What is after Skype?

Intent...Business Intent, According to Lee Dryburgh, "the man behind the Emerging Communications Conference".
In an article in Skype Journal posted by Phil Wolff, there is yet more freedom to come in telecommunications - and that freedom is tied tot he intent of the subscriber.

Speaking of basic telephony, Wolffe quotes Dryburgh: "Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it.

However because its substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.
Second, we’ve got the economic model behind it. Even today, well over a hundred years since it’s original inception, we still have the same usage paradigms and economic models put in place at the time of the first electro-mechanical switches.
Now the keyword in all of this is “software.” Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale."

And what's ahead?

Dryburgh says that Skype is at phase one as yet, ahead is phase 2, the '“new” multi-trillion dollar market replacing much of what today is the multi-trillion-telephony market.'

Details of Phase II
Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone).

Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers. Google even has machines reading your emails in order to deduce your possible intentions and desires, which is why you may often find an eerily relevant ad above your Gmail account inbox. The underlying reason for the Android initiative surely has to be to gain access to better intention deriving data in order to sell upstream to advertisers.

Yet telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

To make the situation even worse, telecoms today is still charging downstream to the consumer, ignores money and wishes of upstream parties (like retailers, media companies for example). Because the telecom business model and regulation is pretty much hard nailed like the network itself, the bulk of telecom operators are not likely to be able to transition in time before other entrants move in who appreciate the new economics and who don’t have ball and chain legacy. New entrants and probably a third of telecom operators will transition successfully around phase two.
You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of more communication modalities. Now underpin that with attention and intention based economics.

Now dream a little.
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As a follow-up:
Commenting on the above view,Richard Bennett said, "As always. "Intention economics" raises one of the problems with advertising today, namely the barriers it raises to doing what we want. Click on a link to an article, and before you can read it you have to deal with ads in your face. I don't want an ad jumping up in my ear before I can place a call, so this model has to go. And of course I don't want to be nickeled-and-dimed to death by service providers converting every intention into a "billable event." So how does intention intelligence get converted into money without pissing everybody off?