Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Debitel becomes first MVNO in France

Debitel, the mobile phone reseller sold last month by Swisscom to private-equity fund Permira - for €430m after deduction of a vendor credit loan, announced yesterday that they will become the first MVNO in France (le JdN has the story).
Debitel, more of an Enhanced Service Provider (ESP => they resell other mobile phone companies's contracts) is present in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Slovenia and Denmark.

This deal is signed with SFR for 9 years and includes GSM, GRPS (2 hours/m for 25€, 8 hours/month for 64€)and SMS traffic (sold at 0,09€ insted of current market average price of 0,12€), but does not yet include UMTS. Il will target mainly new customer segments (those mentionned include immigrants, new mobile users, and the teen population). Debitel will rebrand its own SIM cards, decide its pricing structure (cost-plus or retail-minus???), be able to create new services, manage customer service and bill directly.

Coriolis Telecom is expected to sign a deal with SFR soon as well.

Read my previous post and follow the links in the comments for more background on the MVNO market in France.

An evening with Dany Brillant

Back to the atmosphere of jazz clubs last night where I attended a fun show by french crooner Dany Brillant.
His style is yet uncertain (a lot of this, a bit of that), although you can definitively feel the influences of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr on the one hand for the swing and of Charles Aznavour on the other hand for the lyrics. The man (with a look closer to a life guard than of a poor jazz musician in St-Germain...) jumps around stage, talks about his life, and performs well. I noted a key difference last night from when I used to see him perform on TV a few years ago: the man now has a real voice, and can definitively deliver, although he should stick to french lyrics (comparison with the other guys is a bit hard), and learn how to dance something else on some of his tunes than Jive and Rock n' Roll (salsa and rumba would be great candidates). He had a weird indian-ish song (difficult to sing and not well suited to his style), but also an arab-ish style song from his native Tunisia which he delivered beautifully. The rest was really more in the jazzy note, with some of his greatest hits, which made people really want to dance, although difficult in such a small club.
He reminded me of Harry Connick Jr quite a lot when I saw him perform at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées a couple of years ago with his big band (if you ever get a chance to attend one of his performances, go!). Interestingly, Dany Brillant recorded his last album with the producer and musicians of Harry!

So if you like listening to Jazz in a small club (hey... the Village Vanguard is not next door), surrounded by mid-thirties ladies in adoration :), with a small band (keyboards, bass/electrical bass, drums, percussions, teno sax/clarinette/flute, trumpet, electric guitar), you can still catch him tonight at Le Petit Journal Montparnasse at 21h30-ish, for 30€ with a drink. Enjoy it.

Wireless Machine 2 Machine market...

I blogged earlier about the prospects of new wireless access technologies including WiMax, Ultra-Wide Band and Zigbee. The latter technology has a rather short range (something in between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), but is targeted at machine to machine communications. One recent article (can't find it at the moment) gave an example of folks in the Napa Valley, putting Zigbee sensors in their vineyards (control of humidity, etc.) with the control center a couple of hundred yards away. Cool application. (pix to the left taken from www.CasaLapostolle.com, really one of the top 3 vineyards in Chile - try their Chardonnay! voted best in the world in 1999).
A marketing manager at Orange was telling me recently that M2M is where they are seeing most of their growth these days in the wireless world (coke distributors or copier machines dialing back to a control center), but most of the mass media press is concentrating on B2C coverage, neglecting this very large market.

Forbes has a new story on m2m and on ZigBee as well.

Great companies to follow

Always great fun to follow what Alex Vieux has to day in the tech / private equity world. I once shared a flight with him on my way to the Bay Area with someone, and we were holding a big manila folder (looked like a B-plan...). Guess what the conversation was all about during that 11 hours flight !
If you haven't caught up with him recently, you may have met him in the fever years of the Internet Bubble when he was hosting such conferences as the invite-only ETRE, or other DASAR events such as Startech. Alex has recently acquired the REDHERRING brand and holdings and is actively promoting it. He even hosts 2 blogs, one of the future of the world, and one on the now of the world ;)

His recent RedHerring conference introduced the best 100 private companies in his views. Very trendy indeed, as they include the latest buzz words... social networking (with folks such as LinkedIn and Plaxo), VoIP (with Vonage, Netcentrex...), mobility (In-Fusio - also a winner at MEM'04, Valista...) and many more.

If you are in a hurry, there's even a shortlist of the top 10 companies to keep an eye on ...

