TELEPHONY TWO-DOT-OH!

Tired of the 2.0 nomenclature yet? Web 2.0, Telco 2.0, 2.0 this and 2.0 that? Can't say I could blame you.

For me, however, 2.0 is very much on my mind these days. For starters, this column is my re-entry into the Telephony universe — job 2.0! I started my reporting career at Telephony straight out of college in 1989 and spent five years chronicling the “convergence years,” ending my time here as news director/technical editor.

For the past decade, I've wandered mainly around the world of the Web and enterprise networks/computing. When Carol Wilson asked me back, it seemed like a perfect fit. Cover Web 2.0, she said. Help us track social networking, mashups, IP-based applications, network-driven services, and how it all affects and increasingly intersects with Telephony's universe. I'm in, I said.

I knew it would be interesting, but the amount of innovative thinking happening in the sphere of Web/telephony 2.0 has caught me by surprise. I'll admit, it's still a fringe topic, but one that's increasingly moving to the center of carrier conversations. And that's a fun place to be.

So what is “telephony 2.0” anyway? Two weeks of Googling and talking to some leading adherents has helped me develop my own shorthand. To me, telephony 2.0 includes four key elements:

Telco 2.0 business models: IP-plus-Web 2.0-plus-competition, including service unbundling, cost-based pricing, deregulation and more.

Network/Web-based applications and services: Mashups, social networks, and wireless applications and services.

Cloud operating systems and next gen architectures: Service-oriented architectures; carrier application layers; and Amazon/Google/Yahoo! as next gen hybrid datacenters/communications/content providers.

Network-centric, application-rich devices: Powerful end-points for telephony 2.0 applications and services, both as recipients and enablers.

I'll be covering these things and more in print and online, via blog post and podcast, in person at events, and virtually via newsletters and Webinars. I look forward to all of you, our readers, contributing to the conversation as well. (I think they call that user-generated content, right?)

What could be more 2.0 than that?