Conversation With Skype’s Jonathan Christensen Offers Preview of Dialogue on Future of Communications Industry
Event at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., March 12-14
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–March 4, 2008—One look at the speaker roster for the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference 2008 being held here March 12-14 and it’s clear participants can expect an intense three days of idea sharing and policy discussion on the future of the communications industry.
“It’s what we’re calling ‘The Trillion Dollar Industry Rethink,’” said conference organizer and chair Lee S. Dryburgh. “The speakers participating in eComm are just the kind of forward-thinking people who will spark debate about the future of the industry. What I’m hearing during my preliminary conversations with them is a prelude, I believe, to the thought-provoking, high-energy dialogue that will be taking place at eComm.”
One of those pre-event conversations, Dryburgh noted, was with Jonathan Christensen, general manager, audio and video, at Skype. Christensen will kick off Day 1 of eComm with the keynote address, Moving Up & Down The IP Telephony Stack: Ten Years of Internet Communications.
“What I heard from Jonathan during our chat,” said Dryburgh, “makes me very excited about the direction Skype intends to take and the messages he will deliver at the conference.”
Among the points Christensen made during the interview, which is posted on the eComm blog (http://ecommmedia.com/blog/2008/02/jonathan-christensen-skype.html), are:
• About Skype: We want to continue to make the whole [communications] experience as seamless, as natural and as life-like as possible. And I think there will be a trend toward the higher fidelity, better performance in devices as well. So we need the help of the device manufacturers at this stage to realize that voice is not just about this old-fashioned PSTN-style voice…. Video is a major initiative for us and making life-like video available in the mass market is a big goal for us as well.
• About the future of communications: It's going to be messy for a while but it is going to happen, and the Internet will survive as the one open platform. You are going to see a trend towards extreme innovation at the edges—on the devices, in the PC platform, in software, all around the edge of the Internet.
• About eComm: eComm is focused exactly in the right spot [to explore] where there is going to be an explosion of new rich communication services on the Internet platform.
Other speakers at eComm will include Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs; Rich Miner, group manager, mobile platforms at Google; Brough Turner, chief technical officer and senior vice president at NMS Communications; Christopher Allen, founder of the largest iPhone developer-support community; ex-Google employee turned angel investor Chris Sacca; and Benoit Schillings, chief technical officer at Trolltech (Nokia).
Dryburgh noted that eComm2008 continues to attract sponsors and speakers. With the addition of more speakers in the last two weeks, eComm2008 now has three full days of sessions. Sponsors so far include Voxbone, Ribbit, Six Apart, NMS Communications, IfByPhone, MIR3, Voxeo, Wireless Grids Corporation and VAPPS.
Attendees may register online at http://www.eCommMedia.com, where full details of the conference—including the roster of speakers—are available.
The Advisory Board assisting Dryburgh in selecting content and speakers for eComm includes:
• Imran Ali, founding partner in Carbon Imagineering;
• Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis;
• Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives;
• Martin Geddes, chief analyst at technology consultancy STL Partners;
• Norman Lewis, chief strategy officer at Wireless Grids Corporation;
• Sheldon Renan, principal in technology consultancy Vision & Strategy, LLC;
• Brough Turner, senior VP, chief technology officer and co-founder of NMS Communications; and
• Phil Wolff, CEO of Reef9 Media and managing editor of Skype Journal.
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About eComm™ 2008
eComm 2008—the inaugural Emerging Communications Conference—was born of the ashes of O'Reilly's ETel Conference to track and help drive the major disruption beginning to transform the multi-trillion dollar telecommunications industry. From industry visionaries to bleeding-edge technologies, cutting-edge academic projects to incumbent telecom players and garage-based hackers, eComm is designed as the only telecommunication forum to embrace and promote radical change. eComm is poised to make history on March 12-14, 2008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. For more information and conference registration, please visit www.ecommmedia.com.
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