I am struck by how downtimes create interesting opportunities.

 

Yesterday, I was sitting with a friend who is now far removed from the tech industry, but is very much a tech guy. He is working in an unrelated field but his roots are with him everywhere he goes. What he sees is that he is only using a tenth of his tech knowledge, but to his customers he seems insightful and a wizard (for most of these customers, the word ‘Geek’ would be considered a bad thing).

 

So this brings us to the core of the technology, which is – strangely enough – also finding it hard times to work in telecom. SIP is the protocol of choice and anything new is probably using SIP, but at the price of a minute and the role of the web for applications. SIP is looking for new frontiers.

 

SIP Events or more specifically using SIP to transport information from machines like meters for smart grids and sensors like transport are becoming fertile markets. If SIP is going to be used for things like meter monitoring and rendering billing data, it strikes me there is more fertile, closer to home markets.

 

I think SIP should be considered more core to the discussion is in the Digital Rights Management associated with content. SIP is being used already for ringtones, and yet in the discussions about piracy both Amazon and Microsoft (News - Alert) have ignored the opportunity of using SIP. Which is a shame because embedded in the discussion about SIP would be interoperability and federation.

 

If iTunes is the big monopolist and the device manufacturers and carriers all want to become players in the market, an association to spec out SIP Events to DRM strategies should form immediately.

 

Lots of associations have been formed about core technology issues about codec compression and web interfaces or for DRM methods, but to my knowledge SIP Events for DRM are not in the mix. At 4GWE, we will be talking about the future of video, and the question of integrating SIP to DRM will come up.