Sardinia is considered by many to be the pearl of the Mediterranean. And the tourist office brochure I'm composing in my mind on the way to this Italian island squeezes out the last drop of juice from lemons such as "unspoilt scenery," "proud, rugged inhabitants," and "age-old traditions." The pictures I'm visualising show a scantily clad local beauty, posing in a cove surrounded by smooth red rocks, lit by the dazzle of light sparkling from white sand and blue-green sea.
Such were the scenes I looked forward to as I set forth to Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. But during the time I spent there, the only sea I could make out was a murky bit of lagoon, hiding behind a row of warehouses and scrapyards. And the most dazzling lights came from a bank of 200 modems, locked into syncopated waves. Make no mistake: the Internet has come to Cagliari, and neither may ever be quite the same.
Instead of beach beauties, the key image I took home from Sardinia is that of a fully clothed local businessman, posing in front of a Hewlett-Packard T-500 computer in the basement of a high-tech office block. He is in his mid-40s, with a boyish smile and curly grey hair retouched to perfection - looking as young, healthy, and as well-groomed as only a wealthy, middle-aged Italian can.
Nicola "Nichi" Grauso wants to make Sardinia the centre of the virtual world. This not-so-modest ambition is to be achieved through the global thrust of Video On Line, the Internet service Grauso has set up in Cagliari with the help of a young, international team of 60 engineers, marketers, and creative-media types. "Multicultural" is the Video On Line buzzword.
It takes a strong idea to stand up to the collective muscle of CompuServe and America Online, not to mention The Microsoft Network - especially if you're doing it on a budget of around £20 million, small change in this game.
Grauso's philosophy is that not everybody in the world wants to learn english so that they can order a pizza in Denver, Colorado. Video On Line is staking its future on local content offered in a local language, but through global media.
The idea is not a particularly new one. In fact, CompuServe started to address the problems of country-specific language and content before Video On Line was even a twinkle in Grauso's eye. Back in 1987, a Japanese version of the service was developed in collaboration with two local partners; since then, Compu-Serve has added some three other language interfaces and local-language services.
This autumn, the Luxembourg-based Europe Online launched in Britain, Germany, and France. The Microsoft Network is also rolling out worldwide. But not even Bill Gates has pursued the idea of putting the world online with Grauso's vigour. In the not-so-distant future, Video On Line services will be available in Afrikaans, Ewe, Fa[^], Ibo, Kimbundu, Nyanja, Pulaar, Sangho, Sotho, Tigrigna, Chokwe, Yoruba, Bassa, Fulani, Indi, Kikongo, Lingala, Lunda, Mandekan, Somali, Wolof, Tswana, and Swahili - to name just the African languages.
Video On Line was launched with a Video On Line World Tour, encompassing 30 countries across four continents. A quick glance at the venues reveals more about Grauso's marketing strategy than some 15-page promotional spam: Alexandria, Sofia, Istanbul,
Tunis, Bucharest, Beirut, and Jakarta. In fact, Video On Line is targeting countries that hover on the edge of the First World, ready to explode in a learning curve far steeper than anything likely to be matched in the technologically weary West.
To provide online translation services, Grauso borrowed much of the staff of Radio Tirana, journalists who found themselves with time on their hands after the end of communism in Albania put them out of the propaganda-broadcasting business.
Grauso admits that there may not be many modems in the countries he's visited. But there will be. And, like any good salesman, he wants his to be the first foot in the door: "During the tour, we collected a database of more than 12,000 names of interested clients, contacts, and potential allies. Of course, a lot of people had only a very vague notion of what we were offering, but that's fine. The important thing is that they remember us, that they see us as a point of reference. I believe they will."
Grauso is prepared to stake up to £30 million of his own money on his global vision, plus whatever else he can raise from outside investors. Although he has so far spent only a fraction of that total, Grauso is not stinting on expenses. He's already spent more than £6.2 million on promotion and put together an international team of technicians, marketers, and translators in Cagliari and Tirana. Backing this up, he's also purchased a lot of hardware and communications bandwidth.
Ironically, coming from Italy forced Grauso from the beginning to set up a network largely independent of the (horrible) local telephone service. Video On Line has rented two high-speed dedicated lines from Cagliari to New York and Washington, DC, and from Cagliari to Milan and Stockholm: with a capacity of 2 Mbytes per second, these enable Video On Line to carry what it claims is three times the load of any other TCP/IP connection between Europe and the States. In addition, other less-powerful dedicated lines will connect Cagliari with Moscow, Shanghai, and most of the other major cities that Grauso has in his sights.
Parallel to this expansion abroad, Grauso has set about secur-ing Italy. About 36 14.4 and 28.8 Kbps nodes in the major cities are already up and running, and Video On Line reckons it will have covered all 200 Italian phone districts by winter. The problem of how to offer nodes abroad is being resolved through strategic alliances - by mid-September, Grauso was close to signing an agreement with Unisource with a view to using their international networks for Video On Line's local connections.
