I really enjoyed “The New Disruptors” session chaired by Om Malik. His panel of brilliant, young, drop-out entrepreneurs should be a wake-up call for everyone in our industry. Over the past few years we have seen a shift from enterprises driving network and technology innovation in the marketplace, with examples such as the PBXs and Ethernet, to innovation driven by consumers in the rapidly evolving Digital Home. It has been amazing to watch how consumer demand for creating, moving, and sharing content within their homes is starting to drive the industry. The adoption of WiFi has been an excellent example.

Om’s panel, consisting of CEOs from Xobni, Peanut Labs, Box.net, and Automattic, took this notion of the consumer driving demand to another level. In a highly energetic session, they spoke about how new service innovations will be driven by small, “agile” companies that are tightly connected with their users. With rapid beta processes, these companies could receive immediate feedback from their users and innovate at a fantastic pace. In an ironic but scary statement, even Google, who popularized the “beta”, was coined as “too slow moving” to keep pace. Iterative feedback and development cycles are needed to stay ahead of the market. They also described a world in which the approach is to put your software and services in the hands of the non-paying customers and grow virally – leveraging the power of social networks. Matt Brezina, from Xobni, even suggested that we should stop calling them “customers” and think of them as “individuals.” While some were starting to figure out how to make money from their applications through enterprise sales, many will still in positions in which they had not yet figured out how to monetize their services. But then again, when did Google figure out that they could make money in advertising?

It really was an eye opening session illustrating the massive change we need in the communications industry. We can no longer take one to two years to bring new solutions to market. We have to rethink and reinvent the service creation process. To thrive in this new world, we will need to reinvent ourselves and deliver new services at pace, based on an iterative, agile, and collaborative model that engages our users interactively throughout the process. We clearly have our work cut out for us.