Silicon Valley’s obituary has been predicted over and over again but none of those predictions have come true so far. There are too many inventive and creative minds in this area, a large amount of angel and venture capital and nearly all major hi-tech companies have important locations here too.  As Ron Conway, an angel investor said today at a conference, “”Innovations is not happening in Sun Valley, it’s happening in Silicon Valley.”

Tech Crunch, a well known blog/weblog, held their Real Time CrunchUp event today in Redwood City. It was broadcast live allowing virtual attendees like me to participate.

A number of interesting discussions happened but I’m happiest to see that the focus was all about real time, which is what GIPS is all about.

On a panel discussing the ‘Real Time Opportunity’ John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks said: “The most compelling monetization models go with the user experience.” One can just look at the entry of Apple into the smartphone market in just two years and see the impact – the iPhone is all about the user experience. That’s what we are doing at GIPS. Providing customers with the best technology available on the market allows them to provide their customers with the best user experience – so whether it’s voice or video GIPS is constantly striving to provide the best real time experience.

How do you get President Obama, Michael Jackson and Iranian elections to fit on one page? It may sound like the start of a joke but in fact it’s simple: real-time communication.

As witnessed by the last few weeks Twitter, facebook and instant messenger applications like AIM have been especially active on the latter two topics – not just in the US and Iran but around the globe. While Mr. Jackson nearly brought twitter to a crashing halt yesterday, internet searches did come pretty close to slowing down the worldwide web.

As a society, communication has progressed in recent history from the letter, telegram, telephone, instant messaging and now video calls. What’s profoundly interesting is that the use of real-time communication software is becoming less and less the domain of technology-nerds and is rapidly migrating to general users. This is also evident in the workplace as unified communications grows. The younger generation entering the workplace is also comfortable using their real-time skills in a business environment as well as at home. It’s not just personal computers that house real-time communication platforms; it’s also prevalent on mobile phones.

This shift may seem obvious within the industry but it’s events like the death of a world-renowned musician, the true will of the Iranian people or the results of the US voting masses that highlight this change for me. The real-time communication environment will dramatically shift the way society works and operates. From making a VoIP call from a computer, to sending an instant message to a friend 12,000 miles away or waving hello on a video chat. We’re no longer going to be tethered to the dumb pipe of the PSTN as the IP network is allowing a whole range of software possibilities.

Moving on, I’m excited to read that Google Voice will be launched soon. While some of my colleagues are already using it (they were previously Grand Central customers) I’m awaiting my email invitation. However, I doubt it will solve my pet peeve that many people don’t answer their office telephone when it rings.

A few weeks ago I got a question about using GIPS products for streaming music. This is indeed possible, but since having to wait a few seconds before the play-out starts hardly matters when streaming, you can normally get away with using less sophisticated techniques like buffering a few seconds of audio to make room for delayed packets and have the time to re-send lost packets.

Anyway, the question got me thinking about whether there is a scenario where music played over the Internet would benefit from real-time treatment. I came up with one: what if you were able to rehearse with your band mates over the Internet. Imagine web portals where virtual bands can be formed in minutes – the drummer is in the US, the base player Swedish and on guitar that Korean guy from Youtube. I wondered if this is something we’ll get to see in the future and – as usual with Internet technology – I then found out it is already available. I haven’t plugged in the guitar and tried it out yet and until I have, I will remain a little skeptical since I believe even the theoretical minimum delay introduced by how fast information can travel over a network (speed of light) will come into play when trying to play music together. Nevertheless, it’s a really cool idea and I’d like to be proven wrong about the suspected delay hurdle – chances probably increase if you limit the distance by restricting band membership to people living on the same continent or in the same country or state.