Whilst perusing my daily feeds, I see Kim Cameron bring up the following idea:
When I was in Britain earlier this summer, I met Toby Stevens. How should I describe him? Can we invent the category of privacy entrepreneur?
Was trying out the Skype 1.4 beta today, with auto-forwarding. You know, Skype is now in a position to re-intermediate the mobile and other carriers (for a fee!). If your cellular carrier doesn't "get it" and see that there's a demand for innovation in voice features (like enhanced privacy), you just hand out your Skype number instead and have it intelligently forwarded.
Only want to be called on your mobile at certain times of day, or when you're not in a meeting, or when you're at your keyboard with a certain presence status? Then just set up your forwarding accordingly.
The current forwarding mechanism is just a binary on/off, but it doesn't take a genius to see how extensions could play into this.
So Skype Inc. is indeed a form of privacy entrepreneurialism. Roll up! Roll up! Come here to buy your missing telecom privacy features!
Now all Skype has to do is find a way to remunerate developers whose extensions lead to more billable minutes and up-sell to premium features. Unless of course they like pissing in their own pond and killing the little developer fishes...
Now here's a really evil thought. Want to upset the incumbent telecom players with some progressive regulation? Then force a separation of connectivity and service markets upon them. Allow users to port their number to a service provider like Skype, but still allow termination to your mobile device. Finally make numbers logical addresses associated with service, not physical addresses associated with routing and connectivity. Add a dash of wholesale pricing rules, stir in some termination rate sauce, and serve with gusto. Et voila! A competitive market in advanced telephony service emerges, unconstrained by the low level of competition in connectivity.
And we didn't even need to buy a single IMS box...
Unfortunately, the implementation will be really messy with all sorts of craziness because even things like a 3G data card needs to be assigned a telephone number to be accepted by the provisioning system. Doh! But where there's a political will, there's a technical way.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:09 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Don’t Call Me from Alec Saunders .LOG
Some great stuff by Martin Geddes on advanced privacy features for voice networks. He describes a compelling feature set for privacy enabling voice networks, and observes that Skype could do this. Skype is almost there. Their call fo...
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