I had a chance to meet with Joanna Rees, who is not only a venture capitalist with VSP Capital but also the Chief Fonera of Fon USA. Oh, and she sits on the boards of companies like Posit Science, Sabrix, AccountNow, Danger, QuinStreet, The Threshold Group and NVCA.

No doubt, we had a lot to talk about – especially Fon, which is a peer-to-peer system to share WiFi services. Investors include biggies like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Skype, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and so on.

And, this week, Fon received an additional $9.5 million in venture capital.

Basically, Fon has a unique business model. That is, if you allow free broadband access on your computer, you can get free access when you roam. Or, if you don't want free access, you can pay for it from fellow Foneros. So far, there are about 170,000 routers on the Fon system.

While viral marketing is important, there are also key strategic relationships, which is something that Rees has focused on. For example, there are key alliances with Time Warner Cable and British Telecom (which is an investor).

Martin Varsavsky, the founder of FON, has an interesting blog post on the funding. He's also fairly blunt about the current market: "We already cut losses at Fon from $1.3 million per month to $800K per month in the last half year and we achieved this through cost reductions, a great reduction in router subsidies and increased revenues with high margins. We plan to do more of the same in the future and my target is to be losing half a million per month by June and to break even by the end of 09. And yes I do know that I should not be telling any of these things because we are a private company but if this blog is of any value to entrepreneurs I believe I must share them with you."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.