2009 January 26 | Alec Saunders

Is there a trend underway? Mobile startups everywhere are looking beyond cheap voice calls as generous minute packages have niched these players into providing cheap international long distance and not much more. Om Malik profiles several this morning, including the newly “rebooted” iSkoot.

The conditions are right for these companies. As first Apple, then Google, RIM, and Nokia all announced new mobile applications “stores”, the shackles imposed by carriers on software developers have gradually loosened. The iSkoots, Truphones and mig33’s of the world were formerly left to their own resources to gain distribution – cutting deals with carriers, or doing downloads over the air. Neither option is all that profitable, nor easy for the customer. The environment is now changing.

Having weathered the downturn with large cash reserves, these folks are now starting to deliver real value added service on top of the infrastructure they originally built to provide cheap calls. And with these fat cash reserves, they’re poised to capitalize on the economy as their less flush competitors experience the … ahem… downside of the “free” business model. It’s downright Darwinian.

A trend? Definitely.

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Jeff Pulver is back at it again. His newest venture is SocComm, the Social Communications Summit. The topics at SocComm will span across: Media / Internet / Communications / Entertainment, something he calls the “MICE” space. SocComm will have a mixture of individual talks, on-stage interviews / conversations and a number of group chat sessions.

This one day event presents a pot-pourri of speakers ranging from David Kirkpatrick, Senior Editor at Fortune to Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV. It deals with everything from content to policy.

Jeff’s rationale for the event? Here’s what he had to say:

We are living in a time where our phones have become social communication devices.

Presence is quickly becoming the trigger point for communication. I grew up in an era where the dial-tone on my home phone meant something to me. Today and in the future I believe that Presence is the new Dial-tone and that more and more communication sessions will happen because of presence. The evolution of presence has huge implications for a number of industries, including: advertising, media and telecom.

February 10, New York City.