Yannick Laclau

UPDATE (at the end!)
UPDATE2 below!

Renegade French broadband provider Free are adopting a nuclear weapons survival strategy.

They’ve just distributed an amazing press release. The highlights:

- Free have lab tested ADSL running at 174 mb/s down / 18 mb/s up.
[translation: we are actively seeking nuclear weapons]

- These speeds are achieved using paired ADSL2+ technology, using their existing DSLAM infrastructure, without any modifications required.
[translation: this is no joke; we've got the goods- reactors, uranium, etc.]

- There are no plans at present for any commercial deployment.
[translation: don't panic. we're not crazy enough to use our nukes, but we could if provoked]

- Deployment of this service, called F-ADSL, requires no new capital spending
[translation: haha, you capitalist (incumbent telco) swine. Go ahead, spend billions on absurd missile defense systems (or on laying fiber everywhere!). My nukes are cheap, and will cause you much more pain than yours will ever cause me]

I can only guess this is all to help Free position itself for an endgame where it both survives and wins the shift to the next generation of broadband upgrades:

1. Value boosting PR for a buyout [yo, world? Anybody wanna buy some nukes? I've got some]
2. Avoiding a damaging capex war that they wouldn’t win ["look competitors, let's stick to this path- cheap upgrades to existing infrastructure; don't do the expensive fiber thing...please. I'll even wait to launch my product to give you time to catch up."]
3. Preemptively destroy any chance FT could have of doing a Verizon FIOS in France ["still thinking about that expensive fiber plan? well, don't. I'm telling the world's capital markets as of today that spending on fiber upgrades is a path that will only end in tears: You spend a billion, I spend nothing, we both offer the same product to the same customers."]

This is the asymmetric warfare that Kim Jong-Il has basically used to stalemate his much larger and better capitalized American enemy for years now. This is brilliant strategic work by Free.

UPDATE:

- Free is *slowly* starting to break out of the francosphere, and getting more attention in the English-language press: BusinessWeek has just published this good profile (although no mention of the new F-ADSL product)

- Om cites a report that Verizon is actually thinking about selling 1 meg broadband using its fancy multi-billion dollar FIOS fiber network. This is absolutely hilarious. "1 meg over fiber?"….puh-lease!…where’s that "174 meg over copper"? Consumers want to know, and soon, enough, your investors will, too

TelcoThink is just tragic: thankfully they were never in charge of developing the automotive industry. They would have asked capital markets to support them in multi-billion dollar investments in 10-lane expressways, so that they could then sell consumers "low-cost" and "accessible to the masses" products like horse-drawn carriages and personal donkeys.

UPDATE2: Dave Burstein kindly contributes his perspective in the comments. He’s looking into it, but questions how revolutionary the product really is. It seems that the key is *how many* paired ADSL2+ lines are needed to achieve that magical 174 mb/s. Free’s press release doesn’t say; are we talking about 2-4 lines or 10-15? It’s important because the economics of the product will revolve around that number.

FYI- if you don’t know Dave Burstein, he publishes by far the best newsletter on all things related to broadband (particularly good for global news and technical/infrastructure news – hence his comments are much appreciated).

Had drinks last night with Oscar Frias and Daniel Katime, the two founders of Trabber.com.

They’ve built a cool, simple website that is a real-time search engine for flights. Very clean and easy to use, it delivers good results. They originally caught my attention among the list of companies in the WebDosBeta conference.

Oscar & Daniel have bootstrapped Trabber in their spare time while holding down full-time jobs. In addition to good techical performance and a clean UI, I like the way they’ve managed to incorporate community elements like forums and a blog to stay in touch with their users.

Their space is very competitive in the US, but I haven’t really seen the American players localizing for European audiences. And there don’t seem to be many European startups in this area (I think Mobissimo was originally French, but as soon as they were funded they headed stateside) So there’s a real opportunity for Trabber to take on the Mobissimo/Kayak/SideStep role in Europe.

Good guys. Always fun to meet with local entrepreneurs working hard to create something new and innovative. Hope they can take it to the next level.

Give it a try: Trabber :: buscador de vuelos baratos.

