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.
. Nov 7-9. San Francisco. 
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