I opened an account a few years back to get a sense of what the fuss was all about. Since I have a lot of industry contacts, I found it to be an endless stream of tedious invites to approve people I barely knew as 'friends', and with whom I had no intention of sharing the intimate details of my scandalous personal life.

In the meantime, I bought a teeny weeny PC to stick behind the telly and run Skype, so I could talk to my kids and behave in a childlike manner without the limitations of my laptop being on and charged up. This Skype account was not my main one, and had only two buddies: my parents, and the mother of my children. Nobody else.

Which made it a bit of a surprise when an industry colleague popped up one day with a "Hi Martin!" instant message. It took me a bit of detective work to sense what had happened. He has been suggested to contact me via a feature in Facebook that integrated Skype contacts, following a biz dev alliance between the two companies.

The only way of matching identities must have been through the email address or mobile I number I gave Skype when I had signed up. Remember - I had never explicitly shared this Skype ID, or authorised its publication via Facebook.

Having a private Skype account leak data via Facebook told me that this was a totally toxic relationship. Since Skype is not in the business of collecting personal data and monetising it, and Facebook is, I immediately proceeded to shut down and permanently delete my Facebook account.

And that's why I will never, ever give any of my personal data to Facebook again or do business with them.

I feel data raped.

We have produced a summary deck of the first session of the day, and you can view it here.

The kind of person we're looking for is likely to have a deep industry network with professional services expertise. Someone with consultative selling skills, marketing prowess and technology thought leadership.

We're also looking for sponsors for North American events.

I've just posted 3 CHALLENGES OF UNIFIED COMMS ON UNIFIED NETWORKS. I hope you enjoy it!

There is a 2-for-1 offer in the newsletter for the upcoming Future of Voice workshop in London on 27th October.

The newsletter covers some of the topic areas from the Future of Voice workshops I am doing in collaboration with Dean Bubley. For more information on the workshops, go to www.futureofcomms.com.

To subscribe to the newsletter, click here.

I've thought about blogging this stuff, but decided that putting content out there with no reciprocity from the reader (money, attention, data) is a fool's errand.

The workshop is an interactive learning and networking event, limited to 20 attendees. This is a particularly exciting time, given the challenge of 'over the top' providers to core telco voice and messaging products, and the response of telcos: RCS as the formal industry standard route, as well as a variety of their own 'over the top' services. Add in shifting business models, delivery technologies and ecosystems and it will be a packed day. If your company or livelihood depends on understanding where voice service is going, and you want to know what you peers are thinking, you should be there.

To learn more about the event and see what people said about previous events in California and London, go to www.futureofcomms.com. The registration link is here.

There are two parts to this post. Firstly four lessons from life; and then four beliefs I have about the future of the tech and telecoms industry.

The thread that joins these is the difference between truth and belief, and how we use magical thinking as a defence against uncomfortable truths.

(Apologies that comments are broken; my archaic Movable Type installation has gone kaput.)

MORAL: There is no one bearer of truth.

• Attractive truths can be delivered wrapped in falsehood.
• Those who offer you "The Truth" should be treated with healthy scepticism.
• And your own deepest beliefs may be on shakier ground than you think.

MAGICAL THINKING #2: That belief that the structured incentives, rewards, and activities of the organised search for deeper truth as a "discipline" will necessarily deliver truth that is valuable. Indeed, the more embedded into reductionist thinking - the default in academia - the less likely it may be to deliver something of use.

MORAL: The important truths are about people (and there is no "physics of people")

• Forget clouds, data centres, packets, optics, towers and poles. It's the relationship between people and technology, and people and people, that matters.
• Self-absorption in technology alone is not healthy or productive.
• The most interesting truths about technology are at the interfaces with the social, economic and political.

MAGICAL THINKING #3: By enjoying the confirmation bias of lots of like-minded people paid a lot to hold strong opinions as "leaders", your belief in the future will become truth.

MORAL: Truth is not democratic, and can be lonely

• You can have a fragment of the truth, even if nobody else is listening, and thousands of people around you are tasked on projects and products that visibly have no future.
• Andrew Odlyzko in his treatise on the 1840s Railway Mania notes the lonely voices in the crowd who saw through the insanity. The same happened prior to the 2008 financial crash.
• Have the courage to follow-through your truth even when your voice is very alone.

MAGICAL THINKING #4: You can both know who you really are, and ignore the parts of yourself you don't like or find shameful.

MORAL: The truth is not static, but an ongoing process of discovery.