UPDATE: A reader asked whether the comment was more likely written by a staffer of Sarkozy. My thought is, so what if it was? It still demonstrates a level of web-savvy and connectedness with people that Villepin’s/Chirac’s people don’t have.

Also, the comments on the thread in question are full of people who wrote that they were Nicolas Sarkozy. To find the actual comment he posted, search for the comment posted at "7:12 AM"

UPDATE2: Wow. Hello, Instapundit readers. Happy Thanksgiving out there in the US

Via Loic LeMeur, I learn that Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Interior Minister, has posted a comment on a blog.

How cool is that?

Starting one’s own blog is already a big step forward in communicating with people, but posting comments on other people’s blogs is really getting down in the trenches. The commentsphere brings out the good, bad, and ugly of people; it’s the land of typos, flaming insults, and heated debate….very impressive for Sarkozy to get his thoughts out there this way.

The contrast between him and his rivals for the French presidency is…stunning: Sarkozy is out commenting on blogs side-by-side with other commenters that freely insult him, while Dominique de Villepin is out writing books on Napoleon and diplomatic history.

People may not like his ideas, but it’s *no contest* that he’s much more dynamic, and in touch with what people are thinking, than Villepin or Chirac.

I like the Internet-savvy (very Howard Dean), and hope he pushes the envelope here in France’s next presidential elections; and I like his roll-up-your-sleeves attitude to problem-solving (very Rudy Giuliani).

It’s a shame people like this don’t live on and on, but at least the world had the privilege of his company for 95 years.

In addition to an amazing analytical mind, he had the ability to express, with simple clarity and folksy humor, very complicated business issues, and was one of my favorite business writers for that reason.

I’m sorry to see him go.

Links:

Thoughts from Drucker’s grandson
Good article on Yahoo! News.

Sorry for the silence lately- been busy coding up a storm (well, by my standards at least!).

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to beta-test MeasureMap, a new blog stats tracking tool created by AdaptivePath, the folks who invented the buzzword AJAX.

Anyway, I really like it, but with caveats. As you’d imagine, it’s AJAX-intensive. Yet this makes it feel like a nice add-on, but not substitute, for a the simpler, spreadsheet-like stats of say, StatCounter.

One example of what I mean is: visitors sorted by country. On statcounter you get a spreadsheet, with lots of clickable data. But on MeasureMap, you get a picture of the world, with different countries in different shades of red to give a visual representation. The same data, but I wouldn’t want one over the other…they seem more complentary to me. And the same is true for the other features.

Maybe that’s ok, although I’m not sure if it’s the positioning the AdaptivePath folks are seeking.

In the past week, my blog has been visited by people in 40 countries. This is about consistent from week to week lately. But it took actually seeing those countries shaded in on MeasureMap’s world map to truly appreciate how amazing that figure actually is: one lone blogger in Barcelona, able to connect with people in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Chile, Iran, Macedonia, and other countries outside the usual suspects (USA & West. Europe).

There may be limited analytical value in working from a flash/ajax-ed map, but there’s value in its ability to stimulate reflection and perspective.

UPDATE: Looks like journalists at the FT have also seen this movie before: Link

It’s the shining star of the UK mobile phone industry, with a bright and powerful brand that is attractive to youth segments, and is the fastest growing network. Its marketing is seen as innovative and fresh, optimistic, and even a little daring.

And now it’s being bought out by an incumbent phone company from continental Europe, a lumbering, former state-monopoly grossly overstaffed, overcapitalized, and overpoliticized, is now over here overpaying…..

wait a second. I’ve seen this movie before. This is France Telecom buying Orange about 5 years ago. Boorrrrrrrinng.

In fact, I’ll spoil things by telling you the ending: All the good people at O2 leave over the next couple years, the brand remains but lack of new ideas makes it start to look tired and past its prime, and finally net adds and revenue growth starts to lag behind competitors.

But at least the plot will prepare us for a cool sequel!

Here’s the plot: Lumbering former state monopoly telco, distracted by overseas adventures, neglects major threats to home market and core products. The climax is an epic, Titanic-like sinking of the incumbent telco with remaining employees getting out while they can as last diehards insist that the band must play on.

I hear they’re thinking of casting Jazztel for the part of home market threat, but are undecided between Skype, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and many others eminently qualified to play the part of core product threat.