So much for connectivity. But, what do you get when your modem has finally hissed and screeched its way through to the megaservers in the basement at Cagliari? You get the Web, for starters. One of the advantages of coming onto the scene late in the day is that you don't have to rehaul an old system to offer Web access, as most of the first-generation services have recently been forced to do. With its PPP connections and the activation of newsgroup access, Video On Line has the whole Net covered, yet some have criticised Video On Line as too Web-oriented. So the company offers all of the usual Internet services: e-mail, online shopping, tourism, sport and cinema pages, a selection of online papers and magazines (including the Grauso owned L'Unione Sarda, the largest daily newspaper in Sardinia), plus a neat design-your-own-home-page feature. Oh, and you get an attractive pastel interface with icons (created by local graphic-design team Professionisti Associati) based on an ancient Phoenician dove symbol found on traditional Sardinian rugs and pottery. All for a flat yearly rate of about 261,800 lire (£105).
Subscriptions now account for most of Video On Line's revenues. But in the longer run, Video On Line also hopes to rake it in from a variety of other sources: hosting Web pages, royalties from foreign partners, transaction charges on online commerce, payments from content providers - just to name a few. Any conversation with Grauso rapidly turns into a whirlwind tour through the excitement of cyberspace, and one of the things that excites Grauso most is the idea that some people, people like him, are going to make a lot of money here.
Grauso's energy and ambition are already outdoing the tourist brochures' ability to lure international visitors to Cagliari. Who should I bump into at the Video On Line headquarters but young Dmitri Negroponte, son of another "Nichi" MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte. He was here as an "observer," one of the many who has been drawn to watch Cagliari goings-on. Other corporate visitors in recent months have included emissaries of Time Warner, Silvio Berlusconi's Mondadori, and Sprint. I ask Negroponte what he thinks of Video On Line. "I don't like pastels," he mutters darkly, before disappearing to chat with Grauso.
First Sardinia, then the world
"Nichi Grauso is the Christopher Columbus of the Internet," says Greg Roselli of Sub-Cyberia, the interactive media space below the Cyberia café in London. "He is wild enough and Mediterranean enough to get on in this game. The Net is all about chaos, and Nichi functions beautifully in chaos. It's his element."Grauso laid the foundations of his multimedia empire in 1975 when, at the ripe age of 26, he bought an army-surplus transmitter to set up a private radio and TV station in Sardinia - one of the first in Italy to break the state broadcasting monopoly. The experiment was a success, and by 1985, Grauso had become a big enough fish on the local scene to acquire L'Unione Sarda. He packed the management off to the States to learn about the cutting edge, and, by 1986, L'Unione employees were holding courses on electronic typesetting for their colleagues at the big national newspapers on "the continent," as Sardinians refer to the rest of Italy.
In 1991, Grauso felt confident enough to launch his first major overseas venture. He acquired a majority share in a Warsaw newspaper, Zycie Warsawy, and a 33 per cent share in a group of 13 local TV stations which were merged, Berlusconi-style, to form Poland's biggest private network, Polonia Jeden. But the experiment went wrong. Last year, the Polish government closed down most of the network's stations as part of a squeeze on foreign ownership. Taking the hint, Grauso decided to get out.
The Warsaw experience is probably the reason Grauso's face clouds over when talk turns to the traditional media and its minions. "Journalists are standing on the deck of a sinking ship. They can either get into the lifeboats now or go down. But they won't take me with them," he says. Grauso's growing disillusionment with printed paper explains why he found the idea of an online service so appealing after it was first aired in the summer of 1994. No pesky governments getting in the way - at least not for the time being - and no unions holding up the pace of change. Quizzed about his sense of timing, Grauso admits, "I ask myself at least six times a day whether I'm really in love or just on the rebound."
The things we do for love
The metaphor is apt. Without love, where would Video On Line be now? Reinier van Kleij, a system manager working for Sarda, must have told the story at least a hundred times. A deep breath, and he launches into it again: "I met this Sardinian girl in the Netherlands, see," he says, with a goofy smile that must turn women to jelly. "And I asked her if she would shack up with me. But she said no - as any self-respecting Sardinian lass would. I had to go and shack up with her."Once installed in Sardinia, van Kleij soon found a way of putting his computer science PhD to good use managing the computerised page-setting for L'Unione Sarda. Although the paper was one of the first in Europe to convert to computerised page-setting, the next logical step - an online edition - had never occurred to Grauso, for the simple reason that he didn't know what "online" meant. "It all started when I asked if I could get linked up to the Internet from the office," recalls van Kleij. "The Interwhat?" they replied. "So I told them, and then one thing led to another. Soon I was working on a pilot version of the online paper, with the help of Pietro Zanarini at http://www.crs4.it/">CRS4 (Carlo Rubbia's advanced technologies research centre). When Grauso saw the result around May 1994, he was extremely enthusiastic."
