The Presence Era

I had been travelling quite extensively whole of the week, been to four different capital cities in five days - that explains the poor record of updates( I do not know when I am going to follow Rajesh's suggestion to keep blogs ready while travelling)- one of the key development that came out in my discussion with various people - many in the so called new economy enteprises were amazed at the news that Ebay could be buying Skype for anywhere between 2-3 billion USD.As the WSJ article noted, EBay's surprising emergence as a suitor points to changes in its growth prospects and strategy. While the company still dominates its field, its core business of Internet auction listings is maturing, and eBay is searching for new product categories and international markets. It has made a string of acquisitions and investments over the past year and a half to enter markets such as rental-property listings, online classified-ad listings and comparison shopping. Many were questioning the valuation -whats the deal - as we covered long back Skype had reached 20% penetration of its addressable market and marching towards creating its own Skype Ecosystem. As Jermey wagstaff brings out
Making Presence Felt is indeed a real phenomenon. As he writes, "Presence" - the future of communications, might just mark an end to disruptive phone calls. Anyone using an instant messaging program such as ICQ or MSN Messenger will know when their buddies are in a meeting, offline or available for a chat. With ordinary telephone communications, where you have no idea whether the person you want to reach is at his or her desk, at lunch, on holiday or deceased. Getting through to voice mail doesn't narrow it down because that might merely mean they're on the line, or have switched it over so they aren't disturbed. Phone tag is a boring sport but one still being played in offices all over the world. Presence, theoretically, changes all this. In a world where the cost of the actual phone call is rapidly falling to nothing , some see presence as the best hope for the communications industry. Douglas A. Galbi, senior economist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, observes "To avoid disaster, the telecommunications industry needs to shift from providing telephony to providing means for making sense of presence." Feeling another human being's presence is what, at heart, communication is all about, and yet technology has done an uneven job of helping us in this. Hearing a loved one breathing, or bustling about, at the other end of the phone is comforting, but consider a future where we can decide not only how and when people can reach us but also easily share with those people where we are - photos or videos of our environment, our clothing, the room we're in, the view we're enjoying, the Web site we're reading, the movie we're watching. More prosaically, imagine opening a document and seeing not only who else has worked on it but be able to see immediately where they are and whether they're available to discuss it. Imagine a corporate network that told you immediately who else was in the office, and where, through an easy-to-access Web page or desktop program. I see a future where the concept of presence becomes so mainstream that we are able to connect with each other easily, more satisfyingly and less disruptively. One day a phone ringing at an empty desk will seem a quaint historical absurdity.