World turning

Lots of stuff happening today.

Glasvezelnet Amsterdam's official launch is happening today. I've got a lot of information, but am not sure what is coming out when, so will hold fire for now. The official site is here, including the first three service providers, though Labs2 has added some interesting 11th hour news to the mix by introducing Scandinavian service providers next year. Some pretty exciting stuff is happening around this, so more to come later.

Elsewhere, a little bird tells me that the Gizmo/Live Journal LJ Talk mashup goes live today, which is timely as I just included a section on this in my recent note to clients as well as in my Telco 2.0 presentation.

Cycling home last night, I heard some nauseatingly sycophantic coverage of the Carphone Warehouse/AOL deal on BBC Radio 4's PM, which went something like: "Well, okay, TalkTalk broadband has had a few hiccups getting started, and management hadn't anticipated the huge demand, but Charles Dunstone's a great entrepreneur..." I'm surprised that they didn't have "Land of Hope and Glory" playing in the background, because the tone was very much that we're lucky to have him, what a national asset, etc. Fairly sickening stuff. I'm sorry, but when you make a big media splash initially offering free broadband for life, you should expect significant interest - if your marketing department leads places where your systems can't follow, that's bad planning, not "overwhelming demand." I thought, surely someone out there is going to tell it like it is. Over to my cyberfreund Keith, who seems a bit miffed. Also, I guess one interpretation of Vodafone's decision to cut and run may be that the collateral reputational damage of association with CW is just too much to risk.

I had a call with the management of Fring today, and am looking forward to getting a review handset sometime next week.

UPDATE: Amsterdam has added another ISP, Teleturk, which has IPTV rights on a range of Turkish programming. Also, Pilmo, one of the first group of ISPs on the network, has revealed initial pricing: EUR44.95 per month for 10Mbps symmetrical connection, 250 minutes calling in the Netherlands, and 38 TV channels, reduced to EUR34.95 per month during the first year.

UPDATE 2: A longstanding Palladium Club mega-uber value reader, veteran of the UK mobile arena, writes in to observe that the Vodafone/Carphone deal is nothing to do with reputation, it's all about payback, a sentiment echoed in this very fine post from Keith (I'm very intrigued by his suspicion that Mr. Dunstone may opt to take the company private.).