I've recently heard that FON, the wifi community, after losing more key staff has retrenched and is hunkering down for a "nuclear winter". The slimmed down FON, has cut it's burn down from $1m/month to closer to $200k/month and will focus on key markets including Japan, France and the UK. Despite the gloom it's heartening to see the deal I did with Stephen Stokols who was at the time VP Business Development and has since gone on to online dating greatness with WooMe continue to succeed - and now includes over 150,000 hotspots which makes it by far the largest wifi network in the UK.

Skype 4.0 rocks! It feels like it's been a long time in coming and seems to want to take over the whole screen but the new functionality and particularly bringing video to the fore is great. Skype missed out on the social networking opportunity during the go-go times - leveraging the buddy list and building a more comprehensive profile might have created Facebook before anyone knew what social networking was. And whilst networking has now been done the opportunity to create great experiences and conversations around entertainment be that music, video, photos or other media and sharing that with your friends still is a prize worth striving for. I really was hoping that it would be an integral part of this release making Skype an entertainment destination rather than handy communications tool and as history shows if Skype doesn't do it somebody else will. Even so you can't argue with a company that has over 300 million registered users and $400 million in revenues that was launched less than 5 years ago...

Looking at what is happening at Yahoo reminds me a lot of what happened to Arthur Andersen post Enron. Even though I had left AA by then I had a lot of friends caught up in the ensuing confusion. Similarly over the years I've gotten to know a lot of really strong Yahoos and its sad to witness the meltdown of thsi internet pioneer but I think Henry Blodget has it down: it's time for Yang to give his troops the Robert De Niro are you with me speech (click here)and gather a tight commando unit around him and cut loose the maybes before he completely loses control of the company he helped to create.