By Brady Gilchrist (May 2008)

Ok - I'm a tech guy, advertising guy, technology freak and someone who spends way too much time traveling. I've been involved in creating markets for everything from broadband to burgers - you name it and I've been knee deep in understanding how to sell it. Here is a little insight gained over 16 years in the biz - consumers choose popular technology trends. Companies make stuff and consumers vote through their consumption as to what rocks and what doesn't.

Rather than look at the voice convergence issue from a technology provider perspective, I'd like to talk about my current converged lifestyle. Fact is that my communication habits are more advanced than any single vendor can address. I suspect this is the same for many people. From a communications perspective, it all starts with a powerful computing appliance; probably a smartphone and a laptop. The reality is that communication options have become so complex that we need powerful devices to connect us with all the streams that carry our touches with the outside world.

The need to communicate falls into three main categories in my life: seeking, connecting and participating. Seeking is the act of finding stuff, and this generally happens through the web or conversation. Connecting is a human connection for either business or personal reasons. Finally, participating is the act of being in a group or focused on a task either as an implementer, sponsor or manager - but generally with some type of contact required with many. These three modes of connection create the need for a variety of tools.

In our modern world keeping all these forms of communication moving requires converged devices and services. Simply put, convergence in my life is a total necessity. My digital lifestyle is also a total kludge, and it works extremely well. It was never sold to me; it was just gathered along the road of interacting with others. No marketing genius lay behind any of it - just the ebbs and flows of finding new ways to connect with those around me. We tend to communicate using the same bits that our colleagues and friends use.

My personal experience in convergence anchors around two bits of technology - my BlackBerry and my Macbook. GSM keeps me talking, GPRS and Edge flip me the mail, while WiFi and RJ45 put me into the stream wherever I may be. Interestingly enough, the phone is critical but the real heavy lifting happens on the laptop. Truth is that I don't really care that much about the technology behind the services - only that my work gets done. The killer service for me is really Boingo - the persistence and international nature of their networks has made certain that I'm never far from the data which defines the modern office.

I'll paint this converged picture. Not long ago I was sitting in Singapore doing as millions do around the world - connect to the internet through a decent WiFi connection in an airport. As my computer booted, a familiar stream of things started to happen:

• Adium (IM - Multi-service Client) boots - connecting me to my colleagues
• Skype boots - video conferencing and POTS access
• Office SIP client - just another extension
• Twitterific - just because I'm obsessed with the stream of opinion
• Mail - along with lots of filters to organize the incoming email
• Lingering on browser tabs are Salesforce, LinkedIn, Facebook, Bootcamp and a half dozen other useful web services including Google Docs for some long distance collaboration

Within 60 seconds I'm connected with my data, friends, associates and networks. It seems crazy to have so much happening, but each of those bits are required to connect to all the folks, activity and data feeds that go into managing projects and people on a global scale. Connectivity and proactivity are things that ultimately drive personal productivity. All the tools of a converged lifestyle deal with the issues of connectivity, while giving you a channel to exercise your proactivity.
 
You see examples of this everywhere. I'm sitting in Starbucks in downtown Toronto - the gentleman next to me is telling stories about how he manages massive projects around the world using Skype and promptly starts a conversation with his team in Angola. My new friend was in Toronto on vacation from Brazil. Like me he carried his converged lifestyle around on his Mac. I'm discovering more and more folks who sit at the center of self-designed international collections of people, and do interesting work just about everywhere.

It dawned on me then that convergence is a function of convenience - not the convenience of the individual but rather the convenience of the group. As long as the learning curve is short and the benefits apparent, it's a sure bet that these technologies will show up in the mix. It was a reality check to think that nobody actually told me what I should be doing or how to do it. Things just happened because they worked. The wisdom of the crowd had the perfect technology mix. Necessity was the mother of integration.

As a marketer, what really struck me is that there is no such thing as a perfect solution. The world is far too complex for someone to figure out all the paths and styles we have for connecting. I've concluded that product innovators need to get much more inventive and spend more time hanging out in airport lounges asking the folks nattering away in-front of webcams how they used their PCs to talk to the world and manage their global activities.

In essence, to me, convergence is nothing more than the ways the bits fit together now and forever more. The scary thing for service providers is that they must understand that they are no longer the core application or service, but are now simply part of a bunch of disparate elements that need to connect together. Anyone who tries to be all things to all people will find themselves in trouble. Telecom operators are nothing more than glue. Find out what kind of glue you want to be and then be the strongest you possibly can. Today's customers are far more sophisticated than most marketing departments realize - which is really an opportunity as much as it is a problem.

Brady Gilchrist is an entrepreneur, investor, inventor, explorer and communicator. Brady is currently residing in Toronto but works globally. You can find him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , on his blog at admodo.blogspot.com.