MEF elects new chair: Patrick Parodi

Please join me in congratulating Patrick Parodi on being elected last tuesday the new Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, 'promoted' from last year's job as vice-chair. More on him in my previous post, where I mentionned he was a candidate for the job. Another great French Entrepreneur, Gilles Babinet, Founder & CEO of Musiwave also joins the board. I'll have to blog shortly on him as well. He's a great personnality and fantastic entrepreneur.

A press release on the new MEF Board is due tomorrow, but hey... crisp news on mobility come on this blog first :oD

PS: Patrick is very excited that this blog comes up as the first hit on google.com when you search for his name... of all the interviews he's given in the past ?!? I guess it is because I syndicate the content to a number of meta-blogs, a cool feature by the folks at typepad.com.

Wi-Fi enabled devices featured on Forbes

It seems the folks at Forbes are riding the Wi-Fi tide as well. They have a fun little animation presenting some of the latest consumer Wi-Fi devices (predicted on this blog for a while) in another article:

"Wi-Fi is starting to show up in some unexpected places--like printers, cameras and car stereos (see "Roam Sweet Roam," Dec. 8, 2003). The latest batch of devices typically aren't much more expensive than their corded cousins, and the best of them can do quite a lot more, so go ahead and cut the cord. "

15 winning stocks in Wi-Fi

Forbes has a recent story in which they sustain a rapid growth in Wi-Fi adoption, and hence in value of the stock of some of the Wi-Fi manufacturers. Who wants to bet ?
Excerpt:
"Wi-Fi is faster than a cable modem and much faster than 3G. It's also cheaper. Wi-Fi access points cost only $1,000 to $1,500 each. Already some hotels and cafes offer free access, absorbing the cost into the price of a room or a cup of coffee (3G users, by contrast, can expect to pay a pretty penny, at least initially). But unlike 3G networks, a Wi-Fi access point requires you to be within 200 feet or so to use it. In an airport, a Wi-Fi network would need to be made up of many access points.

Wi-Fi will get another boost as voice-over-Internet Protocol--an inexpensive way to route phone calls over the Internet--extends to voice-over-Wi-Fi, where cell phone users access Wi-Fi networks to make cheap or even free calls. "

MVNOs arriving in France before the summer

The general manager of SFR was interviewed by Valerie Lecasble this morning on BFM radio: he confirmed his company would be signing an MVNO deal (check my previous post) with a large player on the French before the summer, although he refused to confirm it would be The Phone House (bets are on!). He mentionned he was also discussing with other players, although talks with Tele2 have been suspended.

ART, the french telecom regulatory body has a page on MVNOs.

(BTW, I don't understand how BFM manages its audio archives, extremely difficult to find anything of relevance on their website. Someone should tell them...)

Portable video players competing with the iPod and mobile phones

I have been predicting that the next generation of iPods will be featuring color screens and wireless connectivity. Well the Taiwanese industry has already addressed the first concern, producing a number of color-screen video players, that also play of course MP3 music and many more formats. As always they've also included new differentiating factors: DiVx playback, etc.

Wireless connectivity is not yet included, however some of these devices already can run Java applications specifically written for mobile phones. The blurring of frontiers between all portable devices is continuing at a very fast pace.

The Register has the story:
"PQI has looked beyond video and music: the mPack also runs Java games written for mobile phones, and contains its own text viewing and editing apps - though without a keyboard, the latter can't be an easy task. There's also an FM radio in there, and since the device mounts as an external hard drive, you can store other data too."

"Apple has publicly said that it doesn't believe video is a killer mobile app, but the iPod certainly has the potential today to be given photo display capabilities - support is already there in the PortalPlayer engine. And with Sony launching personal video players in Japan this month - probably round the world later in the year - and iRiver readying its own video player, the H300, Apple may be forced down such a path."

Please confirm uninstall

We are all becoming accustomed to web sites that ask you to verify your identity as a human, in order to fight bots trying to spam your mailbox or newsgroups.
One such as tool is www.mailblocks.com that attempts to fight your spam in your inbox by asking each new sender to confirm his identity. I've been using it for the past few weeks, and it works almost fine. It has 2 minor problems though:
i. some of my contacts don't bother to verify their identity so I need to dig into the pending folder for missed emails
ii. some spammers actually do confirm their ID by hand, and I have to mark those messages as spam with my email client software...
However this program allows legitimate emails to show immediately in my inbox, and that is the benefit.

This morning however I experienced the weirdest message box I have seen on my computer: for some time now I have had a search add-on installed on my internet explorer. Very annoying, and I don't know where it came from. As I mainly use firefox, I didn't bother to uninstall it until this morning. I had run ad-aware scans however just in case, and I keep my antivirus up-to-date every day.

And here goes this program asking me to confirm I am a human before it will uninstall itself on MY computer ?!??