I usually don't "plug" conferences. But EComm, to be held in March, is an exception, in part because it is a "bottoms up" meeting being organized by people in the IP communications business, not by a well-established conference producing organization.
The other reason is that I am primarily a "content" person, most interested in the intellectual capital being created at such meetings, not the important but more pointedly commercial aspects of trade shows. I respect the folks over at STL (Telco 2.0) for this reason as well.
Lee Dryburgh, who is pulling this together, shares a perspective on what is happening in the trillion-dollar-annual-revenue telecom business. "The first wave of the democratization of communications was market liberalization," Dryburgh notes. "The second wave was VoIP."
"Yet VoIP as a standalone product is not viable long term (consumer attraction is drifting away from "standalone telephony") and VoIP is unlikely to ever be highly profitable," he insists. "In short, VoIP is something 90s which has had little consumer success since."
"The third chapter onwards is far more exciting and profitable," Dryburgh believes. "It is this chapter onwards that eComm seems to track, promote and highlight."
"The third chapter takes VoIP as one building block of many to be fused together into "application experiences"; largely social applications or business efficiency products (or both)."
I happen to agree with him, and lots of us do. You should really check this out:
http://www.ecommedia.com
(I apologize for this not being a hot link, but I have never been able to figure out how to do that, despite following the instructions. Just a dumb end user problem.)
Or click on the new "Related Article" field at the bottom of the post. I've had to play with the HTML, which, as a Mac person, I really hate. I need to enhance it a bit, but that might take me a year...really....
If the future of the global telecom industry is a concern you share, be there.
