Whisher has achieved nothing, a pathetic small amount of users on their forums, and I would imagine an equally pathetic amount of real Whisher users.

Ferran, well this is a guy who makes a fully public declaration on (link) as to what he is going to do to the guy who’s flaming them. Quite amazing comments I must say.

How did Swisscom manage to back such a lame project?

Yes, but I don’t tell lies on my blog. Biased you say? Sure, tell me ONE blogger who is -not- biased…the problem is that people fail to admit this, at most we see the typical “Disclaimer: blah blah”, if that.

I have been critic with Fon, and receiving a free Fonera did not change my views as it has happened to a good number of people. Fon is not a competitor to Whisher if you really look at it, we can work on top of Foneras, just that the press likes to look at the gory details and confrontation. I just don’t like when someone manipulates people into believing they are joining some sort of ‘movement’, and you see the neglect and disdain they treat those very users on the forums, just as an example.

I also did an honest review of the Fonera on a hardware level, and while it gets hot, power management is not as good as it could be, and the RF side could be better laid out, it’s not a bad device. I also pointed out a serious flaw in their online maps service, that could have allowed a malicious user to reposition all their routers, and gave them information to help them fix it - following proper reporting procedure, not making it public until they had solved the issue.

So, biased, probably yes, untruthful or dishonest, definitely not.

If I am Mr. Whisher, who are you by the way? It would be nice to know where your comments are coming from…

The idea of the maps is to show the registered and tagged access points, and we will be improving them and adding new features. Since our metric of success is the number of Whisher users, not the number of access points that people register, our statistics will be published through other means - this could include figures on the map too.

You have to remember that many of the features Whisher offers work on top of any WiFi, even those which are not tagged or registered. WiFi sharing is just one of the many possibilities we offer, and certainly not the only one.

Regards,

The flash map shows the top cities in terms of shared WiFis, while the second (based on Google maps) shows the details at a street level of those shared WiFis.

But we don’t have any place where people can see how many Whisher registered users are, and that’s something we will be adding shorly.

I guess this is the answer to your question.

Regards,

I thought the idea of the maps was to show information, and how many users. Are you saying this data on your web site does not reflect the real amount of users?

You are right about the forums & blog - our idea was to have a seamless integration between the Whisher client and the website, so once you created an account on the client, the same login details would work with the forum and blog, thus not requiring you to re-register. This is working up to the forum database, but the linkage to the login mechanism of the web pages is being sorted. In any case, we apologize.

Working on a live site is not the same, it gives you much less flexibility in applying changes quickly, but we hope to have things resolved in a matter of hours. Our forums will be monitored by me and others at Whisher, and believe me, they -will- be treated seriously.

Passive:

We have just launched, and you don’t know our statistics. Time will tell, of course!

The number of users is tiny, so I assume that “support” is not really required anyway at this time.

I think any of the downloads, and possible registrations will be just people who have a passing interest, which will play with it, and then walk away.

Time will tell if I am wrong, but I doubt it

The comment was based on the fact that we cannot post in the forums and that there are no news on the site as to possible problems fixed, or updates, as well as the maps are not showing actual users. There is a general lack of news on the site, do you agree?

Now as for the forums that may be a good thing, Fon has forums which are not treated seriously and the worst things are said there.

Thanks.

May I ask you why you think our customer service and support is so bad? Because so far we’ve answered to all the requests and solved almost all…

Otherwise please let me know because we can help you out for sure.

Regards,

Une nouvelle start-up espagnole vient de voir le jour et a été dévoilée au DEMO 2007, il s’agit de WHISHER.

Créée par Ferran Moreno ce dernier n’a pas hésité à utiliser un superbe buzz pour se répandre sur la toile.

En effet ce dernier …

Aside from airports and hotels and may be restaurants, it is very hard to expect any revenue from any other hotspots. Therein lies FON’s problems. It is doubtful they have any meaningful service revenue at all. The only solution I see for their woes is to make their low cost router a full blown router - and become another router vendor. That is a daunting task, but it seems to be their only option to survive. Today you can install better 3rd. party firmware on the Fonera and it becomes a better router, so there is some potential if they went that route. Their other choice was to become a voice operators for wi-fi phones, but the competition is little tough there and they don’t control people’s DSL or cable.

As for Whisher, yes, their customer service and support is as bad as FON today and their site is still semi stealth. Let’s wait and see.

I very much prefer to log-on to a fon acces point which so far worked very well for me!