By Kelly Fitzsimmons (@SchnellerKeller), Co-Founder & CEO, HarQen

As an industry, telecom sits at a vital juncture in history. Which side of its business should it invest heavily in: ‘tele’ or ‘com’? To many carriers today, the choice seems obvious. The growth is in the ‘com’ – the digital side of the business. The telephony – or voice – side of the equation appears to be losing velocity too quickly to be saved.

Innovators like Telefonica realize that this is a false dichotomy. Voice innovation is still very much alive and well. The key to success, however, is placing the right bets on the very probable future that voice lives on, just in a very different form than it does today.

With the recent emergence of the Hypervoice model, voice and the web begin to combine in a previously unimagined way.

Voice has the ability today to be a native Web object – a dynamic media asset that is searchable, shareable and findable in any language. The possibilities this represents are endless.

This vision of the future promises to unleash a kind of richness in applications and business models of which neither telecom nor the OTT players have previously dreamed. By moving away from the conception of voice as a separate, analog media type, the telecom industry is on the threshold of reinvention.

Telefonica is leading the charge, as they have recently partnered with HarQen and telecom expert Martin Geddes to found the Hypervoice Consortium, an organization whose mission is to drive the development of Hypervoice standards, applications and capabilities.

If you wish to learn more about Hypervoice or the Hypervoice Consortium, check out hypervoice.org