As the summer of 1994 rolled in and the Sardinian heat started to hit the high 30s, Grauso was getting more and more interested in the potential of the Net. At first, he contemplated a Sardinia-only service. "That idea lasted a good few hours," says Grauso. By June, Grauso's favourite brainstorming method (pacing around the swimming pool of his sumptuous villa in the centre of Cagliari) had thrown up a company, a name, and a mission: to boldly go where no online service has gone before. Why Cagliari? I asked Grauso. "Why not?" he replied. "The Internet can be anywhere, wherever a strong idea is born."
But there is one reason why Cagliari is more than just where Video On Line happens to be. Just down the road from its offices stands CRS4, which sprang fully formed from the rib of CERN in Geneva, where elementary particles with cute names like W and Z get thrown out of underground atomic collisions. It was the discovery of "intermediate vector bosons" that earned Rubbia a Nobel Prize in 1984.
CERN, you may recall, was also the birthplace of the Web in 1990 - although the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has since emigrated to MIT, blaming bureaucracy and lack of interest in technology at his old stomping grounds. CRS4 promises to be more interested in computers. Its home page proclaims its mission to be that of "reducing the segregation between traditional scientific research and technology." If "multicultural" is the Video On Line buzzword, "interdisciplinary" is the CRS4 equivalent. It looks like a marriage made in politically correct heaven.
Rubbia believes that the encouragement of low-impact, high-tech industry along the lines of Video On Line and CRS4 is one of the best ways to preserve Sardinia's "unique environmental beauty."
"It's an island where time doesn't exist. It's much easier to think here than in a big city, and thinking is our strength," says Rubbia. He sees one of CRS4's functions as that of stimulating the interface between business and science. Of Grauso he says simply, "It is obvious that those who invest wisely in the future are going to succeed."
The lab's Scientific Visualisation and Digital Media Group, headed by Paolo Zanarini, was instrumental in setting up the online version of L'Unione Sarda - still one of the most sophisticated Net papers - and has since signed a research contract with Video On Line to develop know-how and software. "It isn't often that a businessman gets inspired by applied scientific research," says Zanarini, "but Grauso has always been particularly attentive to change, and he's willing to take risks."
Network aristocracy
Just recently, I finally got round to reading a book that had been on the bedside pile for a number of years: The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, yet another "Nichi." In talking to Grauso, it had struck me that he had much in common with the man the Elizabethans loved to hate. At the very least, I decided, he'd been using the 16th-century Florentine's book as a business manual: A Prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he wishes, not when others wish; on the contrary, he ought to discourage absolutely attempts to advise him unless he asks it, but he ought to be a great asker, and a patient hearer of the truth.At times during the interview, it felt like I was the one being grilled, not Grauso. "What effect do you think all this will have on property prices?" he asked me abruptly, breaking off a long, meandering reply to a question I had asked some time before. At other times, struck by a new idea, he broke off to ask anybody else who might have been wandering through: "How about this? Will it work?"
"Just call him Mr. Hypertext," says van Kleij. "He tends to skip around from one subject to the next." There seems to be an unexpressed worry at Video On Line headquarters that Grauso also has a history of skipping from one business to the next - he is a man with a low boredom threshold. After a while, though, a pattern emerges. Instead of making business plans, he just makes businesses. What others learn by studying, Grauso learns by doing. "My business plan consists of two commandments," Grauso tells me. "One: don't get hurt. Two: jump straight in."
Grauso revels in the idea that nobody knows all of the online answers. "I've learnt a lot from the big online services such as CompuServe or America Online - but there's no way I'm going to treat them as oracles, because they're learning, too. All I know so far is that most of what I've picked up in 20 years as an entrepreneur has had to be jettisoned. There are rules but you have to dig deep to get at them. The Net has its own DNA - if you look carefully, you start to see the pattern. You can't alter it, but you can begin to make guesses as to how it will make the whole organism behave."
Openness and cooperation - or at least noncompetition - are central strands in Grauso's vision of Net DNA. "If there was one message I could send out to everyone involved in this field, it would be this: cooperate. We've just landed on the coast of a new America. Why fight over a little patch of land when there's a whole continent out there? If one country like Italy can support 20 TV stations, there must be room in the whole world for at least 20 online service providers. The victims are not going to be America Online, or CompuServe, or Video On Line. The sacrificial beasts are already marked out - the encyclopaedias, the specialty magazines, and, last of all, the daily newspapers."
