Was with Simon Torrance, Chris Barraclough and the STL
Telco 2.0 team workshopping through the notes from their recent survey, all fascinating stuff - but that is for another day, and it is their thunder.
Also there were some other very sharp netheads / bloggers whose stuff I have read and enjoyed, and it was very good to meet them.
Like many others (1,000 apparently) I have appreciated the “10 things investors hate about you (Telcos)” post from mega-uber blogger and analyst James Enck's
EuroTelcoBlog.
I think he started it with his comment about big corporates drones killing new ideas like white corpuscles kill viruses, but a blog on (Corpulent) Corporate Corpuscles is on the Cards.....
Also had a good but all too short chat to the
Telepocalyptic Martin Geddes - I found a kindred soul who has also thought deeply about the differences between scale free and small world networks in emerging telemedia. Respect!
Over lunch Dean Bubley (
Disruptive Wireless), Mac Walters of
Moriana, Jason Gillot of STL and I started to debate the convergence of the multiple comms devices around the home. We all had divergent views about convergence (amazingly!), but then we started kicking around the idea of different "tribes" who use the comms devices differently. For eg, some people are talkphone people by preference, others are sms'ers, I am a 'nethead. Some of this is economic (more than the mobile companies would like I think, I watch students drop sms like a hot potato when they get to use our DSL and IM for example), some is circumstantial (no wifi access for eg), some is age group related (I guess - though I think that is less clear these days).
We also came to the conclusion a lot will be simple preference, we have different "most comfortable" modes of communication (is it related to NLP modes I wonder), so any definition of what a "converged" device will be is probably moot. What is more clear to me though is that services will converge - ie will
have to be used over multiple devices.
So which Tribe are you?
(Mac was wondering why, given a trend to retain specialised devices there is not a pure sms phone - I don't know but on reflection I suspect the on-cost of the voice gear is tiny compared to the total cost of phone system...and you may just be tempted to make a nice profitable phone call!)
Also met Malcolm Matson of the
Oplan foundation, which is dedicated to building open public access networks across the world. This is a subject for another post, but growing up in Africa and seeing what comms is already doing to free up people there now, I think this is an idea whose time cannot come too soon.
A fascinating group over a good lunch on a wet cold friday just before Xmas...who could ask for more.
