The competition between VoIP and the PSTN shapes up much like highways versus railroads. The operator of the PSTN and railroad own their transport network. VoIP companies and car companies do not. Railroads and the PSTN support a single type of usage. Highways and the Internet allow all user types to commingle. The emergence of highways empowered people to control many more aspects of their transportation needs rather than depend on the schedules and railroad routes available. The Internet accomplishes the same thing for communications. Automobiles and highways gave rise to an entirely separate industry and provided the basis for new types of commerce. The Internet offers the same promise, and corporate chieftains with traditional telecom assets find themselves in the same position as the railroad barons when Henry Ford got rolling.

ObURL: http://www.gigaom.com/2004/09/the_voice_over_i.php

Signs of the future are all around us, but it isn't until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing that future act on premises that are not yet apparent to others. Watching the people whom more traditional marketing analysts might call "lead users" give insights into the future directions of technology, gaps in existing products, and new market opportunities.

oBur:l http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail197.html

Technically, we can use cooperative digital radios and wired nodes to make each new member add network capability rather than consume it and thereby scale reliably: Each cell phone can be an ad hoc tower; each Blackberry can store neighborhood messages; we can build cameras that never run out of film and recorders that consume no tape. This cooperation rewrites the rules of network capacity, interference, and power use. Perhaps most important, since the features of the network are implemented in each node rather than in the core, change can be incremental, at the discretion of each user, without requiring historically high capital outlay associated with new communications products. Hence the potential for industrial destabilization.

Vastly reducing the minimum efficient scale for innovation removes the high capital barriers that excluded all but the entrenched few. For the price of a new cell tower, one can now envision a wholly new business. The Viral Communications program is more than basic research, it is a forum for the creation of new opportunities.

ObURL: http://dl.media.mit.edu/viral/

-- 
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for
whom it can feel trust and reverence.
-- Mary Ann Evans

Posted a new image to images.
Hmm, still some work to do understanding blogware...