Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Simon Torrance dropped me an email today, letting me know about Telco 2.0, a website, a manifesto, a blog, a report, and a conference.  It’s the full meal deal if you’re a carrier trying to figure out how to be relevant, rather than roadkill, in the future. 

From the opening paragraphs of the manifesto:

We are a collection of like-minded telecom practitioners and stakeholders: investors, managers, analysts, consultants, suppliers and customers.

The telecom industry was structurally stable from the early days of the telegraph and telephone systems through to the arrival of mobile telephony, despite rapid technology change and varying fortunes of individual players. We now see a need for change in the industry to reflect a new world increasingly unlike that experienced before.

The “like-minded telecom practitioners” include our good friend Martin Geddes.

Further on in the manifesto they make their position clear with this statement:

“Telco 2.0” defines any business model where connectivity is supported by a sustainable economic model. This means the end of artificial cross-subsidies between services and connectivity. We assume an all-IP world where choice of applications, devices and platforms is entirely driven by user preference. Connectivity charges will increasingly reflect actual costs of delivery (unlike, say, mobile roaming charges); relatively trivial services like standard voice call routing are effectively free; and thus the scope for the latter subsidising the former ceases to exist  Customers will only take your replacement offering because they want it, not because they have no choice.

They aim to help telecoms players rethink existing business models so they can succesfully transition to this new world.  Good stuff, and likely very lucrative too (Martin has a family to feed, you know!).

I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the EBay announcements of the last couple of days.  A teaser peek at the EBay / Paypal integration, and click to call in PayPal advertising.  As Luca Fillighedu pointed out, if all they wanted was click to call, then $4 billion was a little bit excessive.

Both Luca, and Jim Courtney at SkypeJournal made an iotum / Skype connection.  Luca points out that an iotum / Skype integration would allow sellers to be always available.  Phil Wolff speculated that Skype might cause a flood of EBay calls and Jim messaged me that iotum could be the key to managing those calls on the basis of value to the seller.  These are all great thoughts.

Naturally, at this point it’s difficult for us to do anything with Skype until the much promised call transfer API is available.  According to the presentations, that won’t be until late this year and initially it will be only Skype to Skype.  Until then, we’ll be focusing our efforts elsewhere.  It’s unfortunate, because we’d like to be Skype developers.

My friend, Dr. Tamas Koplyay, is hosting a local conference on open source on June 23rd.  Titled Open Source Licenses and Business Opportunities, this conference is for decision-makers in industry and government who wish to know:

• how open source licenses and the pedigree of the code affect business opportunities, the structure of business
• transactions, and code production;
• how the open source maturity model affects the nature of the corporate lawyer;
• how to make the most from an open source community;
• the business lessons learned from open source licensing practices; and
• the reasons for the co-existence of different open source licensing models.

It looks like a terrific event.  I’ll be in Europe for Astricon, but I’d be at this if I was here.

Last week I spun by the OCRI offices to record an OCRIRadio segment with Jeffrey Dale and Nathan Rudyk.  We were talking about blogs, podcasts, and markets as conversations.  Enjoy!

This announcement popped into my inbox a couple of weeks back.  SimpleVoiceBox is from the same folks that brought you FreeConferenceCall.COM.  And it is, as you would expect, a free voice mail box… with a few twists.

First, it can operate as a voice mail box, or it can act as a simple message broadcaster.  You don’t have to actually allow people to leave messages. 

Second, it has an RSS feed attached to it.  Say, you decide you want to use it to broadcast messages. Others can simply subscribe to the feed, and receive the messages as attachments.

Voice mail meets podcasting.   Hmmm… now that’s an interesting mashup.