Yannick Laclau

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?

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

…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’.