In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.
In seven to ten years video traffic on the Internet will exceed data and voice traffic combined.
Here's what a phone is: It's a computer that has a little app on it that allows me to dial numbers and then talk to someone.
The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
There's a shift to mobile apps; I'd like to see a more pervasive communications experience, and I think Skype can contribute to that.
Here, in low earth orbit, we're going around the earth, so we can actually use an Internet protocol phone because we have the appropriate satellites that can get those bandwidths.
After all, it's the future of business communication that we're looking toward.
As a matter of fact, when compression technology came along, we thought the future in 1996 was about voice. We got it wrong. It is about voice, video, and data, and that is what we have today on these cell phones.
With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.