In line with this approach, the Video On Line home page offers a warm welcome for all. Click on the Other Services icon and you are given a constantly updated array of rival online services to sample. "We have no qualms about publicising our competitors," says Grauso. "Whereas CompuServe and AOL aim to keep subscribers inside the four walls of their online house, we're quite happy for you to step outside. That's why we're giving away a free browser - anyone who wants to can download it." The browser in question, Video On LineBrowser, is a multilingual version of a browser called Tiber, created by California's Teknema Inc., and specially modified to cope with the many languages used by Video On Line.
Is the man one chip short of a full motherboard? Or is there some complicated strategy being worked out here, five moves ahead of the pack? Here's Nichi Machiavelli again on how the model prince can best cultivate a reputation for generosity: The prince may either spend his own wealth and that of his subjects, or the wealth of others. In the first case, he must be sparing, but for the rest he must not neglect to be very liberal.
Anyone who clicks onto www.vol.it gets automatic access to its whole range of services, with no extra charges, no online connect rate, and no time limit. "Rather than selling both the connection and a bundle of pay-by-the-minute services," explains Grauso, "we give away the services and just sell the connection if you need it." Video On Line subscribers in Italy only pay for the Internet connection and e-mail; soon those who want only the e-mailbox will be offered the option of a mail-only service at "a knockdown price."
I finally manage to stop the man in mid-flow and get out the £30 million question: "What's in it for you? How do you make money?" Grauso's response is swift: "We stand to make money out of the exchanges between those who buy and those who sell. This is a market of tiny profit margins, made up for by the vast number of units being shifted." Grauso believes that profits will someday come at least as much from the Web space it rents out to online tradesmen as from direct subscriptions. Already, companies such as Italian oil giant Agip have put up home pages on Video On Line. Video On Line also offers design and translation of Web pages, as optional extras. Further revenue will come from the royalties it rakes in from its subsidiaries in other countries. These companies will be locally owned but will pay tribute to Cagliari for the use of logo, cables, servers, a team of translators, and technical support.
The suggestion that this model is similar to that adapted by the Roman Empire does not amuse Grauso. "Look, I won't deny that there are some dodgy ego trips being worked out on the Net. But the great thing about this network is that it has its own built-in ethical code. You can't distort information on the Net, or at least not for long. The history of newspapers and television has shown how easy it is for their owners to manipulate content for political ends. The open, anarchic nature of the Net makes this impossible. I can buy a bigger cable than the next man, but I can't control what gets sent down it. As for commercial motives, the Net can take these on board as long as they are upfront and the user can grasp the value for money straight off."
All this talk of media manipulation brings us inevitably around to the subject of Silvio Berlusconi. Grauso is considered to be a man of the Left: he maintains close contacts with Fausto Bertinotti, leader of the unrepentant communists of the Rifondazione Comunista party. As a media mogul, he has also launched exploratory forays into the left-wing press - he helped to finance a short-lived Green supplement to Il Manifesto, the reddest of Italy's dailies. "I tend to have a social view of the world," explains Grauso. "That's why I'm attracted by the Internet. I believe, for example, that access to the Net should become everyone's constitutional right, like access to decent roads or decent hospitals.
"Berlusconi once introduced me with the words, 'This is Nichi Grauso, a first-class businessman. He's only got one fault - he's a communist.' You see, I like Silvio as a person and I admire his way of dealing with his critics. And I think his decision to go into politics was a mistake." Mistake or not, ask Grauso who he will vote for at the next election and Berlusconi's name tops the list. Grauso and Berlusconi formed a longstanding friendship in the course of building up their respective media empires, and, for Grauso, personality counts for more than ideology. Needless to say, Grauso's faith in Berlusconi has earned him the suspicion of many on the left who worry that far too many people in Italian media, old and new, are already far too friendly with Berlusconi - if they aren't already employed by him.
But politics is probably not the best way to understand Nichi Grauso. Machiavelli provides a different clue. The most fortunate type of prince, according to Machiavelli, is the prince of the church. For these princes alone have states without defend-ing them, have subjects without governing them, and their states, not being defended, are not taken from them; their subjects, not being governed, do not resent it, and neither think nor are capable of alienating themselves from them. When read in the 20th century instead of the 16th, this also sounds like the dream of the online entrepreneur.
Picture Nichi Grauso as the first cybermissionary, taking the message of the wired to the unconverted lands of Asia, Africa, and beyond. Sure, his motives are not exactly altruistic. But missions and trading posts have been built side by side before. Sometimes they grew into cities; other times they were abandoned or burnt by locals who felt that missionaries were denying them both culture and the best of that of the larger civilisation.
At the speed with which the Net is evolving, Grauso will have to move quickly to keep Video On Line, five years' hence, from looking as quaint and behind the times as the online services he now complains so vigorously about - let alone the missionary trading posts of old.
But, then again, Grauso seems to be moving pretty swiftly as it is.
Lee Marshall (leeanne@mbox.vol.it) is a freelance writer based in Rome. He is not a personal friend of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi - at least not yet.