Pulver's Purple Prophesies--And Fallout Thereof

Once upon a time, there was a guy [1] who railed against the incumbent carriers and wore a lot of purple. Back in 2002, he railed against the generic "black and white" minutes of glorified POTS traffic converted to VoIP.  Long-distance arbitrage was the name of the game, where service providers squeezed as many pennies as they could shuffling calls from Taipei to San Jose and from Mumbai to NYC. 

Jeff Pulver watched as the wave of first generation VoIP shuffling happened and was disappointed at the results.  After that came the initial moves to put VoIP applications on mobile phones and, yes, another arbitrage play to deliver cheaper phone calls through VoIP.  Not much else.

Pulver wanted purple minutes, minutes of IP traffic part of an enhanced application that might include voice, data and video content. Six years later, Jeff is still looking for his honest purple minutes and innovative applications [2].  Voice 2.0 is here, but there's been no big killer application, it's all just variations of a theme for call forwarding and voice mail and some APIs to slap voice into a web service.

As Jeff searches for some companies to invest in for the Next Big Thing, it's easy to see some of the fallout from the many, many me-too ventures selling black and white minutes without a lot of large-scale variation. Vonage is now pinning its hopes on reselling Covad DSL. TalkPlus and Jangl will, at best, be bought up. There's bound to be a few more mergers and implosions by the end of the year as VC cash tightens up.

Maybe the current generation of telecom leadership is too hidebound to really make change. Certainly I see the evidence in the lack of adoption for HD voice. I have to use separate programs to manage phone numbers and load the resulting contact list onto my cell phone. I can't even share phone number between my cell phone and my home phone because the home phone is essentially the same handset that's been around for 20-plus years except it has some memory and an LCD screen for caller ID. Gaak!

I hope Jeff finds a couple of radicals to overthrow the status quo before I throw my handset out the window.

- Doug [3]