Alec Saunders has a great writeup on the ballyhoo surround the recent Tello launch. He describes it thus:

The easy way to think about Tello is to imagine what Skype might be like if it were built for a business user. It’s a voice and IM app that can federate across multiple networks, support a heterogeneous universe of endpoints(hardware and software), and reflect presence information throughout the network. It’s a big vision. Alec Saunders

He provides the overview of the links which confirm to me that no-one has yet really got to do a test drive. I've applied for a personal beta account. Let's see what, when it comes. Tello's exposure at this stage is representative of a startup with big names behind it.

A few comments occur to me. The arguments for presence are it will help enterprise "productivity" dimension. The real issue is increasingly "attention management" and presence is just part of the functionality that enables the new models to emerge around the "economics of attention". This needs more thought. Similarly, Tello says they will federate IM systems so it doesn't matter which one you use anymore. I think this only sorts of works. I'd prefer to know that they are working towards a Jabber XMPP standard. Text is no longer something that provides a competitive advantage. It's the functionality and features you build around it. Perhaps this reflects my resistence to the likely requirement to upload my buddylists. The story also appears to ask the user to follow all sorts of routing info. Frankly I don't want to know about any of that. I do however want intelligence on the best way to make the connection at that moment. That intelligence should reflect both my status and the status of the person or people I want to connect with. No decisions required. Even auto converters where the exchange will be flagged or structured to be asynchonous.