Telepocalypse

Going Dutch

Had a good trip over to Holland as a guest of Citynet. Did a presentation together with James Enck to a mixed audience of local telco folks in Amsterdam. My message: apply the principles of the stupid network to voice telephony, and you’ll find a world of untapped innovation and value. But IMS/NGN as the telco approach won’t let them capture it, because it asks the wrong question. Rather than how stupid can we make the network?, they instead ask how much intelligence can we get away with?.

You can listen to a podcast of me and James being interviewed here.

James has already done a great summary of proceedings that evening, plus a write-up on the Den Haag Telecom event the next day where we were just passive observers. (Apologies for the lack of real-time blogging, I left my laptop charger at home…)

My take-aways: The telcos are still stuck in the “triple-play” fallacy where you just bundle up the old services rather than improve them or innovate in any meaningful way. The cablecos seem to be ‘getting it’ and about to embrace participatory “long tail” media. This could turn into a big story if they execute well. Vodafone wants to be a media company still — I guess the parties are better and staff are prettier.

Anyhow, many thanks to the folks at the City of Amsterdam for inviting me over, it was a pleasure to be back in the Netherlands.