Parsing Jeff Pulver’s next big thing

If you spent your weekend like I spent mine, watching a whole lot of basketball, maybe you’re ready for a little game with a friendly wager attached. I’m betting you can’t count all the ironies contained in the following paragraph.

Jeff Pulver is holding a one-day conference in New York City in hopes of getting telecom service providers and equipment-makers to talk about higher quality voice communications.  One of the goals: to enable law enforcement and Homeland Security types to gather more intelligence from wiretaps and threat calls.

So, how many did you get? Really? Here’s my tally:

1. Jeff Pulver, the guy who created the VON shows and pushed the voice-over-IP (VoIP) vision, used to regularly ridicule telecom service providers. Now he wants to talk to those same companies about how they can rejuvenate their revenue.
2. This same VoIP visionary is focusing his efforts on the quality of the voice signal. Hmmm, remember those early VoIP calls (and many of the later ones as well)? Seems to me it was mostly about cheap … and free.
3. Pulver, the anti-establishment prototype known for the Hawaiian shirts he wears everywhere, is courting the favor of law enforcement. There may even be government financial incentives to deliver high-definition (HD) voice, he said.
4. Pulver thinks telecom companies have a chance to offer app stores, a la the iPhone, that could be the future of social networking. Telecom companies as innovative partners? Not the typical Pulver mantra.