Telephone Free Victories

Lately VoIP is all of the rage. For those of you buried under a glacier, the rough translation is "voice-over Internet telephony", a technology which sends phone calls through an Internet connection for no extra cost. It seems simple, but it has already started to transform several industries - why pay for land lines when VoIP is much cheaper and more flexible? Imagine your phone following you around like you Internet-based email.

In fact, VoIP made a guest appearance in the mayhem that occurred in the days immediately after Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast. On Tuesday August 30th Mayor Ray Nagin's office was trapped in a Hyatt without power while floodwaters were rising and looters were literally at the doors. A resourceful geek from his staff instructed the cops to break into an Office Depot to "borrow" a server, and used a VoIP hookup on a battery-driven laptop to get a connection between Nagin (who had wet himself, and was rocking back and forth) and Bush (who was on Air Force One, enjoying a barbecue sandwich and watching WWF on the plasma).

Okay, I made up that last part. But the story of the Hyatt and the techie is not apocryphal, and made the (unlinkable) Wall Street Journal last week. We know in general that disasters, wars, and terrorist attacks are inadvertent showcases for new technology - usually gadgets that had been on the periphery prior to the breaking news. Savvy observers will note that even while we add items like VoIP to our pile of neat gizmology, there is one principal vulnerability points in terms of infrastructure that make a robust and redundant network. Can you guess?

The answer is power, in the form of electricity. The juice was off in NOLA on August 30th - and the diesel backup generator had been (predictably) stocked with very little fuel. Without that laptop battery the whole rig wouldn't have worked. You are encouraged to worry about the key need for reliable power - but try not to get distracted with fanciful talk about the need to transform our economy overnight into one powered by duck flatulence and rainbows.

Meanwhile, back in the marketplace, investors are hopping around because eBay just purchased Skype, a company which provides free VoIP telephony among it's users (and charges a pittance to call "out" to regular phones). But in the larger marketplace there's a mini-gold rush of looming IPOs for companies hawking VoIP-related offerings. So fire up the Smashing Pumpkins and Odelay! It could be the late 90s all over again, and we can trade stocks in our 'jammies.