The Flat Planet and a Phone !

There is an ongoing discussion by leading bloggers where are the Voice 2.o applications. Jeff, Tom, Alec, Mr. Blog, Aswath have all weighed in. While it took me a day or so to digest their comments - I think that I don’t understand what they are talking about. There is really no such thing as Voice 1.0, Voice 2.0 or even Voice3.0…

Let me explain - what do Telecom companies do? Connect your phone with my phone so we can talk, right? What do VoIP companies do? The same. Sure they do it for cheaper, maybe even add some extra cool features, but it is stil connecting my phone with your phone so we can talk. No big deal, except if you are a techie and get your kicks from using IP instead of TDM or someother acroynm.

What do we want to do? We actually want to communicate and collaborate with our family, friends and business associates. We want to CoIP! Communicate and Collaborate. Now lets assume that somewhere in the foreseeable we will live in a IP Everywhere world, in 5, 10 or 15 years that will probably happen. How will we communicate then? Won’t we just send packets over IP to each other? Will it matter what device we are using or what kind of packets we are sending? Of course not, a packet is a packet. So we will mix and match devices using text, voice, video and maybe even smells to express ourselves and communicate.

The question “Where are the Voice 2.0 applications?”, assume that we are building on Voice 1.0 - the traditional method of telephone communications. But that is wrong, we have here a whole new paradigm which has nothing to do with the telephone. Just because I use my voice to communicate on a telephone does not make all voice communications into a telecom service. From now on we have to talk about IP communications which are media agnostic. Think about it, when you met someone you might use all of his 5 senses to communicate a message, does that mean that you are telephoning him? Well it is the same with IP communciations except the net will let you do it remotely.

Yesterday, I saw the future, a new CoiP application which in a simple automatic way uses an IP camera, MMS mobile phone messaging, cell phones and some other devices that I can not divulge to keep you informed. That is the future, blendng voice, video and text together as needed, to communicate with you - wherever you may be.

Long Live CoiP!