 2.0 port, allowing you turn your your thumb drive, iPod, or whatever other USB device into a NAS without much fuss. That's pretty FON-tastic, no?

[John Stracke @ Nov 6th 2006 11:24AM]

Pretty cool. One interesting note: it runs on OpenWRT, which is a Linux distribution derived from the Linux OS of the original Linksys WRT54G. In other words, because Linksys built on top of Linux, they wound up giving back to the community, to the extent of creating a new competitor.

[Olivier @ Nov 6th 2006 2:01PM]

And when google closes all the users' accounts for infringement of EULA and the Fonera users loose all their data I would like to see what FON will have to say..

[Nilz @ Nov 6th 2006 6:12PM]

@ Olivier: You forgot that Google stands behind fon.com as an investor, so I think, Google has agreed to this idea.

cheers, nilz