Speakers

Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky was born in 1961 in Argentina. At the age of 16, he moved with his family to the United States as a refugee. He earned a bachelors degree in international relations from NYU and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Columbia University.

In 1990, Varsavsky founded Viatel. Viatel used a system to provide long distance services to customers based outside the United States, in particular to Argentina. As the callback business became more crowded, the company's focus shifted to other areas ( especially Europe) of telcommunications, which was just beginning to open to competition. In 1998, Varsavsky focused on his new company, Jazztel. He sold most of his shares in Viatel. Jazztel concentrated on developing a fiber-optic network across Spain, and competing directly with former state monopoly Telefonica. In 2000, he started Einstein.net, a company based in Germany, which planned to rent software to companies, providing access to it over broadband Internet connections.

Martin's current venture is FON, founded in November in 2005, a community-empowered company dedicated to building the world's largest global WiFi network bottom up, spreading the power of WiFi around the world, with one million hot spots by 2010. Fon attracted Skype, eBay and Google as partners and quickly became the largest WiFi community in the world.

 

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