The rattle of jackhammers and traffic gridlock welcome any visitor to London after the ides of March.
The UK financial year is ending: Spend your budget by April 5 or expect a cut, particularly if you’re in public works.
This year, the thud of suitcases locking and money swooshing down the Thames join this noisome mix. London’s non-doms and investors are in startled exodus.
The cause: severe new UK tax laws. And they’re empoverishing our industry.
Perhaps it’s the influence of Lent, but I’m filled with the spirit of penitence. And in totting up my transgressions, it struck me that it’s hard not to sin in the converging industries of telecoms, media and IT - either personally, or professionally.
Clap me in irons, but I’m a Wifi piggybacker, shameless in the theft of bandwidth from those with unguarded networks. And in the bad old days before VOIP, I happily used callback services on my travels to reduce telephony costs.
In the late 1990s, the pan-European operator for which I then worked eagerly monetized bandwidth swaps with its peers. It made our balance sheet look good, and our highly-paid accountants advocated it. We also weren’t shy in refiling voice traffic via various island-based operators with favorable onward settlement rates.
Of course, there’s a difference between sins of omission, and sins of commission. But the problem is that what’s defined as a good, bad or just plain iffy can radically change in fluid industry environments.
I’ve always liked being a girl. You live longer and can blub freely at the Sound of Music. But the industry in which I work remains male dominated. And that demographic distorts how the industry views its innovations.
Take presence, a core component of unified communications (UC). To my mind, Susie Orbach needs to quit her riff on fat: Presence is a feminist issue.
I recently spoke at the U.K. Communications Management Association’s annual conference. In a two-day span, no less than 8 presentations advocating presence were made. I’ll single out John Mann, director of the Innovative Communications Alliance at Nortel EMEA. His live demonstration of presence was articulate, persuasive and technically flawless.
This went down awfully well. I looked across the sea of dark suits in the audience. Of course they love it, I thought, they’re (nearly) all men. It’s in their genes.
