Monday, November 08, 2004
Contact is King - VoIP and Verisign
In my slides I often start or finish with a citation of Douglas Rushkoff:
The mistake of Internet business people -- the same ones I satirized in Exit Strategy -- was to think that “content is king.” It never was. Contact is king in an interactive environment.
Tom Kershaw, vice-president for communications services at Verisign, pointed this already out in his two presentations at the Fall VON in Boston, one on peering issues and the other at the ENUM Update panel and now also in an interview in BusinessWeek Online.
The name Verisign is usually associated with Internet domain-name registrations and e-commerce. Less well known is the tech-services company's telecom-services unit, which supplied roughly one-third of Verisign's third-quarter revenues of $325 million. Cell-phone companies and other telecom providers pay Verisign to act as a neutral switchboard for calls going across different networks and to calculate the wholesale billing for the calls. See also Versign announces VoIP access to Global SS7-network
And that is also the essence of Verisign's latest venture, an effort to create a neutral switchboard for voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) telecom services. The idea is that Verisign will let disparate VoIP networks communicate easily and cheaply. The company launched the service in October, 2004.
BusinessWeek Online Technology Editor Alex Salkever recently interviewed Tom Kershaw. The very interesting Q&A session can be found in VoIP Is Verisign's Latest Domain
Subtitle: Exec Tom Kershaw talks about Internet phone service, which he says his outfit will make safer, easier, and more innovative.
The mistake of Internet business people -- the same ones I satirized in Exit Strategy -- was to think that “content is king.” It never was. Contact is king in an interactive environment.
Tom Kershaw, vice-president for communications services at Verisign, pointed this already out in his two presentations at the Fall VON in Boston, one on peering issues and the other at the ENUM Update panel and now also in an interview in BusinessWeek Online.
The name Verisign is usually associated with Internet domain-name registrations and e-commerce. Less well known is the tech-services company's telecom-services unit, which supplied roughly one-third of Verisign's third-quarter revenues of $325 million. Cell-phone companies and other telecom providers pay Verisign to act as a neutral switchboard for calls going across different networks and to calculate the wholesale billing for the calls. See also Versign announces VoIP access to Global SS7-network
And that is also the essence of Verisign's latest venture, an effort to create a neutral switchboard for voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) telecom services. The idea is that Verisign will let disparate VoIP networks communicate easily and cheaply. The company launched the service in October, 2004.
BusinessWeek Online Technology Editor Alex Salkever recently interviewed Tom Kershaw. The very interesting Q&A session can be found in VoIP Is Verisign's Latest Domain
Subtitle: Exec Tom Kershaw talks about Internet phone service, which he says his outfit will make safer, easier, and more innovative.
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