Michael Jackson of Mangrove Partners (not the recently deceased member of the Jackson Five), credited with introducing MVNOs:

Actually, MySQL started the MVNOs - you could just set it up and start billing without having to buy something incredibly complicated

(Our friends at PlusNet would agree; their billing platform was once thought to be the world’s biggest MySQL database.)

Sean Park of Nauiokas & Park:

Mobile operators, they’ve already built a huge micropayments platform that works! They’re doing this right now - they send me a bill down to the last second. But they aren’t using it because they’re the phone company. The other thing is multi-sided markets. I’m trying to get a much better knowledge, academically and practically, of multi-sided markets

Martin Geddes:

What makes the money in telcoland? Voice and SMS - the interconnected applications, that work the same way anywhere

Today you have missed calls; in the future, your phone will tell you why you should call back

Dean Elwood of Voxygen:

Fortunately there’s this service called Calliflower that makes it all MUCH BETTER

Cullen Jennings of Cisco:

Distributed hash tables are the biggest advance in data structures in 20 years…and they’re the opposite of cloud computing!

In the future, 100% of commercial communications products will incorporate substantial open source

Lee Dryburgh:

Our economy is suffering under this vast waste of human time, and this has got to change…even if 80% of calls go straight to voicemail, telcos get termination fees. The carrier doesn’t care about your time.

Martin Taylor, Metaswitch:

Aside from price, applications are the only way of differentiating ourselves

Colin Pons, KPN:

80% of telco revenue is telephony…but the telephony business model is dead. We forgot that VoIP is a technology - and if you change the technology but keep the business model, you haven’t changed much