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The 2nd Emerging Communications Conference starts tomorrow. Registration is still open.

The programme guide has been produced and can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Below is the welcome message:

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Welcome to eComm 2009.

Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake.

For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players.

A battle is unfolding which is taking place across three related planes; between industries that were previously clearly demarcated (telecom, cellular, Internet and media); between distributed, peer-to-peer ecosystems enabled by the Internet versus centralized, command-and-control ways of organizing to deliver services and content; and between opportunistic infrastructure versus tolled infrastructure.

Complicating the drastic change is the fact that the most popular means of communication, telephony, is increasingly broken. The experience and underlying paradigms are now at odds with the time and attention of the people who are talking through it. It's approached the point of being unacceptable and bad for the economy. Yet it's the source of nearly 80% of the multi-trillion dollar per year telecom industry. Worse still for carriers, telephony and SMS revenues will peak in most advanced economies within the next five years.

Yet as the telecom kingdom fragments it's leading to more flexible, finer and more dynamic means of assembly that furthers innovation opportunities.

The transformations emerging in global telecommunications and media, require big thoughts and big bets. We hope that you find eComm the venue for those thoughts to be shared and heard.

We'd like to think that what happens this week will have reverberations globally.

Glad you've joined us.

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eComm takes place March 3-5, 2009 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott; a free shuttle ride from SFO airport.

About eComm

eComm is the venue for those interested in the radical transformation of the trillion dollar telecommunications industry. It has already started down the path that the homebrew computer took three decades ago. Just as democratized computation gave birth to the computer industry, eComm is tracking, highlighting and promoting the people and technologies driving this new wave of democratization. (Learn More)

Related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality, Policy & Regulation, Telecom, White Space