Plenty of startups are determined to see prove that Apple won’t be Silicon Valley’s only phone company. That was evident at the eComm conference this week on Emerging Communications. I was taken aback by the variety of ideas floated at the conference. So much is afoot that I’m thinking there will be many kinds of companies in all parts of the phone industry in Silicon Valley.

Apple wasn’t at the conference, but its success has inspired start-ups and big companies alike. Consider the list of speakers: the Google Android guy. The Yahoo Fire Eagle guru. Someone from eBay’s Skype division and even a far-out social visionary from Microsoft Research.

Marc Smith, the researcher from Microsoft’s Search Labs, said that he would love to see an application that tracks his moment-by-moment whereabouts so that it could figure out if he were skating or riding in a cab, which would allow the network to push him the most appropriate information for any given moment.

Among the small firms, the dreams were just as big. TerraNet wants to sell mobile handsets to the four billion people on earth who can’t afford one. That makes the 276 million users of Skype’s free voice-over-Internet-protocol service seem puny. Even little Ribbit, the maker of a “soft switch” that lets you stick a cross-protocol phone widget on any site, called itself “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company.” (more…)