• Even as you live your "truth in the moment", it's OK to change your mind. If you can struggle to know who you yourself are, then don't feel guilty allowing new ideas into your idea closet.
• The truth is an ever-evolving phenomenon, if the truth of self-knowledge is only partially-revealed, what hope is there for more than tentative belief in external phenomena?

Now to reverse and complete the cycle back to technology:

4. Truth is not static

MAGICAL THINKING: The end-to-end principle (horizontal architectures) necessarily results in horizontal (decoupled) industry structures.

TRUTH:

• My "Telepocalyptic" view has been given a lot more nuance over the years. Originally in 2003, I saw "over the top" services displacing telco services. That has indeed happened - see Facebook, iMessage volumes etc compared to SMS.
• It hasn't happened with voice to the same extent as quality voice is hard to deliver, and vertical integration retains some value.
• What we see are waves of vertical integration, then componentisation into more horizontal and re-combinable models.
• Apple is kicking off the next great wave of vertical integration, and should Apple use its billions to buy network distribution of digital goods and services we may see novel vertically integrated network architectures emerge.
• There is no one "right" way of building networks, just boundaries over the between different models that shift.

3. Truth is not democratic and can be lonely

MAGICAL THINKING: We've "plateaued" in our understanding of statistically multiplexed networks, and that the best future for society is always "more capacity", with little regard to efficiency.

TRUTH:

• The "network of promises" of telcos comes at a cost of lack of innovation and high prices.
• The "network of possibilities" that is the Internet also comes at a cost: a high demand for capex in access networks to absorb variations in needs between statistically multiplexed traffic types.
• Our deeply-held belief is that there is a tussle between smart and stupid networks, and that we must make a trade-off between generativity and efficiency. This trade-off is not intrinsic.
• There is a third, almost unknown, way of building networks: the "network of probabilities".
• Through new queue algorithms we can move all buffering to entry points in networks, and eliminating (virtually) all downstream contention (and buffering).
• We can make intelligent trade-offs between applications competing for network resources, and raise efficiency at the same time, getting more out of our existing networks at less cost.

2. The important truths are about people

MAGICAL THINKING: That "voice is free" (and peer to peer) means that there will not be powerful players delivering voice services, and that voice will become "just another application".

TRUTH:

• For all the focus on the Web in the last 15 years, we have lost sight of the importance of the human voice.
• The economic model for "talking at a distance" has historically been based on volume and tied to "telephony".
• This is going to switch to "value" and non-telephony services.
• The money is in making connection between enterprises and their customers efficient, effective and secure. Today's tools fall short.
• Connecting the right people at the right time, integration with automated business processes, elimination of wasteful activities like dictating names, addresses and credit card numbers to call centre operators -- all of these are what will drive business.
• What Google does with text search and advertising is going to be replicated at a much larger scale with voice media and a much wider range of business processes -- "putting people back into the cloud".
• The real cloud - one that merges the worlds of Internet and telephony -- is not just racks of on-demand compute and storage; it is also a pool of on-demand conversations with real people.
• The data, analytic and transaction driven intermediaries that enable this are going to be very powerful. Possibly more so than telcos are over voice today.

1. There is no one bearer of truth

MAGICAL THINKING: The "edge" has your best interests at heart and more than the "core".

TRUTH:

• Look around any room of geeks, students or workers at the glowing Apples. Imagine how you would feel if they were AT&T logos.
• The dynamics of multi-sided markets mean you should be as interested and skeptical of the benevolence of Apple as you are of AT&T.
• Veneration of the "edge" ignores that power accumulates in new ways, with new centres and control over distribution, such as apps and content stores tied to OS platforms.
• Whilst your Mac or iPhone may be the product of a beautiful fantasy we call the "free market", with great industrial design and skilful marketing - success brings power.
• With power comes the ability to set the rules of the game. Marx was not all wrong. Look beyond "network neutrality" to all sources of power in the distribution of digital speech, goods and services.

Closing thought:

• What are beliefs that you have long-held in the past as truth - but then you had to let go?
• What caused you to move on?
• What beliefs do you have today that are reaching their "use by" date and are taking magical thinking to sustain?

You can review the resulting videos here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The next event will be in London on 27th October, and we are working towards a late November date for the US East Coast. More information at www.futureofcomms.com.

You can get more information on the TelecomTV website here, and the direct link to the 25 minute video is here.

If you are involved in voice and messaging strategy at an operator or network equipment vendor, you're likely to find watching this video is a very good use of half an hour of your time. If you have any feedback, please do get in touch.

In related news, we are pleased to announce the next London event will be on 27 October. More information at www.futureofcomms.com.