After seeing the innertee.net site I was pretty impressed. Then I heard that they are up for an award at SXSW and I got really impressed. The idea is really cool and the implementation looks attractive and very custom. I got a chance to speak with Miles Sims one of the cofounders of the site.

innerTee Company, Community, Site

First and foremost the site is an artist community. The site provides the artists a way to share and be creative in a new format. The format that they are currently using is tee shirts and remixes of tee shirt designs. Artists contribute artwork (elements) which then must be approved before they are available to the general public. This keeps the quality high. Visitors of the site can combine into mixes of multiple elements to create a custom and pleasant design. It's basically an "open source" approach to tee shirt design.

innerTee and Drupal

The ideas for the site really launched about a year ago. That explains why, when you check out their blog why it's written in wordpress. A year ago that made the most sense. Once they had a blog up they started looking for technologies to make an artist community site with an ecommerce twist and - no surprise here - they found Drupal. They started with no outsider funding and still don't have any, so building from scratch seemed daunting. According to Miles, "Drupal gave them a leg up in development of a full site."

FON has just announced in a variety of places that they received 10million euros to help them spread more routers around the world. That's great news for them as a company and recently they've taken steps that I believe will make the business more sound as well.

Flaws with old FON business model

FON's original model was to give away routers for free. This got them lots of new "subscribers" and lots of new "foneros" (people who have a router) but it didn't necessarily grow the network very much. There were lots of posts on this topic when they originally released their maps product which allowed users to figure out that in fact, FON has a large number of "subscribers" but very few people have turned on their routers and get any real use out of them for making money for anyone. FON's response wasn't to justify the rate of conversion, but to disable the ability to gather those statistics. That was really dumb.

FON's current model - downplay the Linus and Focus on the Bill

I've believed all along that the "Linus" model was flawed and especially flawed when combined with a free router (an old post if Linus and Bill in terms of FON are new to you). If people are not motivated to earn money from their router AND they can get that router for free then they will get a free router and never turn it on (or reflash it and turn it on). That FON should instead focus solely on the "bills" or should charge more money for their routers has always been my feeling.

My post about angies list kicked off such a storm of comments I figured I'd try it out again:

What is the best Denver Tea Shop?

Looking at the Fun Denver wiki there's not a whole lot of great entries under "Tea Houses" aside from the one on capital tea. So...what is the best place?

Please - add a comment and let me know your favorite Tea Shop in Denver.

Well, according to this comment on my site we'll have an IKEA in Fort Collins in the next 18-24 months. By my calculations that would be 2008 or 2009. Well, that works pretty well for me. It's been a long damn time that we've had to suffer sans-ikea here in Colorado and and an IKEA in Fort Collins would be a good bit closer than the IKEA in Utah.

This past weekend I went to New York for a bachelor's weekend for my friend Marty. We're all hip progressive guys but we're still men so on Saturday night we went to a strip club:

(photos after the break)

Just kidding. But we did go to Smoke in Harlem where we got a photo of Marty and "Dr. Lonnie Smith".

Also, my friend the "blogged" about it on his non blog. Looks a lot like blogging to me. Welcome, to 2003, T.

I'm working from Capital Tea this afternoon and they have two new teas:

Black Jasmine Creme Tea
Black tea with jasmine flowers and vanilla

Immortalitea (get it, immortality tea)
Grean tee with lemon, rosemary and sage.

Of course I just had a chai which I love, but these new teas seemed like interesting flavor combinations.

I haven't written about FON in a while. It's still an interesting idea, but I fear that the execution of that idea is too weak to make it successful. If they succeed it will be the triumph of the idea over the execution.