Hint to Wal-Mart…

UPDATE2: after a week, Carrefour is reportedly doing 1,200 gross adds per day...not bad at all in a fully-penetrated market of 44 million people. (via Xataka) UPDATE: A mysterious comment by "in the know" asks us to "watch this space", implying that Wal-Mart may indeed planning to enter the mobile market. If this is true, it would be really big news. Of course, so far it's just an anonymous comment left on a blog... The big news in Spain is that Carrefour, the second largest retailer in the world after Wal-Mart, is launching an MVNO this week.

It will easily be the cheapest prepaid offer on the market (15 cents/minute to call any phone on any operator, 12 cents/sms). A cheap contract offer is coming early next year.

In the UK, Tesco, the world's third largest retailer after Wal-Mart, has had a very nice success with its Tesco Mobile MVNO.

...all this begs the question: why doesn't Wal-Mart itself do an MVNO in the US?

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Startup watch: Weblogs SL turning into a major media opportunity

Madrid-based blog network Weblogs SL is on par with any of the world's leading blog networks.

Traffic has been skyrocketing all year, recently hitting more than 18 million page views and 4 million unique users per month. This is an organically grown, self-funded startup that is now pulling in a loyal audience that rivals some of Spain's largest media groups.

To put these figures in perspective internationally, compare those stats with other leading blog networks that have been in the news:

* Jason Calacanis was doing 30 million page views/month when he sold his Weblogs, Inc blog network to AOL last year for $25 million
* PopSugar, recently funded by Sequoia Capital,  is doing 20 million page views and 3 million uniques per month.
* Creative Weblogging, the leading German blog network, does 6 million page views and 2 million uniques per month.
* b5media, recently VC funded, does 2 million uniques per month.
* Shiny Media, the UK's leading blog network, does 1.9 million uniques per month.

I'd be surprised if these guys stay under the radar for much longer.

Well done to founder Julio Alonso, a former colleague, and his team on their success so far! Shame they're not based in Barcelona :)

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FON squashed overnight…

...and nobody seems to be talking about it.

For a while FON bragged how it was able to surpass the wifi networks of Telefonica and others in one fell swoop. Well, in an even bigger fell swoop, French ADSL provider free has simply opened up the wifi networks for its customers with the latest version of its set-top box (the 'freebox'), allowing them to roam on each others' networks and make free phone calls.

FON was proud to go from zero to 100,000 access points (most of which were never even activated) in under a year.

But Free has gone from zero to 300,000 overnight.

Imagine if Telefonica, or France Telecom, or Verizon - companies with tens of millions of customers, were to follow the example of free....

I think all this highlights that operators still have a lot of leverage here to make things happen, and quickly, *if* they have the will to do it. For FON, this should be a clear warning that bypassing the operators to go directly to the people will be very difficult. To survive, they should be working directly with all the incumbent operators to help them 'do a free'.

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Comcast welfare

Oh, dear. Om talks up Comcast's million VoIP customers, which is all fine and good, except that American VoIP continues to be a complete rip-off, whether provided by telcos or cablecos or Vonage. Om writes:

The growth has been so good that the company is adding 4000 jobs.
Umm, that's *not* something to be proud of. What are these jobs, lobbyists in DC? Free, in France, has gone from 0 to 2 million customers, and only employs 1,300 for the entire operation. For Free, Om might write:
The growth has been so good that the company is adding 4000 jobs generating enormous profits that are being reinvested into providing customers with state of the are fiber-optic connections for the same low price of 29.99 euros/month [pdf].

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Interesting idea…think about it.

Al Gore is proposing to replace payroll taxes with pollution taxes...that strikes me, on first reflection, as a very elegant way to align *everyone's* interests in promoting a clean environment.

The great side benefit would be the reduction of payroll taxes, which would mean companies would find it much more affordable to hire workers.

Very clever; I hope the blogosphere can help keep interesting ideas like this on the agenda during America's next presidential election in 2008.

Link: Gore says tax pollution, not payrolls | Politics News | Reuters.com

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Hello, I’m back

I've taken a nice blogging sabbatical pretty much all summer, but I miss writing so here we go again!

