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July 24, 2007

Offline Comment from a friend regarding my "Call for More Innovation in Voice Services"

Last night a friend of mind shared an offline comment about my recent Call for More Innovation in Voice Services.

He wrote: "Jeff… you’re 100% right in that people who come from the “add features to a phone” perspective will never get there. The very act of starting with the basic idea of a phone inherently constrains the imagination. Inevitably the discussion get to the “find me, follow me” problem because that has traditionally been the #1 problem with phones.

But is the find-me problem obsolete? Maybe it is. I think it is. I think that the upcoming generation of people is used to being online and reachable, and out there with what they’re doing, all the time. The only filter they have is no filter.

Datapoint to support my case for “don’t start with a phone if you want to be creative” – if you look at cell phones, the reason they’ve got all these innovative features primarily is because they aren’t “just a phone” – they are smart terminals, not dumb ones.

It’s not just the technology that’s 130 years old, it’s the paradigm. Gosh, anything that old that’s still around is hard to change; the only way it will happen is through generational change, not innovating incrementally on an old idea."

--

And I believe he is right about this. I would appreciate hearing how others react.

Just to be clear, what I am looking for are new ideas and new innovations. From people NOT involved in a startup yet. Looking for people who have the seed of an idea in their mind that are waiting to take the next step and make their dreams come true...that's were I come in. That's what this challenge is all about.

I look forward to meeting the people who come forward with their vision.

And special thanks to: Andy Abramson, Jon Arnold, Pat Phelan, Aswath Rao, Alec Saunders, Russell Shaw and TIA Communities for sharing their thoughts about my call for innovation.


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Posted by jeff on July 24, 2007 10:20 AM | Permalink

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Comments

It also comes down to having an itch to scratch, too. For example, very often I want to be able to use my phone as a wireless modem, but I HATE virtually every implementation of wireless internet access via Bluetooth or USB to my handset. All the pairing and crap makes it inconvenient - and difficult to share. I'd LOVE for a phone to be able to act as a wireless access point to the network it connects to, and it doesn't have to be a full power 300' radius 802.11g hot spot. All I really need is a hotspot about 5 feet wide, just enough coverage that I don't ever have to take my phone out of my backpack, and when I flip open my MacBook, I can surf via the phone like any other 802.11g access point.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely NO idea how to even begin to implement something like that, so for now, it's the idea only...

... but wouldn't it be cool at a conference like VON if you could create a small WLAN for the folks sitting on either side of you so that they could get access on a pipe that everyone else wasn't using?

Posted by: Christopher S. Penn at July 25, 2007 12:16 AM

Posted by: PhoneBoy at July 24, 2007 04:16 PM