A tale of 2 EComms....

As some of you may already be aware, I'm getting involved in Lee Dryburgh's new conference, EComm 2008 next March. It's looking to be a rapid-fire, whistle-stop tour of new forms of interpersonal communications. Brough and Martin are also involved, and have more on the back-story regarding the event's predecessor, eTel.

I largely concur with the notion that "The first wave of consumer VoIP has had only a minor impact" . It certainly seems to me that the current 'killer app' for VoIP is straightforward PSTN replacement (eg in France as part of triple-play offers). I see the same thing being the driver in the mobile domain - the long-term, slow, replacement of circuit-switched cellular with all-IP equivalents.

Sure, there's some high-profile movement around Skype, Vonage, Truphone and all the rest. But to be honest, that's still a very small sliver of the overall telecoms marketplace, with the possible exception of international call traffic.

I've been talking to a lot of people recently about 'non-telephony VoIP', aka voice mashups, or application-embedded VoIP. I'm expecting this to become a lot more important in a qualitative sense in 2008-9, albeit rather hard to measure quantitatively.

EComm should enable a bit more flesh to be put on the bones of this concept. If you're interested in going, let me know and I can sort you out with a discount code.

On a tangential note, I see there's another synonymously-named event later next year. It appears to owe much to the dubious efforts of London's tyrannical mayor, Ken Livingstone and assorted other misanthropic individuals, to enforce (and I'm laughing at the irony here) "mobility management" policies on his electorate.

Make sure you book tickets to the right one.....