The iPad did to the personal computer what text messaging did to telephony.
And, yes, Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, you can loosen some of those coal regulations, so your constituents feel you delivered on your dunderheaded campaign promise to bring back an industry that has as much relevance to our clean energy future as the telegraph does to 21st century telephony.
They came out of technologies that had nothing to do with telephony.
Co-founder Venkatesh B (who goes by Venky), describes the service as aiming to do for telephony hosting what Amazon did for web hosting.
Their strategy was to buy the cable systems, get as big as they could and then cut deals with the other cable operators to do telephony and rent their networks and roll out a national telephony play.
The other, Gizmo5, does VoIP telephony from Internet browsers and mobile phones.
ReprintsBut it is the coming convergence of the Internet with mobile telephony that threatens to do most to undermine the Internet's free-wheeling culture.
Free World Dialup (www.pulver.com/fwd), for instance, does not sell telephony equipment.
This will require advances in neighbouring industries, such as chipmaking and manufacturing, rather than telecoms, he points out.The rise of the village netbookIn the meantime, notes the Grameen Foundation's Mr Cantor, the internet equivalent of the village-phone model could provide a stepping stone to wider internet access in the poorest areas, just as village phones did for telephony.
What Twilio is doing for telephony, and what Stripe is doing for credit card payments, Framebase wants to do for video.
