I get a lot of questions about the participation age and what it really means for the telco industry. At the last 3GSM conference in Cannes, I had the opportunity to keynote for Sun (Sun at 3GSM 2006 in Barcelona). My subject was: The innovation will come from outside of your network, and there are several technologies that are key to profit from it. What I shared with the attendees is the following: the time for telcos to develop their own services in their network is over, and because voice services (and data services for that matter)are quickly becoming commodities, they need to look outside of their traditional business models to bring new revenues. ATT just announced declines of over 20% in consumer and 12% in business revenues for long distance.
Carriers need to find the new SMS-on-steroid-like IP-based applications that will generate the next growth wave, or else see their revenues continue to decline. These new applications (or innovation) will come from outside of their networks. That's the idea behind the participation age: harness the millions of developers to work on creating value for your network, bring the new media content to your subscribers' handsets, or integrate the enterprise applications into the rest of the communication systems. Communications service providers need to extract greater value from customers who increasingly will access multiple communications, IT and entertainment services from multiple providers across multiple IP-based networks. You may call it web 2.0, or internet.next(), the idea is the same, and telcos (convergent service providers) will make it a reality.
One key enabling technology that is paramount in this participation age is Java. Java created an environment that facilitated growth in application development, by enabling the communities of developers who took open development platform to heart. Business applications, information gateways, and massively scalable network games, which simply didn't exist before the widespread adoption of Java, are now in common use.
