Special Report: Telephony's Best and Worst of 2007

Top Buzz Words

2.0: This suffix will get obnoxious in 2008 as people attach it to anything they want others to deem new. However, it will last a little longer as “Web 2.0,” at least until the “Semantic Web” is born. Besides, we hired ourselves a 2.0 guy, so this has to be hot.

Convergence: The old fart of buzz words is still hanging around, gumming his Jell-O.

Green: When abused as a marketing term, this is as meaningless as “fat free” is to the Ding Dong. It should be a standard, not a slogan.

Mash-up: This catch-all term has taken hold in the telecom industry to describe voice plus Web 2.0-style applications. It does for service delivery what the cloud did for the network — but the name makes it sound like a monkey could do it.

Open: Brand your network, service or product “open,” and the gods will smile on you.

Quality of Experience: Sometimes called “customer experience” or just plan “experience,” it's the new measure of quality these days, replacing — and going one step beyond — quality of service.

Seamless Mobility: It's about as meaningless a phrase as you can imagine — anyone selling non-seamless mobility?

Social Graph: From the Web world, it's a customer's “network” of connections/friends.

Transformation: It's a necessary exercise but a relative term, as carriers in the end are still carriers. Watch as giant telecom service providers transform themselves into … giant telecom service providers.

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