Vizzavi

» see vizzavi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

vizzavi never reached me, and the reason is boring and geographic. it was a vodafone product, and vodafone did not properly arrive in turkey until it bought telsim in 2006, years after vizzavi was already dead. so during its whole short life i was on turkish networks it had no presence on, reading about it, if at all, as european business news rather than as anything on a phone in my hand. it was carrier-locked to a market i was not in.

the scale of it is the part worth remembering. in 2000 vodafone and vivendi announced a joint venture with a planned budget around 1.6 billion euros, which made vizzavi one of the costliest launches the internet had seen. the idea was a single portal that would follow you from the phone in your pocket to the television in your living room, serving mail and video wherever you went. it was meant to be europe's aol, and it was the crown jewel of jean-marie messier's plan to turn vivendi into a global media giant.

the plan collided with the dot-com crash. vizzavi bled money, losing on the order of 377 million dollars in 2001 alone, and investors stopped believing a grand multi-screen portal was the future. in 2002 vodafone paid vivendi around 143 million euros for its half of the venture, taking full control everywhere except france. after that vodafone admitted the brand was finished. the useful parts became the content section of vodafone live!, and the vizzavi name faded out by 2003.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

for a brief window vizzavi was treated as the obvious shape of things to come. two of the biggest companies in europe had blessed it, the money behind it was enormous, and the pitch matched what everyone assumed the mobile internet would be, a walled portal your carrier handed you. it launched in france in june 2000 and expanded outward. on paper it had every advantage a new venture could ask for.

~ the postmortem ~

what killed vizzavi was partly the crash and partly the model. the future did not turn out to be one carrier's portal deciding what you saw. it turned out to be the open web and, later, apps you chose yourself. vizzavi spent a fortune building a front door for a house people would rather furnish on their own. vodafone live! carried the surviving pieces forward for a while, but the billion-euro ambition ended as a footnote inside a smaller product.

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