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Footsteps in the Hallway ... quick, lock the door!!!

A staple of the older horror movies (back in the days before the explicit gory slasher ones) was the suspense that a few sound effects could create, like footsteps coming down the hallway, or that scene in the dark street where the hero hears footsteps, but then when she stops to listen, the footsteps stop, then they start up again when she starts walking, and then ... well, you get the picture. Those footsteps create suspense by way of Apprehension, because we can't help but fill in the blank of what will come next when the footsteps turn into something more tangible, like one of our worst fears. I think that in the quiet times when they are alone, that's what it must be like inside incumbent telecom executives heads these days. All these footsteps, and they just won't stop!

i guess that's just the nature of change: exciting for some, painful for others. Everyday, it seems, there's another disruptive business making an announcement about taking advantage of new technologies and the Internet to offer a better ISP / voice / video service. I stumbled on three such services in the last couple of days, as I scanned email newsletters and websites.

First, here comes a service that seeks to outSkype Skype and outVonage Vonage. Jajah, a Luxembourg-based VOIP service, gets rid of both the Skype software download and the Vonage hardware component, turning telephony into a straight Web-based service, where you go to a website to place a call, by typing in the phone numbers - all over the Internet on the PC, and calls are charged by the minute - I think the rates sound steep, but I'm not calling from Luxembourg, where most calls are International. Still, you have to admire the ingenuity. Footsteps - can you hear them?

And then, back in the good old USA, right around the corner here in Austin, there's this announcement I picked up off of Glenn Fleishman's WiFi Networking News (great site, BTW) that promises to give the Community Internet folks a boost: 2hotspot is a free - there's that word again - downloadable solution to expand your access point into a Hot Spot and share it / commercialize it with your neighbors and passers by. The footsteps are getting louder.

And just the other day, I downloaded (for free, of course) a service called Loki , which is a tool that sits on your browser - it will, and I kid you not here folks - it will use a preloaded database of Wi Fi access points (they have millions catalogued) to locate you on a map, real-time, and ultimately will serve you local content and ads, based on where you are, at that moment. More Footsteps. Again.

There is so much going on in the background that it's hard to piece it all together, even harder if you aren't watching it daily like many of us in the blogosphere are. But when you do stop and think, it adds up to dramatic change on the horizon. Many in this field already think we're in the middle of that change and it's just hard to perceive right now. I am one of those folks, who recognize that it's not just surface change, but buisness fundamentals that are getting wobbly. No, gravity won't be repealed, we won't do the dog food thing again, but the underlying assumptions on whcih many of our great busiensses are based, are changing, constantly, inevitably, as the Internet matures, and those are the footsteps we keep hearing. Listen, and you'll start to hear them too. Open your eyes and ears and you'll see that the changes around us, growing everyday, are not your garden-variety changes that you could call evolutionary. They are fundamental to how we do business and live our lives. I think its exciting!

Posted on March 29, 2006 at 04:17 PM

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