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!

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.

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.

James Enck is overwhelmed by Telco news coming in from all quarters and comments on Telefonica’s doubling last quarter of its IPTV users, saying it “ain’t bad“.

I guess it isn’t, but IPTV has no future. It appears to be fresh and promising, but is actually dead on arrival.

IPTV is the Vonage of new video distribution….expensive, unscalable, uninnovative, and being leapfrogged by net-centric alternatives.

The same way Vonage is being wrecked by much nimbler competitors such as Skype, IPTV will get wrecked by YouTube or iTunes or some other better service.

Update: Ok, Scott Faber comments below that I may have jumped the gun in judging Ether so quickly. So I’ve gone and had a closer look, and I’ve changed my opinion. The difference with Keen is actually very important, and this implementation could really be very powerful. Scott’s PayPal/eBay analogy was helpful in communicating the difference.

My main critique at this point is that everyone has to pass via the same 800 number. Why not give each person a distinct number (or at least let them choose)?

Oh, and kudos to Scott for reaching out to me, and probably many other bloggers who misinterpreted the Ether product as a Keen rehash.

I just saw on TechCrunch that super-stealth Ether to launch tonight….

Things come full circle for this company: they started as Keen, then became Ingenio, and now are launching Ether, which turns out to be exactly what Keen originally was!

I suppose it’s a measured risk. There are plenty of businesses that are working today that would never have worked 5 years ago because of growth in the meantime of broadband penetration, comfort with ecommerce, etc.

So why not bring back Keen from the dustbin? But then again, maybe there was a reason it failed in the first instance. Ingenio should probably just stick to it’s booming, solid business of pay-per-call.