eComm 2008 in Mountain View March 12-14

The Emerging Communications Conference 2008 is shaping up to be a different and fascinating event, not the least because yours truly is moderating a panel with some really interesting panelists.

What will drive wireless innovation?

Moderator:
Brough Turner, NMS Communications

Panelists:
Jonathan Christensen, Skype
Rich Miner, Google
Christopher Allen, iPhoneWebDev.com
Chris Sacca, Angel Investor
Paul Golding, paulgolding.com
Benoit Schillings, Trolltech/Nokia

There are no operators here, nor traditional equipment vendors, so I don't expect this to be an IMS vs. Internet debate.  That discussion is getting old.  The folks here each represent real approaches to mobile innovation.  I still look forward to controversy, but between approaches that each seem more plausible than IMS.  :-)

Ignoring my bias, there are tons of other interesting people attending.  As the schedule indicates, this is not your typical telecom conference.

Here's the eComm summary from the conference PR people:

eComm 2008—the inaugural Emerging Communications Conference—was born from the ashes of O'Reilly's ETel Conference to track and help drive the major disruption beginning to transform the multi-trillion dollar telecommunications industry. From industry visionaries to bleeding-edge technologies, cutting-edge academic projects to incumbent telecom players and garage-based hackers, eComm is designed as the only telecommunication forum to embrace and promote radical change. eComm is poised to make history on March 12-14, 2008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. For more information and conference registration, please visit www.ecommmedia.com.

Other commentary here and here.  Finally,you can get 15% off the conference registration here.

Comments

[Dropped Call]

TMC.net published this article yesterday which speaks to the rampant and expensive problems of monitoring/diagnosing/servicing telephony/internet network quality.

http://www.personalbee.com/215/28626008

Will your conference deal with this issue and do you have any comment on this new product. The simplicity and lower operating costs are attractive IF it really works.

Thanks

[Brough Turner]

Dropped Call,

Since the panel I'm focused on is about mobile innovation and the product you're pointing to (promoting?) is a VoIP probe, there is a significant disconnect. Mobile voice telephony is still 100% Intelligent Network based, i.e. no VoIP. If and when it moves to IMS, the IMS signaling and media flows look quite a bit different than conventional VoIP traffic, so this NetSymphony probe won't be useful without major re-engineering.

You should look through the eComm 2008 schedule to find other speakers who are more focused on enterprise &/or fixed-line VoIP services.

[Dropped Call]

I am not in the communications industry, only a victim of it. Personally, I find the overuse of acronyms very annoying. Your assumption of "promoting" (paranoia?) is hardly a fair description of honest research.

It does not take much research (for some) to find information on Mobile VoIP. Mr. Keating at TMC.net seems more on top of this issue than some since the below article dates back to 2005.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/mobile-voip-convergence.asp

InfoWorld's 2006 article came up, as well, on the first search page.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/21/75543_HNmobilevoip_1.html

I can understand how some in the "Golden State" might be unable to imagine that cell service in flyover country is less than pleasant. Since in my business I have to travel to remote locations in a remote state, it is more than annoying when an important call is dropped. Even more annoying is the failure of mobile cell companies to workout some logical cooperation to improve the pitiful coverage for those of us less deserving.

With the continued growth in WiMax, especially in some of the smallest podunk towns, I was hoping a conference of claimed experts might have some informational hope for us less fortunate.

Have a great day!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/14/wimax-enabled-voip-phone-showcased-at-mobile-world-congress/

[Brough Turner]

Dropped calls, my apologies! Yes, we have a ton of acronyms and I fall into the trap of using them. As it turns out, the NetSymphony probe that you pointed to is focused on enterprise VoIP, typically either PBXs (in other words IP-PBXs) or managed services (think of this as a remotely managed IP-PBX). What you're looking for is mobile VoIP, but it's not quite real yet. If you read Tom Keating's article carefully (and look up all the other posts he points to, and read the product specs of the companies he points to, like Bridgeport Networks), it comes down to convergence (i.e. inter-operability) between VoIP and traditional mobile telephony. That's what's implied by Tom's discussion of ENUM and Verisign.

What's real today is:
> traditional mobile telephony which provides good quality when you have good radio coverage, but terrible performance when you don't;
> Voice over IP over fixed Ethernet which can be made to work well (perhaps with the use of the NetSymphony system if you have problems initially);
> Voice over IP over WiFi which may or may not work well depending on the WiFi radio connection and on how many others are sending data over that particular WiFi access point.

What remains for the future is Voice over IP over mobile Internet access, i.e. over the mobile data channel. Many people are interested in this (including me), but for now most mobile operators are blocking VoIP over their data services and, in any event, this would only work if you had a good cellular radio signal in the first place.

Once again, my apologies for thinking you were just promoting NetSymphony stuff. I do get a variety of spam in the comments section, which appears to have made me unduly suspicious. Sorry.

[Dean Collins]

It's a shame that no one on the panel looks equipped to talk about Mobile Analytics, considering without analytics data mobile web content is inferior to desktop browser content I would have assumed you would be running a session on this important issue.

Just in case some of your readers haven't looked into this before check out the pdf at the bottom of this page that discusses the pro's and con's of javascript/page tagging and wireless capture http://www.amethon.com/Content_Common/pg-Mobile-Analytics.seo

Regards,
Dean Collins
www.amethon.com

[Brough Turner]

Dean, there are many companies solving specific (and important) problems with the mobile channel, as you are at Amethon. That's great.

I can't speak for the rest of the conference, but on this specific panel, I'm trying to address a more meta-question: how can we restructure our industry so as to increase the rate of mobile innovation?

[Dean Collins]

Hi Brough,

Thanks for your comments via email; as requested here is my response

Unrelated to Amethon but based on my experience working with other mobile related companies and carriers in 3 different countries the answer is easy.

"Have USA cellular companies stop thinking about themselves and start to think about what the customer wants".

To quote David Verklin CEO of Aegis speaking at OMMA 2 weeks ago. If mobile carriers in the USA got real about their flat rate mobile data plans and reduced the pricing to drive up penetration it would result in an increase of $20 billion dollars annually of increased turnover.

There is not a single other 'innovation' they can implement that will drive up their ARPU as much.

And until unlimited data and higher throughput becomes available nothing (but processing power but thats battery related) is going to count for naught. There are no data carrier people on this panel to answer this question.

As for the panel:
- Paul and Christopher can talk about apps;
- Rich and Benoit can talk about mobile OS (when you really need a battery guy to talk about handsets as it's the 'only' real thing holding back mobile processing)
- I dont know Chris Sacca.

As for Skype - why oh why, Where are my web controls for managing multiple endpoints in real time? Where are my documented api's for presence and chat control? Where are my smart call routing and voicemail applications? "Oh why Skype do you forsake me when you have had such promise so early, is it really true when your founders sellout that all the green cabbage spoils the mind"

If you want to have a smart 'voip' company talking about mobile then get someone from Grand Central, at least they are building real web 2.0 applications.

Anyway these are just ramblings of someone who cares about actual analytics - what do I know.

Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Amethon.com