Emerging Communications

TerraNet hopes to bring cell phones to villages in developing nations. CEO Anders Carlius describes TerraNet's ad hoc GSM mesh networking technology and business model. He envisions local entrepreneurs rolling the technology out one village at a time.

Open the telephony network and create a platform accessible to a community of developers. Crick Waters, co-founder, SVP Strategy and Business Development for Ribbit, believes this vision will lead to a new generation of hybrid communication tools and high value applications, and deliver on the premise that voice has value.

Can you recall the frustration you last felt trying to navigate through a poorly designed IVR system? What if there were an automated web-based solution that would take you directly to the option you need and then sent the call to your phone? Well, that's exactly what Shai Berger, President and CEO of fonolo.com, presents during this session recorded at the eComm 2008 Emerging Communications Conference, where fonolo.com was voted "Best New Product."

David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, pitches the telephony community on grassroots efforts as a means for the development of open standards. Grassroots community groups can serve as the catalyst for addressing challenges that corporate groups have chosen to ignore, and begin to bridge gaps between existing web technologies and mobile service providers.

In this talk from the Emerging Communications Conference, Tim Panton of PhoneFromHere.com describes how social networks can be improved by appropriate integration of telephone services. His company makes it easy for users to embed phone services in web pages without any additional setup, and he shares some of his experiences on how to best do that.

Mark Rolston of Frog Design describes how technology is changing products from a single idea to a platform for other ideas. The most prominent example of this is the telephone, which has changed from being only about talking, into a multimedia tool and element of personal identity. From the O'Reilly Media Emerging Communications Conference,

At the Emerging Communications Conference 2008, Jonathan Christensen, General Manager of audio and video at Skype, speaks about the development of IP communications over the past 10 years, giving a brief history of VoIP. He talks about its evolution from being a technology for geeks only, to a mainstream application, and concludes the talk by discussing the threats and opportunities for the IP communications industry.

Cell phone handset manufacturers don't know what features future applications will use, and developers can't build those applications without having hardware support. In this talk from the Emerging Communications Conference, Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko tells how their open hardware platform solves this "chicken and egg" problem.

In this talk at the Emerging Communications Conference, Rich Miner, manager of the Wireless Platforms group at Google discusses the ways that increasing openness will bring an explosion of innovation in the mobile industry. Carriers, manufacturers, and software companies are beginning to open up the networks, technology, and business models, all of which is opening up new opportunities for entrepreneurship and services for consumers.

Despite the increased visibility that the Web provides, many small businesses would rather receive a phone call from a customer than a page view or an email address. Irv Shapiro of IfByPhone demonstrates powerful, easy to create telephone services that take advantage of the ubiquity of telephones.