Good things will at some point finally make it. When today Bertelsmann's IT services group Arvato and Warner announced that they would work together I had a smile on my face.

Bertelsmann with its music group BMG has like practically all other music label companies simply missed the boat for online music distribution. Now they want to at least be part of the upcoming online video business.

Backgrounder: Bertelsmann had a 50% joint venture with AOL for Europe in the early days of the Internet and was building and maintaining the fastest TCP/IP access network in Germany and other countries in Europe. Plans had even been to move into AsiaPac.

Moreover the technology at the time would have been ready to offer music online, but the media giant was deadly scared of losing its grip on the business model, which was creating, marketing and distributing music. Then things changed. The AOL Europe stake was sold - for a good amount of money - and the chance to lead a market was left to others (now Apple), who made great business out of it. The reasons why it did not happen are difficult to explain but it was certainly not technical nor to do with marketing or distribution skills, all of which are a strength of Bertelsmann, but simply political, for which Bertelsmann is well known.

The Exxon record high profits reported today have a flip side of course, since these profits are paid by and taken out of the people's pockets.

As just commented on CNBC Europe such a development of course will mean that the US is finally coming to look at green companies and technology. Just recently I also came across a US solar cell startup (will look it up and let you know the name shortly) and while I skimmed through the website I suddenly saw two Internet celebrities among the investors: Google's Serge Bin and Larry Page... One note of caution: The solar cell or panel startup business can be very risky since lots of the new technologies have been smoked up in labs and only later on can it be found out if cost efficient mass production is possible. Of course many of the German success stories that blossomed during the 7 years of Green party government participation should head for US opportunities now. If not now when then?

As reported back in September 2005 in Heise Online the Austrian system integrator Kapsch TrafficCom AG won the prestigious truck toll collect highway project in the Czech Republic for 636 million EUR. Two of the losing bidders, Autostrada and Fela/Ascom/Danuv, handed in complaints since Kapsch ranked third only in the total project amount.

Now this complaint has been rejected and it is expected that in another 10-40 days at the latest the contract with Kapsch will be ready to be signed.

While I have no clue what the "technical" reason was for selecting a more expensive system, I think one can speculate that the historically close relationship between Austria and their neighbour countries played a role. I have myself seen that happen more than once and therefore e.g. the Swiss Fela led group (433 million EUR offer) would have probably been better off to also work with an Austrian partner rather than the Swiss Ascom. Interesting side note: the infamous T-system consortium that finally got the truck toll collect system working in Germany only handed in a letter of intent for bidding in case the "unrealistic" delivery milestones were changed. So looks like the T-system solution is not as easily exportable as they were hoping and, surprise surprise, delivery milestones are taken seriously in other places too.

And another one that is using the soccer world cup to roll out new services.

Fiber is being laid by mid-year in the streets of nine of the twelve cities
where the soccer world cup is to be played .

Bandwidth will then be 50 Mb/s. Up to 50x faster than DSL but
compared with the Vienna announcement yesterday 20 times slower.

The cities are: Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfurt,

Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich.

Services will be a triple play with Internet, TV and telephony and
some very special offerings around the Soccer World Cub that will
allow subscribers to analyse matches themselves. Marketing for this
service will start in April. Customers need to order a termination
box which is the reason why they are using this event for such a launch.

Vienna the Austrian capital is eager again to re-gain the reputation as the world's leading broadband city.

Construction work for a fiber to homes and to all businesses in Vienna is supposed to start in February with a pilot for 50,000 homes which should go online in May or June.

In a second phase the roll-out is planned for 250,000 users with the final goal of bringing 960,000 homes and 70,000 SMUs with 1 Gbit/s symmetrical bandwidth online.

The whole project is intended to build an non-monopolistic access infrastructure that can then be used by service and content providers.

If the plans come off then this will be quite a remarkable project, going far beyond just great PR for the Austrian capital.
See also the comments on The Euro Telco Blog about the Vienna project.