Christopher Herot's Weblog

VON?

March is always a big week for conferences.  The past four weeks alone have offered TED, ETech/GSP, SXSW, eComm and VON not to mention numerous smaller events.  Amidst all this plenty, several people have asked me what I found attractive about VON.  VON was started ten years ago around the almost subversive notion of sending voice over the internet instead of the telco monopolies.  As that goal was achieved, the conference became a large trade show with multiple tracks and a large exhibit floor, and it became harder to find the good parts, but they were still there.  The analogy I use os that VON used to be like Paris (well, ok, maybe Toulouse) where you could wander in any direction and find interesting architecture and an excellent meal.  Now it's more like L.A. where there is lots of good stuff but you had better have a destination in mind before you get into your car.

Some of my favorite "gems" from VON this year were VON Camp - an "un-conference" in an obscure corner of the convention center which seemed to attract all the people I had come to VON to hang out with and the session on Real-Time Social Communications, which included Loic LeMeur, Robert Scoble, Ramu Sunkara and other luminaries from the social media world.

As the rumors swirl that Pulvermedia and the VON conference it operates may be going out of business one hopes that these gems will live on in some new form.

Robert Scoble and Fan

Intel at VON

Anand Chandrasekher, GM of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group gave the first talk at VON.  He started with some useful facts:

• There will be 1.3 billion Internet Users by end of 2007.
• Google can be queried in 36 languages.
• The average person spends 32 hours per month online.
• 140 new applications added every day on Facebook.
• Social Netowrking is 25% of all internet traffic - surpassing porn for the first time.
• The average user spends 3B minutes/day  on Social Networks.

From Intel's perspective, the growth of the Internet has become more important than the growth of software to drive demand for faster processors.

Chandrasekher said that Intel saw a huge opportunity in the fragmented market for mobile devices, showing a graph demonstrating how there were more compatibility problems with devices that did not contain Intel processors.  He didn't explain how much of this was software vs. hardware, but did go on to describe a new Intel brand, Atom, which will include a line of processors designed from the ground up to be small and low in power consumption.   The first of these processors will be Menlow, released in 2008, followed by Moorestown, released on 2010.   Moorestown will enable building a complete PC and phone on a board the size of a credit card.

Trend Spotting at VON

One of the last, and most informative, sessions at VON was one on Trend Spotting.  Moderated by Todd Keefe, it had Ofer Gneezy, Brough Turner, Don Price and Timothy Jasionowski offer their predictions of where the communications world was going.

There was a lot of discussion about mobile connectivity, specifically when voice would cease to be a premium service and would be carried "over the top" as just another application on top of a commodity data network.  Given that voice is so lucrative, the incumbent operators are not only reactant to go that route but many of them are actively blocking services such as Skype.  (And, as it turns out, the recently announced Skype phone doesn't use the Skype protocol at all but uses IP for signaling and conventional circuit-switched channels for voice.)  Brough advanced his "Four or more and things go nuts" theory, based on his observation of developing countries where, once there are four or more wireless operators the weakest one will break ranks and start offering innovative services.  Over lunch, Brough told me of a study recently done by one wireless operator which showed that if they just offered "dumb pipes" they would have a smaller but much more profitable business than they would by getting into the risky content and applications business.  Given that Sprint recently spent $4B on 700 Mhz spectrum in the AWS auctions, the US should have four such operators by January of 2009.

I asked what other obstacles there were to over-the-top voice.  One response was that the current idea of using WiFi would remain problematic due to WiFi inefficient power consumption, but that 3G, including WiMax, would solve that problem.

Another hopeful sign is that the Apple iPhone, Nokia's N95, and the forthcoming Google open source framework would wean customers away from dependence on subsidezed but anemic handsets provided by the mobile operators.

The one remaining prolem is, as Ofer put it, "every year, the next year is when data would break through, but voice is where all the money is today."  When that happens, watch out!

 

What ever happened to those exciting VoIP applications?

I was catching up on my blog reading and came across a post by Tom Evslin that's especially appropriate on the eve of the VON conference here in Boston.  He recalls that at an earlier VON he opined how VoIP would occur in three stages: (1) Cheap long distance; (2) Converged networks; (3) really cool new services.  The first two came about, but we're pretty much still using the phone the same way we always did.  Sure, we can launch calls from our mobile contact list instead of punching in numbers, but otherwise the need for compatibility with POTS and the need to pay termination charges to POTS carriers has meant change has come at the speed of the slowest component.

Evslin concludes that the next stage will not be incremental improvement over traditional telephony, but wholesale replacement, with live voice and voice mail becoming just two choices in a continuum of communications modes.  I agree with him that these will be based on social networks, which are the phone books of the future.  This approach will allow a more natural form of communication  Instead of starting with a phone number and the hope that the associated device is near the intended recipient, conversations in the future will start from the identity of the recipient and the nature of the task to be performed.  From that point, one can initiate a communication in the mode most suited to the problem at hand and the needs of both parties, whether that be an synchronous email, and almost-synchronous SMS or Instant Message, or a real-time voice or video conversation.