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What’s DEMO?
The Conference about the Future (Jan30 - Feb1)
Right before your eyes, more than 70 of the world’s most promising new technologies will be unveiled for the very first time. The hottest. The newest. The best. It’s a sneak peek at the future of the technology business.WiF:)) is going to be there in an exclusive coverage of the much anticipated Whisher launch. Refresh often to check back on the new WiFi sharing initiative news and see what the stir is all about. They promised to be big! We’re going to cover it and let you know how they do!
Stay tuned to wirelessisfun.com for the latest on innovation and technology.

Company profile

Address
Rambla Catalunya 12
Barcelona, Spain 08007
34-600-35-92-61
Company URL
www.whisher.com
Corporate Officers
Ferran Moreno, CEO & Founder
Mike Puchol, CTO & Founder

Product description

WHISHER gives consumers an extremely simple-to-use software application that instantly aggregates all WiFi networks into one, free global wireless community—without requiring new hardware or equipment.

Market

The last five years have seen an explosion in the adoption of WiFi. The convenience of such a cheap technology together with its ease-of-use has led to near ubiquitous WiFi signals and WiFi-enabled devices. There have been several initiatives aimed at offering free WiFi services within select regions, including Google’s WiFi network and various municipal wireless projects in the United States and abroad. Yet, all suffer from scalability problems, economic inefficiency and difficulties in assuring a minimum quality of service to the end users. (via DEMO.com)

DEMO Coverage

(All times are UTC/GMT-8)
Jan30 / 2AM - All hell broke loose when the news about Whisher, initially under embargo until launch, was spilled out by Erick Schonfeld. Everybody from wifinetnews.com to venturebeat.com rushed in to cover it and make the headlines. The news starts in great epic unfolding with a genuine fight between two of the day’s WiFi moguls: Fon’s Martin Varsavsky and Ferran Moreno, Whisher’s padrino.
According to Erick, Ferran said he was one of the founders of Fon. “I was running a wireless ISP, and presented the idea to Martin. After half a year, I didn’t want to continue with him. A week before launch, he wanted me to go 70/30 instead of 50/50 and put in more money.”
But Martin V. seems to disagree: “Ferran Moreno did not work for Fon. He was the CTO of a failed Swisscom company known as Air Bites. I considered investing in Air Bites but decided against it. He´s been telling people that he was involved with Fon, that is not the case. I had the idea of Fon in September of 2005, which, of course, I had and not him. I am a blogger the whole episode is well documented in my blog”.

This is a great Spanish melodrama, with a tech twist! We looove it!
But Whisher is what - why not brag about it since it’s there and moreso open news - we at c*free wireless thought of about a year ago and eventually touted at Fixed Mobile Convergence Summit in Amsterdam (March ‘06), a community based application to be deployed on top of any WiFi network, tied-up on protocols but free of any hardware dependance.
“The software also includes a local search function, and the ability for Whisher members to leave comments and tags about that WiFi hotspot as well as local stores, restaurants, hotels, bars, and the like. The comments can work s a message board for local events. You can also share files—music, movies, photos—locally (hello, piracy lawsuit).” we read on Erick’s page. Does anyone remember: the community application which will help hotspot users to browse other people’s shared resources, chat and get to finally look like they are all in one place through one unified, cross-platform, interface.

Here’s one of the first screenshots of the web interface for Wisher!

Jan30 / 5AM - We were granted access to the beta goodies and have been playing with for some time now! It’s cool! We only experienced the Mac app but the Whisher crew ensures us there’s all-round experience on all supoported platforms (Win, Mac, Linux).
I must confess I still feel a bit strained and unfamiliar with the UI but the layout is clean and straightforward. As expected there’s plenty of web2.0ish reflexions and icons, all in a Vodafone-ish red theme.
First thought was “this is more complex than I expected!”. It promises WiFi sharing in a crazy, radical way, social networking and geochaching, file sharing and obviously “so much more”.
Wild guessing a coupe of days ago returned just part of the truth. We said it was going to be about sharing stuff locally in friendly manner, but it turned out the pie was bigger.
Interestingly, the application has direct access to the WiFi layer, which I’ll get into a little later because of it’s implications.
It’s a few hours till the launch and we’d like not to disclose all the details of the new WiFi product before they make it public themselves.

Jan30 / 7AM - Whisher is Made in Romania!
Not surprisingly, with such great developers per capita, it appears that Whisher, or a good part of it, has been developed by a Romanian outsourcing company.

Jan30 / 8:45AM - whisher.com is up online.

Jan30 / 9:40AM - It’s only minutes after the website launch that articles appear on digg.com debating questionable Whisher email address privacy.
We’ve started having trouble loging in.
Update: this was later fixed for app login but not for the website yet.

