Fon’s CEO Martin Varsavsky introduces the Gramofon on Kickstarter

Fon’s CEO Martin Varsavsky introduces the Gramofon on Kickstarter


Serial entrepreneur and Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky officially introduced his foray into the music space today with the Gramofon which launched as a Kickstarter campaign.

Fon is the largest WiFi network in the world, with over 13 million hotspots, and the Gramofon is an extension of that device but developed with music streamign as its primary feature.

The Gramofon allows users to simply connect the device to a sound system and to the internet, connect an Android or iOS device to its WiFi singnal and then stream music from Spotify or from the Gramofon’s free radio service which is powered by WahWah (integrations with more music services are coming soon).

The company relies on Facebook to automatically grant friends visiting your home access to the Gramofon's network and music capabilities. As the Gramofon is essentially also a Fon router, having this in your house will also allow you to access the 13 million other Fon hotspots around the world, making it pretty handy for international travel.

The company stresses that the Gramofon’s strength over other music streaming solutions for the home is that it does not rely on bluetooth but on WiFi, thus overcoming range and signal issues. The company prototyped the Gramofon from a Raspberry Pi but then re-engineered it from the ground up around a new chip by Qualcomm which allowed them to achieve the size and price point they wanted.

The company says it also plans to add SoundCloud, Google Play, Songza, Rhapsody, Pandora, Rdio, Deezer, Slacker to the mix, but my guess is that the recording industry won’t be too thrilled to see the Grooveshark logo be the first one on the list…

The device starts at $30 dollars (limited to the first 400) going up to $40, $50 or $60 depending on the colour and how quickly you pledge for it.

Will the Gramofon take the world by storm? Even if it will be hard to achieve the level of publicity of Neil Young’s recent Pono campaign which is going to close today having raised just over $6 million, the company has got something here in providing what’s essentially a similar functionality to the Sonos without the attached price tag. The result of the Kickstarter effort will definitely be a good indicator of whether the market is prepared to adopt the Gramofon.


(Andrea Leonelli)