The focus of their high-level powwow was IP Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS, the technology that most big telcos had once identified as the industry-saving platform for creating more IP applications more quickly, enabling them to finally escape their dependence on a handful of commodity services.
Just four weeks after the Monaco affair, in a conference room 6,000 miles away in San Francisco, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was unveiling Facebook Platform, a new version of the company's applications environment that lets people with the most rudimentary software skills create new services for the Facebook site. Those new services include the kinds of mobile and video applications that telcos themselves would dearly like to supply on the go.