Jan30 / 4:10PM - Om Malik thinks Whisher is overhyped and seriously doubts the business model behind this project. Read his arguements here! I’ll reffrain from arguing this now until we get a better picture and receive some numbers from Whisher.
What’s cool though is that, even if publicity, Martin Varsavsky’s Roman wresling with Ferran Moreno is in the news and promoting Whisher. And we’re doing it too, one would argue, like we were paid to do so. (we were not!) But wireless is fun we say, and the new Spanish start-up is the only one this week to make an impression in this promising telco ground. WiF will equally cover any other great initiative out there in the WiFi world!
We said it at c*free so many times before: Nobody has yet found the Holy Grail of WiFi! (Read full document here).
We dare Whiser and say not even them.

Jan31 / 00:20AM - Here’s the first video with DEMO preps we just got from Ferran Moreno

About 8 hours to go…
Stay tuned as we’ll come back with more Whisher exclusive coverage including video and pics from DEMO!

Feb1st / 4:12AM - It’s one more day until Whisher will have had the chance to convince all those generous VCs at DEMO that they got it right. And they have to do it in just 6 minutes. They are not allowed to show off any slides or other material but the product itself, in a functional live demo. Since we’re clean covering it until tomorrow, here’s some other news from the expo.
- Devicescape, a WiFi software developer that brags they have the universal solution to all hotspot authentication systems, is known from striking a deal with FON about a month back.
Their FAQ definition of the service: “The Devicescape is the collection of connected devices, networks and the people who use them”. WTF??? No, basically it’s just a software that helps auto-login to account-protected hotspots. They say it works on any device but even grandma knows that’s a big fat lie. They actually only cover WinXP and a marginal number of three and a half devices like the Nokia 770 Web tablet (wow, that’s mainstream!). And seriously guys, you should consider redesigning that website!
- DARTdevices is another have-to-do-with-wireless “startup” (ahem, founded in 2003) present at DEMO. What they hope to achieve is a “cool technology that provides a seamless way for diverse consumer entertainment devices, mobile gadgets and computers to interact, securely share and update information and applications. DART software provides peer-to-peer content access and distribution by effectively turning all devices into one virtual device.”
Now that sounds like a big WOW. But when dugg deeper it’s just a bunch of BS. The “diverse consumer entertainment devices” realm is a huge mess. They’ve been wooorking on this since 2003 but did you hear any buzz around them? Or did you see their never-mature software on your friend’s PDA?
Hoping to get all consumer devices out there connected to say show off a picture on both a TFT-enabled freezer and a generic mobile phone is pure madness! We know this guy who thought of an even better idea to have content on any device without tackling with proprietary platforms and software. He saw that it was so much simpler to attack this issue using the built-in browser most of today’s devices have and developed GOwidgets. He’ll tout the service in the upcoming weeks.

Of course there’s more interesting newcomers at DEMO but we’re in the wireless tech biz so we won’t cover startups like Zink dealing with zero ink printing.

We’ll come back with news on how Whisher made it. In the meantime you can definitelly read more on them and DEMO anywhere on the web. For example Om Malik thought our live coverage was a cool idea so he had his own team sent there.

Feb1st / 1.00PM - Whisher was unveiled. We’ll be back in about five hours with all the juicy stuff about their launch. Hit that refresh button hard!

Feb2nd / 12.00PM - Here’s how Whisher was presented in front of an audience of around 500. Just after Deviscape’s demo, Ferran Moreno (co-founder) came on stage to briefly explain the features of the application. The Windows version was shown on the screen. To that point the Linux version was not available for the public and the Mac app was still crashing randomly. Let’s recap the main features, pros and keywords that Ferran pointed out for Whisher:

- WiFi is ubiquitous.
- empowering wifi
- wifi is boring
- wifi is only access, not collaboration

- Whisher is a complete and collaborative wifi sniffer
- Whisher will enable anyone to access for free a whisher tagged wifi network
- web mirroing of data
- file exchange
- buddy lists of local users and friends
- chat
- local peer-to-peer file exchange
- geo-location info
- customizable profile
- message boards for location comments.
- a website inside the application

Main screen

The wifi sniffer details

Local file sharing

At the end of the given 6 minutes the app had ran fine, no crashes or sluggishness. Pretty impressive!
Watch the video and read other DEMO resources here!

We’re now done covering this event which was a neat close-up to the very birth of Whisher, one of the most interesting WiFi applications to date. After its launch I played with the app mostly on a Mac, the Linux and Windows versions still remain a mistery.
It’s not all about the application though. Not even about the WiFi sharing. It’s not about the file sharing either. But it’s about the way this application revolutionizes how we perceive wireless communication today. I have a hunch version one will not hit deep, but the next version might really take off.
I’m puzzled myself about using it and getting more from doing so. Is it that we’ve taught ourselves to master a more complicated and unfriendly wifi or is this way too revolutionary?

Let me settle my thoughts. I’ll come up with a more coherent analysis.

Also watch c|net’s “The Qeue” from Feb 1st where Whisher is nominated download of the day

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