VON: Pulver tells telcos: Be a ‘blade of grass’

BOSTON--The future of communications -- a combination of real-time and asynchronous connections driven by social networks -- may occur completely off the public switched telephone network, said Jeff Pulver, chairman of Pulvermedia, at the opening keynote address at this week’s VON show in Boston.

In a speech driven more by his enthusiasm for new technologies than antagonism toward the telecom status quo, Pulver nonetheless described a world where a combination of IP-over-broadband and Web-based applications marginalized traditional service providers.

“Carriers can provide us with connectivity and be bit-bucket providers,” he said, summoning advice from a grade school teacher in advising service providers to be happy with that limited role. “If you can’t be a tree, be a bush. If you can’t be a bush, be a blade of grass, but be the best blade of grass you can be.”

Pulver was clearly in visionary/enthusiast mode for his speech, encouraging an industry he helped found to embark in new directions. But it was hard to miss that his status-quo-breaking speech was followed by a keynote address from mainstream service providers Embarq and AT&T, each emphasizing the power of converged networks driven by IP.

Pulver, however, warned service providers in the audience “not to be dismissive” of his big-picture vision. The intersection of IP communications and social media “isn’t a distraction, it’s a step forward in our thinking.”

It’s also a direction that is creating significant new business opportunities, he said. “What service provider in the world do you know of that picked up 50 million subscribers in a year,” he said, noting social network Facebook’s massive growth path.

Calling Facebook the “white pages of the Internet,” Pulver said social networks will take their next step forward beginning next year when businesses worldwide begin to participate and figure out their social media strategies.

More than anything, Pulver said, social network-driven communications brings together synchronous and asynchronous communications, enabling participants to communicate in real-time when they want and in “real-enough-time” when they prefer. Communications today on social networks is not only text-based but brings together photos, video and increasingly IP-driven voice communications as well, Pulver said.

This model of communications is also enabled by rapid application creation driven by open social network APIs, best exemplified by Facebook’s much-touted development environment, which has helped launch thousands of applications. By comparison, Pulver said, “Nobody ever went into their garage to add new features to the AT&T network.”

“[Service providers] should hire a 13-year-old as a product manager, and then fire them when they turn 18 and hire another 13-year-old,” Pulver said.

Pulver wasn’t alone in busting the chops of incumbent service providers. Tom Evslin, a partner of Pulver in his latest startup, FWD, called the combination of IP and Web-based applications the next step in the evolution of VoIP.

According to Evslin, by leveraging IP over wireline and wireless broadband pipes, the next generation of communications is “being invented as if the PSTN never existed. [The PSTN] may connect to it, or it may not.”