However, Iribe said that virtual reality's more mainstream application will be more around communications – something that surely plays into the reasons Facebook paid $2bn for the company.
Many of the snarky blogs that follow Internet businesses, countless online industry watchers, and most current AOL employees listened poorly or with their usual confirmation bias and, thus, took away from Armstrong's remarks on the Ad Age video and from his subsequent personnel moves and communications something to reinforce their own prejudices, fears, and shallow thinking.
Such arguments would be compelling in a Jeffersonian democracy, where parties to the communications enjoyed something like parity of position.
"People are going to look at voice communications as something they expect to get for free," said Henry Gomez, general manager of Skype, which eBay bought last year for $2.6 billion.
As president, she succeeds Stephen Badenhop, who is leaving, he said, to take some time off and then pursue a new role in "marketing, advertising, communications or something entrepreneurial".
In fact, he says he's reaching back to the once-du jour notion of blogging because, in the frenzy to build social communications tools, something has been left behind: rationality.
"Our idea was that this year we'd try to shift the marketing and communications to something that's truly walking the walk," said Lee Clow, chief creative officer and global director for media arts at the Pepsi-Cola agency, TBWA Worldwide in Los Angeles, part of the Omnicom Group.
Originally called Sendgine, it was previously focused on building a secure messaging platform for legal communications, or something of a "Basecamp meets Gmail" type of product, explains CEO Shawn Schwegman.
A preoccupation with state-of-the-art communications technology is something that unites this rural community of around 1,000 people with the personnel of the 422nd Air Base Group – the branch of the US Air Force that operates the former bomber base as a vast data hub.
She has been able to raise the profile of the auditor general's office through a knack for communications based on something other than slickness or charisma.
So it is to Ms. Ruhl's everlasting credit that in "Dead Man's Cell Phone," she orchestrates the annoying din of our contemporary communications systems into something resembling celestial harmony.
