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Fon raises $14 million from Qualcomm to boost sharing of Wi-Fi, music

Spanish Wi-Fi sharing company Fon has raised $14 million from Qualcomm Ventures, VentureBeat reports. It’s an indication that Fon’s collective approach to sharing bandwidth, while slow-growing, still has some attraction to investors — particularly a strategic investor like Qualcomm, which makes chips for broadband wireless communications. It might also be finding some traction now that the notion of “collaborative consumption” is catching on, thanks to startups like AirBnB and Lyft — although Fon predates those startups by several years. Fon will use the funding to develop a new device, based on Qualcomm’s Atheros chipset, that enables users to share music as well as their broadband signals, Recode reports. In addition, Qualcomm will build Fon’s Wi-Fi sharing capabilities into its own Atheros chipset, GigaOm states…

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