Reports

The persistence of telephone numbers reflects the long-standing pursuit of innovations that serve the telephone company, not telephone customers. They are meaningless, and yet the wait for a mechanism that would reduce the need to keep track of them continues.…

There exist a lot of practical reasons for carriers to embrace flat-rate calling, but it remains to be seen if any of the current plans will be expanded to the point of Internet-like, flat-rate levels. Indeed, the Internet's 300 million consumer broadband connections remain the best opportunity for unlimited global calls.…

As the world population continues to grow, making communication available to everyone becomes increasingly important. An infocom ecosystem expanding the reach of the infotech industry to communication holds more promise for our human network than the usual stewards of communication.…

Infotech and telecom business models operate at opposite ends of the product vs. services spectrum. So for infotech companies looking to play a greater role in communications -- notably to offer more options -- they'll need to do more than just replicate telecom models.…

Given that the average talking Hallmark greeting card probably consumes more than a single MIPS and the $600 PC used by a typical 16-year-old to post videos on Facebook sports an Intel Core Duo chip capable of 27,000 MIPS, the tracking of MIPS no longer generates much excitement. While the availability and performance of connectivity represents the primary input gating progress today, the hunt for broadband still lacks an equivalent metric.…

Aside from price, the traditional telecom model remains largely unchanged, even with the introduction of VoIP, and a lack of innovation has kept miscommunication a part of our daily lives. The infocom sector needs to move beyond cheap telephone calls.…