GigaOM

The declining relevance of telephone directories erased 95 percent of publisher RH Donnelley’s market capitalization over the last 12 months. Although Google’s free 1-800-GOOG-411 service may attract some share of the directory assistance business, the crux of the problem lies with the diminished standing of wired telephones in an increasingly crowded communications landscape. The [...]

Vint Cerf’s 1974 TCP-IP specification and Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 World Wide Web proposals remained little more than interesting academic ideas until the ease-of-use advances that arrived with the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which sent the click-to-information Internet jumping from a paltry 500 end points to 10,000 by the end of 1994 and 24 million [...]

A transformation continues to gain momentum in telecom, with software innovation displacing big iron as the primary source of competitive advantage. But in order to have a telco-free nirvana, the infocom industry needs to produce compelling devices that go beyond features and functionality already available from the telcos.

The persistence of telephone numbers reflects the long-standing pursuit of innovations that serve the telephone company, not telephone customers. They are meaningless, and yet the wait for a mechanism that would reduce the need to keep track of them continues.

There exist a lot of practical reasons for carriers to embrace flat-rate calling, but it remains to be seen if any of the current plans will be expanded to the point of Internet-like, flat-rate levels. Indeed, the Internet’s 300 million consumer broadband connections remain the best opportunity for unlimited global calls.

Software patents deserve to die. What is needed instead is exactly the opposite — a formal process of contributing software innovations to the public domain.