Orange Launches Netvibes/Pageflakes Competitor
Everyone else has one, so why not one more? Orange, a massive European mobile phone carrier that is now a subsidiary of France Télécom, is beta testing a customizable Ajax homepage product called Bubbletop.
Context & Ripple Effects
The customizable Ajax startpage — popularized by Netvibes and Pageflakes — has become the category every large incumbent wants a piece of. Orange, France Télécom's mobile arm, is the latest to join, following the pattern of established brands bolting free Web 2.0-style products onto their portals, as AOL did with its free Bubble 2.0 offerings last November.
What makes Orange's entry notable is distribution rather than product: a carrier with tens of millions of European subscribers can put a startpage in front of mainstream users who have never heard of Netvibes, testing whether reach can substitute for the startups' first-mover polish.
First-order effects
- Netvibes and Pageflakes gain a competitor backed by one of Europe's largest mobile carriers, whose default browser and portal real estate give Bubbletop instant exposure the independents had to earn user by user.
- Orange's subscriber base becomes a test bed for whether a carrier-branded startpage retains users who currently set their own homepages.
Second-order effects
- Other European carriers and telecom operators face pressure to match Orange's move, since a customizable homepage is cheap to build and visibly modernizes a portal offering.
- Widget and feed developers get another platform bidding for placement on default homepages, spreading development effort thinner across competing startpage ecosystems.
Third-order effects
- If carrier-distributed clones keep landing in categories startups pioneered, the structural lesson is that in consumer web services distribution increasingly outweighs invention — a pattern that squeezes standalone players toward enterprise or white-label markets.
- The startpage itself risks becoming commodity infrastructure bundled into portals by whoever owns the customer relationship, eroding the standalone category's pricing and exit leverage.
The trend: Consumer web categories pioneered by venture-backed startups are being rapidly cloned by carriers and media incumbents whose distribution advantages let them compete on reach rather than innovation.