Jeff Pulver "From Telephony to IP: Shift Happens" is about to kick off the second VON Canada. He speaks of the communcations gap, the need for freedoms to choose and provides his questions for Skype. I've paraphrased many of his comments. Shift does happen. Reference to TV programs, Radar on Mash and the Jetsons, and the Get Smart shoe phone. They were the real mobility futurists.. integrating it into a shoe. These pioneers of mobility foreshadowed things to come. In 1964 the Picture phone.. later introduced.. Star Trek the Communicator. And R2D2 from 1977 could project a real time 3D holographic image. How much does this cost? Economically priced for everyone to have one. 3D presence so you can actually communicate with the person you are communicating with. While video works for training etc.. we really need to move to the point where we get the R2D2 type experience.

In the last year, end to end IP and broadband is taking off. VoIP is driving the infastructure buildout in places like China and voice is becoming an application. Concurrently there are freedoms we should aspire to ask for re content applications, personal devices and service plan information. Watch out for discrimination.

What's wrong with the IP inductry... to date VoIP has been about arbitrage, cheap voice replication. We essentially dare regulators to regulate. Differentiation is essential. He damns... those that come to market offering cheap voice.. to the extent that they are plying old rules. It's hard to say don't regulate them like that... kids with IM are different... build the communication services for this new generation. Communications will define this communication gap... many are missing the boat by not defining the communications for these kids.

Regulation / government must not stand in the way. New technologies are often used to replicate old applications. Soft switch replicated the function of the circuit switch. They simply ported the old technologies; this replicating is a mindset that we need to change to take advantages of the last 35 years. As VoIP minutes replace black and white minutes, there are very few purple minutes arising at the moment.

Jeff's lessons from Skype, asks whether Niklas Zennstrom is the "Steve Jobs" and Skype the "iPod" of voice and IP communications. He observes that Skype has made the communications experience on broadband internet better, because it is easy to use, works better than the rest (firewalls) and provided at the right price, so people adopt and use it.

Jeff's view and questioning asks whether Skype is really the future of communication. I understand him to say it is more than VisiCalc, probably Lotus 123 although no certainty that it is yet the Microsoft Excel and thus the next communications platform. At the Skype Journal we've been tossing around questions for Niklas for a couple of weeks. These are Jeff's questions...

• Has Skype become a "standard"?
• Does Skype become the new OS for communications?
• Will application developers build to Skype?
• Will Skype support the developer community?

If Skype is our iPOD,and what happens next in a Skype - enabled world? Still Jeff would really like an open source solution to emerge. The question may be is there still time?