ManyMedia

Moderator Gary Kim will introduce speakers Frank Fawzi, Jeff Lattomus, and Peter Pattullo, for this session on Telecom 2.0.

Gary Kim (no PowerPoints!), encourages questions from the audience.

Peter Pattulo: clean build of his company, focus on hosted applications (unheard of 11 years ago), reinvented telecom company–now on 8th revision of software. All capabilities brought as close to problem as possible, developer APIs not really part of their profit model; more about removing friction.

Frank Fawzi: Amazed with everything 2.0, ecosystems, et al. From Pete’s description, he hears that we all want to make money, create a way to monetize your services and intellectual property. Telecom 2.0 is the next migration; starts to feel like early days of bringing solutions to market that customers are valuing and deploying. Marriage of Internet and traditional telecom: we attacked to make that happen. Carrier 7+ billion minutes, wholesaler with distinction: TDM or SIP, or API layer with widgets and applets that deal with diff biz environments (order fulfillment, upselling, collaboration and conferencing, emergency notification, insertion of voice and telecom functionality w/in web sequence. Is broker between “customer owner” carriers, and communities of software users, bridging gap between those silos.

Jeff Lattomus: We (in this room) are the dedicated ones. (Applause) Sales for western US and PacRim, bottom line is we’re all here to make money. Metaswitch is manufacturer of class 4 -5 app driven manufacturer. How to drive new revenue? Telecom 2.0 is all the new ways of serving customers with new apps (like Google) to make point and click easy access to new services? How to develop?

Open standards, developing gadgets for customers to try. We need to drive innovation.

Gary: Telecom 1.0 is telecom as we’ve known it over last decade: voice driven revenue service. Revenue models now changing, direction unknown. How are you making your money: carriers and supporters, apps, etc. If voice is application, can I drive revenue to me and build company around that? New people coming into market, wedge into existing value chain. Some conversation is from telecom people, others making telecom providers irrelevant. How does Telecom 2.0 work for you?

Frank: built our biz around partners (carriers and large users), continue to evolve new services and not commoditization. Challenge is to make voice so critical where end user is willing to pay for that value. As we expand reach, working with other carriers, this becomes a pressure to derive diff value props from their products, voice enabled.

Jeff: in marketplace it’s a buzzword, is a true application space, but is like IMS (gotta have it). Need to take a pragmatic approach: what do our customers actually need, evolution to get there. Build apps today for pragmatic revenue generating services. Kids will drive technology in next 15 years. Some things are true apps, making them a reality in industry has to be things you guys want to buy.

Frank: just signed long term agreement with Microsoft, leveraging cloud computing and carriers. Space starting to move down to apps with voice enablement. Expanding functionality. Hosted model, SAAS or communications as a service, trial apps for revenue, move on with minimal investment.

Peter: Going from 1.0 to 2.0 is about reducing friction. Not just download, is giving power to guys in enterprise to solve their problems. Adding voice to some business process, new tool sets to solve problems. Microsoft (excel): gave tools to build own spreadsheets. Telecom 2.0 is pushing ability to the edge, to connect.

Gary: is up to vendors to develop tools. How good is each of us to value and understand real business problems? More than just usage–need to be business process facilitators?

Peter: we may never know our customers well enough. There’s real pain out there. Example of delivery service going to sites where they couldn’t deliver. From our perspective, not that there is pain, it’s that we need tools for customers to use. [wait, first you need to understand problem before you can deliver appropriate tools. -jc]

Jeff: Open standards is one driver: develop some apps to get customers started (moving from legacy environment), and allow and support customer development. Work closely to understand customer base.

Gary: some think Telecom 2.0 is for enterprises, but some real pain is felt by smaller businesses. Communications tools: increase transparency to see processes. Should be able to automate certain processes that are not transparent now (e.g., healthcare appointments).

Peter: lot of niche apps that only work in limited ways, as opposed to generic apps that won’t fit as well. Opportunity cost vs expenses.

Frank: moving from time of “minute is a minute” to long tail, move up to set of apps that can be standardized and customized for specific needs. What we can do is provide well defined widgets and apps to build and customize application resources.

Jeff: key theme is automation to put processes in customers’ hands, so they can use for their customers, or what’s most useful to them. Make it mobile. Make it something worth paying for.

Peter: almost like we’re coming out of stone age: number of opportunities is endless.

Gary: most opportunities aren’t big, they’re lots of small that add up. Need to be better at communicating to end users to empower them. Take each of the functions, convince people to use them to solve problems, turn functionality into a widget that they can use to drive traffic.

Jeff: what is next gen product line? Creativity of software. Roomfuls of equipment, but power is in software. Softswitch = software.

Gary: assets are not being deployed to 100% capacity. Some amount of biz logic in work thru old time processes.

Question: iPhone not just communication device, is an info and commerce device. (?)

Frank: is about evolution, not revolution. things that we can do today is voice mashups, things without a huge amount of IT, from the cloud. New edge of the network is not a box, it’s apps and processes. Lot of apps, not a lot of use. Simplify to our level. Push out media, voice mashups, etc. Voice is no longer a commodity minute, now is a value prop.

