The Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm) is focused on 'What’s Next in Telecom, Mobile & Internet Communications™' (See http://eComm.ec for details)

Major event sponsors: Voxeo (Platinum), Skype (Platinum), Global IP Solutions (Gold), MetaSwitch (Gold), Ribbit (Gold)

Organizer Message

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For example I'm totally jazzed about mobile augmented reality (AR) since it came of age at the end of 2009. So much so, the last day is dedicated to it and now it's stretching to a 12-hour day! It's going to be amazing and will be the first such commercial gathering. But in conversation with friends privately recently, it was evident that nobody (except Martin Geddes) understood the very likely tight coupling between AR and "communications". Such a tight coupling offers immense opportunities for a substantial percentage of companies in the mobile/telecom/Internet communications space. Let me tickle you. AR has been about overlaying the "online space" (e.g. media/information) onto the "offline" world (AKA "real world"), i.e. providing visual metadata. But significant opportunities are up for grabs (in the greenfield sense) by applying to communication services.

AR could be used as the interface to interact with the "digital space", in our case, communications services. For example you could "see" AR created photo frames in your living room of people you cherish. If one of these people calls you, their photo frame could flash and it's general color state could indicate how long ago since the last call from that person (if it's too long the photo frame can vanish). If you wish to create a conference call, you could "pick up" two such photo frames and knock them together. You can keep building out from there, e.g. have texts (SMS) displayed as sticky notes on the photo frame. Already magazines are beginning to embrace AR and it's a logical step to add in communication services, e.g. advertisements have an AR component such as an AR overlaid Twitter feed. This is all entirely possible. It will generate significant value and it's just the beginning. The question is where would your company fit in such a value chain? Whom should you partner with?

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