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The EIU screws up again

A few months ago I came down hard on the Economist Intelligence Unit for the sloppy research of their MBA rankings. Now a reader has sent me an extract from their recent worldwide cost of living survey, and again at least some of the research is just wrong (my comments in brackets):

BARCELONA - Three-course meal £14 [still possible, it's true] - 1-litre mineral water 44p [only if bought in a supermarket- why is this even in the survey?? mineral water must be like, 1% of average household spend, totally irrelevant INHO] - 33cl bottle of beer 40p [same as comment above] - City-centre bus ticket 59p [about right] - Football ticket: £18 [no idea- don't watch football] - One-bed flat £40-£50 pw [totally wrong. if you're lucky this budget gets you a room and a shared bathroom; ask any student!]
I'm no cost of living expert, but I can definitively say that this estimate for a 'one-bed flat' is off by a factor of at least 2. Possible explanations? The data could be 4-5 years old, and they have missed the rental inflation of the past few years. Or maybe their definition of 'Barcelona' includes the whole province. Or maybe someone just screwed up and wrote £40-£50 instead of the more realistic £100-£150. Housing being the single largest expense in most peoples' budgets, one would expect this statistic to be compiled with rather more care than say, the cost of a bus ticket. Like with the MBA rankings I previously wrote about, once you spot information in a report that you know with absolute certainty is complete rubbish, you're disinclined to trust any of the content in the report. Having seen this twice now in just a few months from the EIU is disheartening, and makes me wonder just how pervasive this sloppy research reaches across the organisation.

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JazzHell

Update: a reader points me to this post which cites an article claiming that 40% of Jazztel's claimed customer base have not had their service activated. I consider it unethical (and surely unprofitable) for this company to continue to advertise for new customers when it can't even activate 40% of the ones it already has.

Jeff Jarvis in the US had his DellHell; in Spain there is JazzHell.

Julio Alonso is tired of Jazztel's crap service, and so am I.

I signed up for the fancy 20 meg service *4 months ago* and never got to use it once. Repeated calls to customer service were pure torture: long wait times and endless transfers between departments only to be told that frankly they themselves had no idea what the status of the account was or when it might be activated.

Jazztel loves to blame Telefonica for obstructing their ability to activate lines; this may be totally true, partially true, or just a scapegoat for incompetence. I don't know, but it's hard to have any sympathy for Jazztel when I see their advertising plastered *everywhere* in major newspapers here trying to sign up new accounts, when I'm impatiently still waiting for mine to be activated.

So today (funny enough, before even reading Julio's post), decided to just give up and quit. Even this was pure torture, as some call center person endlessly reads from a script designed to 'save' your account....don't quit, we'll give you dialup for free...we'll give you a discount...we'll file a special priority ticket for your account....and so on. The final indignity: they put you on hold for 10 minutes, then come back and ask, "are you sure you still want to quit?", as if counting on me to give up and hang up before finishing.

Well, I'm done with it now. Adios, Jazztel!

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Startup Watch: Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Yahoo

Had a fun meeting with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, the director of Yahoo's new R&D center in Barcelona. Ok, so this isn't strictly a startup, but I think it's great to see academics like Ricardo take the leap out of the dull safety of academia into the dynamism of a new corporate lab; and I think it's great to see Yahoo diversify its presence (Ricardo's research center will be jointly operated in Barcelona and Santiago, Chile- the first R&D facilities for Yahoo outside the US). The opening of the center is an important event for Barcelona. The calibre of people who work in such facilities are the kind that every city in the world should be competing fiercely to attract. If you don't know about Ricardo, he's something of a guru in the field of Information Retrieval, where much of the advanced research in search technology takes place. One of his books in particular is probably on the bookshelf of every search engineer working for Google, Yahoo, et. al.

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Startup Watch: The Pando explosion

This is one hot company. Pando is a little software app that lets people send any size files to each other in a super easy way. It's got the first UI that I've ever seen that makes p2p file transfers dead simple. And it might just be the tool that finally allows BitTorrent technology to break into the mainstream. They've been in a closed beta, but the app leaked out into the public and has been rapidly spreading around the world at Skype-like growth rates. They are now moving over 12 terabytes a day, and have users in more than 130 countries. All without a penny spent in marketing, and in less than 60 days. But perhaps what really sets apart this company, beyond # of downloads and active users (which btw are phenomenal), is the emotional connection these guys are generating with users. One of the co-founders of Pando is my longtime friend Yaron Samid, and he recently showed me anonymized real-time logs of user feedback: all I can say is that every company in the world would kill to have this kind of user love. Crazy positive comments from people all over the world: using the app to send big presentations to clients, sharing wedding videos, kids, adults, hackers, newbies, Europeans, Chinese, Brazilians...and even when they criticize, the criticism is positive and encouranging- the users *want* this thing to succeed. The GUI is slick and they’re also building plug-ins for the top email services and Outlook so you can simply attach files and folders (up to 1GB) to any email as you would normally. The files don’t clog your or your recipient’s inbox because Pando only sends small (~10K) “.pando” files through your email service. Clicking the “.pando” files triggers an encrypted p2p swarm delivery between you, your recipients, and Pando’s own proxies. These temporary caching proxies ensure recipients can receive files even if the sender is offline at the time (a significant limitation of IM-style transfers). If they continue growing at current rates, this company will be a monster in 6-12 months. It's going to be fascinating to see how distribution of video content evolves this year. Pando is probably just one of many innovative startups that are going to really create new opportunities in this area, and as usual, the main beneficiary in the end will be consumers like us.

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