Tim pointed me to Alec Saunders blog today. What a great read for us industry folks. Our "got to market" approach is quite different than Alec’s company’s, but we see the world the same nonetheless.
Alec talks about "Voice 2.0", something similar to our "Phone 2.0". Our primary distinction being that we’re looking beyond voice, to other modes supported by phones, i.e. SMS, MMS, etc. Other than that, we see the world the same way Alec does for the most part. The prerequisites for being in this Phone 2.0 space:
-Carrier, device, and access agnostic
-No headset required
-No client SW or HW required
-No jacket required (jk)
I enthusiastically posted a comment to Alec’s blog:
"I couldn’t agree more with this post. You’re right, it’s all about the customer. And Ken’s right, people don’t want yet another phone number (and I say they don’t want yet another voice mail box either). The reality is, among all the Voice 2.0 companies, everyone is choosing their beach head. Some are modernizing smart number services, some are doing find me/follow me, some are doing long distance arbitrage, some are doing asynch messaging, some are doing group messaging, some are doing free voice mail boxes, and some are doing control and private identity stuff (that’s us). Some will get more traction than others, and those lucky ones will have an opportunity to perform their follow on act to their respective visions. Among those, as long as everyone keeps in tact the notion of being carrier agnostic, access agnostic, and device agnostic, we’re going to have a very interesting dynamic in the market place. We’ll ultimately learn what consumers want, and in what order. Some things will make better sense to consumers than others. Some companies will innovate better for consumers than others. Some may win the hearts of millions of users, some will power partners, some may consolidate and some may fail. To that latter point, time is on our side, so we’re all better off pushing our agendas now than we would have been in prior times. Hang on everybody."
-MC
