Tiscali

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For other uses, see Tiscali (disambiguation).
Tiscali S.p.A.
Type Public (BIT: TIS)
Industry Communications and Media
Founded January 1998
Headquarters Cagliari, Italy
Key people Vittorio Serafino (Chairman), Mario Rosso (CEO), Renato Soru (Founder)
Products Communications
Website tiscali.com

Tiscali s.p.a. (BIT: TIS) is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisition of many smaller European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the late 1990s, but in subsequent years these have been divested.

Contents

History [edit]

Tiscali Campus in Cagliari

Tiscali was created in January 1998 in Cagliari by Renato Soru, following the deregulation of Italian telephone. The company owes its name to the mountain in Sardinia, where there are the remains of a nuragic village dating from the sixth to fourth centuries BC. Since March 1999, Tiscali offered free access to the Internet(people still had to pay the time), called Tiscali Free Net, pushing that time all Italian providers to repeal the fixed subscription of about 200,000 lire a year, thus contributing to the spread of mass in Italy the Internet.

IPO during dot com bubble [edit]

On October 1999 the company went though an IPO and entered the italian stock exchange; 1 share was sold for 46 Euro; from 2001 until 2003 the shares were also traded on the French stock exchange.

3,098,000 shares were offered to investors (2,658,000 shares were created with capital increase, the rest were sold by Soru; Soru made 20,240,000 euro on the IPO).

Today (2012) 1 share is traded at 0.04 euro.

Services [edit]

European countries of Tiscali SpA operation:
  current
  previous
  Tiscali name used, but no wholly owned service

Each of Tiscali's regional companies offer many services, which may include broadband internet access and telephone services. Tiscali SpA briefly operated an IPTV service in Italy (available in the cities of Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin and Trieste) from 11 December 2007. Its UK television service, Tiscali TV was acquired by TalkTalk in 2009.

Tiscali's former Carrier Company, Tiscali International Network, is a pure play carrier business delivering wholesale services including Global IP Connectivity, MPLS lines, Voice over IP and Network Monitoring.[1] As of May 2009 Tinet's IP/MPLS backbone counts 90 POPs and extends over 17 European countries and across the United States and Hong Kong. Its Autonomous Systems (AS3257) is a core ASN in the global Internet routing table, as well as the largest IPv6 backbone outside Asia. The network was sold to the Italian private equity firm BS Private Equity SpA on 27 May 2009, and renamed Tinet.

Tiscali ran similar web portals for each of its countries, which include features such as webmail, reviews, news, videos, dating, chat, radio, TV guide, streaming TV channels and others.

Tiscali 10.0 was Tiscali's integrated self-branded web browser, which was distributed with its dial-up Internet packages. It was produced by UltraBrowser Inc, and used Microsoft's Internet Explorer Trident rendering engine to display web pages. Since Tiscali's corporate re-branding exercise in 2004, the software has not been included in broadband installation packs as it features Tiscali's original logo and design layout, and generally was designed for those with dial-up packages. Its version number was matched to that of UltraBrowser's most recent version of their own browser.

Tiscali offered dial-ip internet in Finland under service name 'Surfeu'.

Tiscali Campus in Cagliari employees 1,000 persons, the center includes a development division for Internet technologies where works researchers like Antonio Tuzzi one of the developers of Apple MacOsX, Luca Manunza, inventor of the first webmail service and Domenico Dato, developer of Arianna, the first italian search engine in the firsts '90s. [2]

In 2013 Tiscali announced the development of a number of new internet services:[3]

  • Istella.it, a search engine dedicated exclusively to Italy;
  • Indoona, a social networking and microblogging service for smartphones;
  • Streamago, an application that allows the creation of a personal web TV.

Sales and acquisitions [edit]

Beginning in 2004, Tiscali sold off many of its regional sub-companies to native telecommunications operators in order to focus more on prime target areas.

  • On 16 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Austrian branch, Tiscali Österreich GmbH, to Nextra Telecom GmbH.
  • On 20 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its South African branch, Tiscali (Pty), to MWEB Holdings (Pty) Ltd.
  • On 23 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Norwegian branch, Tiscali AS, to Telenor Telecom Solutions.
  • On 30 August 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Swedish counterpart, Tiscali AB, to Spray Network AB, then a subsidiary of Lycos.
  • On 16 September 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Swiss counterpart, Tiscali AG, reaching an agreement with Smart Telecom.
  • On 19 October 2004, Tiscali sold its South African mobile telephone network, Tiscali Mobile, to Vodacom.
  • On 29 November 2004, Tiscali disposed of its Belgian subsidiary, Tiscali N.V, reaching an agreement with Scarlet België.[4]
  • On 1 February 2005, Tiscali sold its Danish company, Tiscali Denmark A/S, to Tele2.
  • On 5 May 2005, Tiscali sold the French ISP, Liberty Surf to Telecom Italia.[5]
  • On 31 January 2007, Tiscali disposed of its German business to consumer activities to Freenet.de AG, at a sum of €30 million.[6] It later sold its business to business transactions on 5 February 2007 to Ecotel Communication AG, with future intentions to leave the German market altogether.[7]
  • On 19 June 2007, Tiscali disposed of its Dutch branch, Tiscali BV, to Royal KPN NV.[8]
  • On 11 October 2006, Tiscali announced that it was to focus on the UK and Italy as its prime ISP targets, with plans to introduce new services to them including a mobile network operator and new IPTV products to the United Kingdom by its acquisition of Homechoice.[9]
  • On 31 December 2008, Tiscali shut down its IPTV service in Italy.[10]
  • On 27 May 2009, Tiscali sold its International arm, Tinet to BS Private Equity firm.[11]
  • On 30 June 2009, Tiscali sold its UK subsidiary to Carphone Warehouse following regulatory approval from the European Union.[12] The service was rebranded as TalkTalk in January 2010.[13]

Financial and economic data [edit]

On 31 December 2009:

  • 744 workers
  • there are 1,861,473,919 common shares of Tiscali
  • 570,000 adsl customers of Tiscali

Shareholders [edit]

Today the shareholders of Tiscali are:

  • Renato Soru 17.788% of shares
  • Ignis asset management limited 1.756%

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ Tiscali Network
  2. ^ http://economia.panorama.it/tech-social/Tiscali-web-made-in-italy-Silicon-Valley-No-Sardegna
  3. ^ http://economia.panorama.it/tech-social/Tiscali-web-made-in-italy-Silicon-Valley-No-Sardegna
  4. ^ Tiscali - 2004 milestones.
  5. ^ Tiscali - 2005 milestones.
  6. ^ Tiscali - Disposal of B2C activities in Germany
  7. ^ Tiscali - Disposal of B2B activities in Germany.
  8. ^ Tiscali disposes of Netherlands branch
  9. ^ Telecom Paper - Tiscali to focus on UK, Italy; plans net profit from 2008.
  10. ^ Tiscali powers down IPTV service.
  11. ^ Tiscali International Network Acquisition Concluded By BS Private Equity.
  12. ^ Update 1 - Carphone wins EU approval for Tiscali UK buy Reuters.com. 30 June 2009
  13. ^ Tiscali TV rebrands as TalkTalk.

External links [edit]

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