During the dot com bubble of the 1990s European bankers went to telecom company CEOs and said you can be as sexy as the American dot coms. This is the basis of what went wrong for the telecom industry according to James Enck. He observes that this panel discussion has a wide range of speakers and backgrounds but there are commonalities he guides the panel to discuss with the 2008 financial meltdown in hindsight.

Agilent's lead technologist offers predictions for 3GPP LTE cellular technology. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not a done deal, he explains, because its performance advantage is not yet proven. It has to be economically viable. The future of wireless is bright, but it has to be based on low-cost, low complexity technology. In the end, Rumney says, watch out for WiFi, because it is delivering where cellular isn't.

In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.

The over-the-top audio and video services occupy a major part of Unified Communications landscape today. Cullen Jennings, Distinguished Engineer, Office of CTO at Cisco speaks during the recently held eComm conference about the major trends that may affect the VoIP industry in the future. Cullen analyses the major hardware and software expenses incurred in offering these services and how the increasing cost of wideband codecs are vital considerations in the decisions that the voice service providers and open source communities make.

The adoption of High Definition Voice communication has gained grounds with the advancement of VoIP based communication technologies from companies like Skype, Cisco and Microsoft. Martyn Davies, Principal Consultant at Dialogic, speaks on the evolution of HD voice at the recently held eComm conference in Amsterdam and discusses how HD voice is gradually becoming a reality not just in VoIP based systems, but also in legacy mobile networks despite their inherent bandwidth limitations.

Imagine the earliest days of society where oral communication served as the foundation of describing, preserving, and sharing human experience. Johanna Kollmann, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, studies how technology serves essentially the same function today as then, helping move the interaction of people from communication, to conversation, then to collaboration.

"Telephony is dying and voip is not much better off". Where are telecommunication companies to look to next? Colin Pons, Senior Architect at KPN, thinks it's in enterprise applications, social networking services and mobile devices. The future of mobile is bright. The future of the internet is mobile.

Telecom companies need to move from being merely infrastructure companies to having add-on services on top of their infrastructure to survive. Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy at BT, looks at the container industry's history for insights into where the future for telecommunications will be. The money in the container industry was not in the infrastructure but in the service of moving objects from A to B, efficiently and profitably.

Everything is becoming a digital good. Sean Park, founder of Nauiokas Park LLP, discusses this idea and others, such as cyclical business cycles and horizontal business structures, in the context of the current events in international financial industries. Touching on both the far past and future, Sean Park analyzes current trends, markets, and business practices with particular attention to investment and business infrastructure while presenting his idea of a sixth economic paradigm.

In a world of media fragmentation, how can a big telemedia company keep its edge? By bundling deals with content providers, aimed at targeted markets. Gerd Leonhard says "curation" is the name of the game. Previously, big broadcasters and communicationss companies were the only game in town. It's now time for a new telemedia to care about content, branding, and audience.