Dryburgh: What's after Skype? Intent.

eBay is preparing to spin-out Skype, setting it free to steer its own course. Almost six years ago Skype redefined realtime communications and changed the industry. Lee Dryburgh, the man behind the Emerging Communications Conference, shared some thoughts with me about his vision for what comes next. – Phil Wolff

I spent many years thinking about telephony, seven days a week, in a way it “destroyed” my life in a mental health sense during those years trying to ascertain where it was going between 2005-2020. It was clear to me that what had existed for over a century and which today generates revenues that dwarf the Internet, was going to be surpassed and that we had already put one foot on the cliff edge. It’s the big reason I kicked off the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards, because no other event seemed to have enough inherent vision.

Where is it going?

First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it.

Relationships replaces Voice as the substrate in clients. 

However because its substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.

Second, we’ve got the economic model behind it. Even today, well over a hundred years since it’s original inception, we still have the same usage paradigms and economic models put in place at the time of the first electro-mechanical switches.

Now the keyword in all of this is “software.” Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.

Looking forwards, we can consider Skype phase one.

Phase two is emerging on the horizon and it will have deeper impact yet. In fact, played out it will change social governance, market economics, how humans relate to each other and even the nature of geo-politics. It’s likely to have ramifications on all social order. In the long-term view, it will also be the “new” multi-trillion dollar market replacing much of what today is the multi-trillion-telephony market.

Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like.

And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency.

Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.

Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers. Google even has machines reading your emails in order to deduce your possible intentions and desires, which is why you may often find an eerily relevant ad above your Gmail account inbox. The underlying reason for the Android initiative surely has to be to gain access to better intention deriving data in order to sell upstream to advertisers.

Yet telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

To make the situation even worse, telecoms today is still charging downstream to the consumer, ignores money and wishes of upstream parties (like retailers, media companies for example). Because the telecom business model and regulation is pretty much hard nailed like the network itself, the bulk of telecom operators are not likely to be able to transition in time before other entrants move in who appreciate the new economics and who don’t have ball and chain legacy. New entrants and probably a third of telecom operators will transition successfully around phase two.

You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of more communication modalities. Now underpin that with attention and intention based economics.

Now dream a little.

tags: skype, strategy, intent, intention, intentioneconomy, presence, richpresence, privacy

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