Peter: we separated apps for control from network. Softswitches, don’t have to completely rewrite software due to new technology.

Question: are we over-complicating things? Everyone wants to communicate, how do we simplify?

Peter: we gotta simplify. Drop dead simple.

Q: so are we over-complicating?

Peter: making voice as app and making voice as central, yes in some ways we are.

Lunch and awards ceremonies!

Events, Network changes, mashups, Network, PTC09, switches, technology

My colleagues said it so well before the words came to me. On the matter of technology policy statements from the presidential candidates, telecom prosultant™ David Isenberg said this about John McCain’s technology policy statement:

I was hoping that McCain’s Tech Policy would emphasize and extend the two McCain pro-Internet initiatives — the McCain Lautenberg Community Broadband Act and Spectrum Re-regulation, neither of which have yet seen the light of day — but it doesn’t. In the first case, it makes a vague nod in the direction of “market failure and other obstacles.” In the second, it treats spectrum policy as a done deal; now that we can surf the Web in coffee shops, we’re done.

David Weinberger’s take is more to-the-point:

Much of the McCain policy is the expected stuff about public-private partnerships, educating the workforce, and providing incentives to reach under-served populations, etc. But he shows his hand on three issues:

1. He’s flat against Net neutrality.
2. He wants to see copyright extended and enforced more vigorously.
3. He thinks the current infrastructure only needs a couple of tweaks.

In sum, our Internet policy should be the same as our energy policy: Hand a key resource off to big corporations whose interests are fundamentally out of alignment with ours as citizens.

Hmm. Not a surprise and not what I hope for. Reminds me of the early days of television: so much hope for the betterment of society and the world, but delivered to the strict commercial interests of several large corporate interests. Development of the dream and betterment of society? Not so much.

Compare McCain’s policies with Ars Technica’s thoughtful summary from last November of Obama’s policy statement:

The document begins with a set of policy goals that pretty well sum up the major areas that the proposals address:

• Ensure the full and free exchange of information among Americans through an open Internet and diverse media outlets.
• Create a transparent and connected democracy.
• Encourage the deployment of a modern communications infrastructure.
• Employ technology and innovation to solve our nation’s most pressing problems, including reducing the costs of health care, encouraging the development of new clean energy sources, and improving public safety.
• Improve America’s competitiveness.

This is closer to what I had in mind for my future.

Having said that, I realize (and everyone has touched on the limitations of each policy document) that it’s going to be very hard to bridge a gap between where we are now and where we should be in a more connected world.

Now I’ll be watching this race to see what kind of future we’ll really have.

Content, Network, Policy, Scenarios control, election, Internet, ownership, Policy, president, technology, telecom

Bob Frankston said it best (about the future of education, intellectual property, R&D, and the future of technology):

From: Bob Frankston
Date: April 24, 2004 12:13:11 PM EDT
To: dave farber
Subject: RE: [IP] more on Losing Our Edge?

This reminds me of the fears about Japan getting the lead in AI because of their fifth generation project. What I fear most are the attempts to keep “the edge” by clamping down on education and assuring that it is highly tuned for the past.

Our lead over the long term is dependent upon not trying to over-tune the educational system for a narrow vision.

It’s our incompetence at imposing the one true solution that has kept us from getting caught up in the local optima.

While the Nobel Prize is far form a perfect indicator I do note that Japan, for example, has very very few in the hard sciences.

This is one reason why I point out that the first amendment is an economic mechanism — it is a way of providing opportunity for stupid ideas. It’s only with enough stupid ideas that we discover the brilliant ones.

I don’t want to defend ignorance but neither do I see a focus on big R&D as the necessarily that much better than a focus on quarterly results. Both are optimized for the present.

The question is what environment is best for leverage individual initiative. Very few such efforts will succeed but that might be enough to seed the future.

Policy, Scenarios education, future, globalization, intellectual property, R&D, research and development, self-determination, technology

Congress has a rather spotty record of passing forward-looking laws that acknowledge and anticipate changes in technology. Instead they pass reactive measures, such as one being considered currently, to limit covert voyeurism by phone camera. The Washington Post reports:

Oxley said he’s heard numerous stories ‘about how individual privacy has been violated in locker rooms, dressing rooms and even homes.’ And Internet surfers can easily find Web sites with camera phone pictures of those individuals posted for the world to see.

Even when a person finds out about a peeping Tom, the hodgepodge of laws around the nation sometimes let criminal cases avoid prosecution. ‘Victims will go to the police and be told that `We’d love to arrest this person, but it’s not technically against the law,” Howley said.

Currently there is no federal law protecting citizens from secret and intrusive videotaping in public places, Oxley said, and some prosecutors have had difficulty making cases.

‘That’s why we wanted to make a specific crime so there would be no misunderstanding which law applies,’ he said. ‘This is a case where the law is trying to catch up with the technology or the misuse of technology .’

The bill before Congress would make it illegal to videotape, photograph, film, broadcast or record a naked person or someone in underwear anyplace where a ‘reasonable person would believe that he or she could disrobe in privacy.’

Careful who and where you snap. It may land you a year in jail.

Devices, Policy camera phone, intrusion, privacy, reasonable person, technology