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CIO Forum: Online communities to shape mobile working
eBay's buyout of Skype not for VoIP gains...

By Dan Ilett

Published: Tuesday 27 September 2005

Wireless providers are looking to tailor mobile working around online communities in a bid to improve security.

Speaking at silicon.com's CIO Forum in London today, George Polk, CEO of hotspot provider The Cloud, said businesses are now demanding public internet accounts for visitors to prevent them using a corporate network.

Polk said users will be defined by their communities to determine access rights to a network: "This enables us to look at a network as a community not as a geographical boundary. The core area of that is that you don't lose control in a mobile environment while enabling people to travel. What service providers are trying to do is define that community experience to make it possible for users to have access to more communities."

He added that online communities were starting to have an influence on major business deals, such as the buyout of Skype.

"eBay's buyout of Skype had very little to do with voice over IP and much more to do with a community. Effectively what Skype did brilliantly was create an un-ignorable community."

Polk highlighted that the internet has brought about a change in the way people interact and build relationships.

"If you look at what has happened in the last 20 years, the difference in communities has changed. It used to be the people around you but now it's no longer based on geographical boundaries.

"I have a sister who is deaf. Her community is not restricted to her local friends. Her best friends live in other countries, some of whom she has never met. For her that community is more real than those people at the end of the street."

The silicon.com CIO Forum is going on throughout the day.