Jumpy

» see jumpy.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Free internet access in 1999 meant something specific and slightly dishonest. The provider charged nothing and the phone company charged you by the minute. That is how Fininvest went onto the web in November 1999. You dialed a 56k number carried over Albacom and paid for a local call, and Jumpy itself cost nothing. The mascot was a green frog in a yellow shirt.

The portal arrived five months after the access did, in April 2000, and it was built against Virgilio, the Telecom Italia property that led the Italian market at the time. Jumpy ran free SMS, a homepage you could rearrange, live stock quotes and an online store called Jcity. The company was its own entity with its own board, run by Massimo Armanini with Claudio Sposito as chairman, and in 2000 it opened a Spanish edition with Telecinco holding a quarter of it.

In 2001 it won a Smithsonian Award in San Francisco for providing innovative content and services. That is the sort of line a portal puts in its own press release. The same year, with the internet bubble gone and the planned stock listing shelved, Fininvest handed the company to Mediaset to stop the bleeding.

Then nothing was built. Italy moved onto ADSL and Jumpy stayed a 56k product that paid for itself out of telephone minutes nobody was spending any more. The Internet Archive holds working pages at jumpy.it through February 2006 and nothing but redirects from March of that year onward. Today the host answers on neither scheme.

~ the chronicle ~

~ free as a local phone call ~

The business under the mascot was a revenue share on telephone traffic. Every minute you spent reading Jumpy was a metered local call, and a cut of that minute came back to the people who had given you the browser full of frogs. It made the free tier honest in one direction and expensive in the other, and it is why the whole European free-access generation of 1999 is now a cemetery. Freeserve in Britain and Tiscali in Italy both ran the same arithmetic.

Flat-rate broadband is what ended it. The year Jumpy was abandoned is the year my own house in Turkey got a broadband line, which closes the same loop from a different corner of Europe: once the connection stops being metered, a portal that lives on the meter has nothing left to sell. Jumpy never shipped an ADSL product of its own.

~ 14 september 2000 ~

Grande Fratello started on Canale 5 on 14 September 2000 and changed Italian television in one season. The network broadcast an edited version. The satellite platform Stream carried it whole, and so did Jumpy. A free dial-up portal was pushing the uncut version of a television show down a 56k modem in the autumn of 2000.

~ what mediaset bought ~

Mediaset got a brand and a subscriber database. It had no reason to spend on broadband: the group already had television, and the portal was a hedge that had stopped paying. Five years after the purchase the project was abandoned.

The frog is the part Italians remember, and the frog is also the problem: it was the friendly face of a metered dial-up contract, and those do not get fond rebrands. When the redirects started in March 2006 there was no notice attached to them.

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