Disruptive Telephony

Truly awesome... via Techcrunch...

Kudos to the LaughPong team for doing this!

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As I noted over on the Deploy360 blog today, I'll be down at the massive International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. I'm traveling on Wednesday, at the show Thursday through Saturday and then returning home Saturday evening.

I'm there with my team from the Internet Society and one of our primary purposes will be to get a sense of the state of IPv6 support - or NOT - among consumer electronics providers. As large carriers look at how they can roll out IPv6 within their networks, having home equipment that supports IPv6 will become more important in the years ahead.

At the show, we will be meeting with some vendors who want to understand more about how to move their products to IPv6 and also talking with media about the launch of our new Deploy360 site to help accelerate the deployment of IPv6 and DNSSEC. We'll also be part of a presentation on Saturday with a representative from Comcast explaining IPv6 issues to a IEEE conference for consumer electronics vendors.

And, of course, we'll be walking all over the show floor seeking out vendors who have IPv6 support. We'll see what we find!

On a personal note, it will be interesting to go to CES. While I've attended hundreds of shows/conferences over the years, including the even larger CeBIT show over in Germany, I've never made to CES before this year. I've heard a great amount about the madness there, of course, and watched the coverage from afar. So it will be interesting to be on the ground there.

You can, of course, expect that I'll be tweeting a good bit both from @danyork and @deploy360 (although a colleague of mine may be doing most of the tweeting from that account). I'm also planning to put up some posts on CircleID related to what I find... and of course the Deploy360 blog.

IF YOU ARE OUT AT CES and want to connect, please shoot me an email, call me or ping on Twitter.

Let the fun begin...

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How can we accelerate the usage and deployment of IPv6 and DNSSEC? What are the barriers to getting those technologies more widely deployed? How can we "take away the pain" of getting started with IPv6 and DNSSEC?

When I joined the staff of the Internet Society back in late September, the project I joined was charged with looking at questions like that and developing a means to promote online resources that would help speed up the usage of IPv6 and DNSSEC.

Yesterday, after a long 3 months of hard work, we formally announced what we are now calling the "Internet Society Deploy360 Programme" located at:

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/

On that site, you will find real-world deployment information about how to get started with both technologies. Case studies, how-to documents, links to other sites, and much, much more...

THIS LAUNCH IS JUST THE BEGINNING!

The site is certainly incomplete... we wanted to get the site out there and now my task over the months ahead is to fill the site up with answers to questions and pointers to new information.

We're not looking to add ALL the information found on the web about IPv6 and DNSSEC, but rather the best information we can find.

And where we can't find information that answers specific questions, we'll be creating new materials either directly ourselves or with partners. As an example, I'm working right now on some tutorials about how to add DNSSEC support into Firefox, and how to configure DNSSEC for your domain at a couple of different registrars.

And let me tell you, it is EXTREMELY clear to me now that this program(me) is definitely needed, as many parts of both DNSSEC and IPv6 are in desperate need of geek-to-common-language translation! Just sorting through some of the steps myself, it's very clear that there's a good bit of pain that needs to be taken away...

To that end, we will be constantly adding new material and resources as we both find and create new content - both in text, video and other forms.

Our goal is also to help foster the conversation around these topics, and so we'll have a constant stream of blog posts and will, of course, be engaging via many forms of social media. You can be part of what we are doing by:

• following @Deploy360 on Twitter
• liking our Facebook page
• adding our Google+ page to a circle
• subscribing to our YouTube videos
• following us on SlideShare

and I would definitely encourage you to join us on as many of those channels as you use. We're also actively seeking volunteers to assist us and have been rather humbled and pleased by the great amount of interest and support we've already seen.

I'm excited to get this project out there... and am looking forward to the months ahead as we build the momentum to help get both IPv6 and DNSSEC more widely deployed!

Please do take a look around the Deploy360 site. I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have. Are there other questions we can be answering? What are the barriers you have found to using these technologies? Are there sites or resources that you found very helpful that we don't have on the site yet? Please do let me know! Drop me an email, fill out our feedback form, ping me on one of the various social media... heck, leave a comment to this blog post! Somehow... I'd love to know what you think.

And with that, I'm off to write some content...

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Is Skype now "boring" in 2011? That's the question Phil Wolff raises over at the Skype Journal in his post "Skype is boring".

Phil points out, quite correctly, that Skype is no longer the scrappy little startup intent on disrupting the entire global telecommunications industry.

They've done that.

Telecom has been disrupted.

As I wrote about back in August 2011, Skype has accomplished a great amount in its eight years of existence... completely destroying the expensive costs of international telephony, bringing video telephony to the masses, introducing people to wideband audio, demonstrating that you can have secure VoIP... and so much more...

But as we enter 2012, Phil offers a number of reasons why Skype is now "boring". His main points are:

• Skype is a top dog, not an underdog.
• Skype is one-sixtieth of the Microsoft behemoth
• Skype is less unique
• Skype didn’t look innovative in 2011. Or 2010. Or 2009. Or 2008.
• Skype staff don’t talk to the public.
• Skype abandoned its revolutionary People’s Product identity,

(read Phil's post for his full description)

And he notes the current status of Skype:

Skype should end 2011 with about a thousand employees, about a billion dollars in sales, a portfolio of more than a dozen clients and a few platform products, and hundreds of millions of users.

Most of Skype’s work in 2012 will be more of the same. Getting new users. Holding onto existing users. Inducing users to Skype more. Putting Skype on more devices. Keeping the network running. Boosting ARPU. Diversifying revenue.

Sadly, I must agree. I used to write about Skype all the time here. But I don't as much any more, in large part because, like Phil, I don't tend to find Skype as interesting to write about as it once was.

Instead of the little company taking on "the Man", Skype has now become "the Man". Heck, Skype is even now owned by Microsoft... who pretty much defines "the Man" in terms of the corporate enterprise.

I don't see this as a bad thing, actually. It shows the success of Skype to fundamentally disrupt and change the telecommunications industry. There is still MUCH more disruption that needs to happen, and it will definitely be interesting to see what role Skype plays in all that.

Will we see exciting and innovative things coming out of Skype in 2012? Will they be revolutionary? Or simply evolutionary?

Can Skype rekindle some of the passion that users had for the company now that they are as big as they are? (and part of Microsoft?) As Phil asks, should they even try?

Will the writing about Skype move now from the bloggers and media sites that focus on the leading edge to more of the "enterprise" sites such as those from industry analysts? (Has it already?)

What do you think? Is Skype now "boring"?

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