The following news story is a captivating summation of the rise of businessman Jeffrey J Steiner.

Jeffrey Steiner was a born Jewish Austrian who as a child fled his homeland during World War II to escape the Holocaust. As an adult, he speaks four languages and has residences in London, Paris, St. Tropez, Palm Beach, and New York. Jeffrey Steiner earned a degree in textile engineering from the Bradford Institute of Technology. He worked for Texas Instruments and advanced quickly through the ranks to earn a position on the management committee by age 25. He later obtained an executive position. Jeffrey Steiner worked for Texas Instruments for ten years before becoming interested in investment.

After leaving Texas Instruments, Jeffrey Steiner spent some time in Europe, where he dabbled in investment practices until deciding to return to the United States. Jeffrey J Steiner’s big break came when he bought enough shares of Banner Aerospace to become its Chairman. Rather than settling Banner’s debt, Jeffrey Steiner leveraged the company as a financial vehicle in other corporate buyouts. This eventually led to the purchase of Fairchild Industries, which Banner Aerospace rescued from the Carlyle Group and merged with its own business. Jeffrey Steiner is still Chairman of Fairchild Corporation.

GLOBE-TROTTING TAKEOVER ARTIST: Jeffrey J. Steiner; Transforming Nuts and Bolts Into Big-Time Deals

He grew up in Istanbul during World War II, after his family fled Hitler’s advance into Vienna. At one point, he was an executive at Texas Instruments Inc., at another, an owner of a Paris-based engineering firm doing business in the Middle East. He helped fund Carl Icahn’s first forays and is a buddy of the corporate raider Nelson Peltz.

Now Jeffrey J. Steiner, once one of the invisible hands in the takeover game, is stepping out on his own.

Mr. Steiner, whose investment vehicle is the Cleveland-based Banner Industries, is trying to buy Fairchild Industries, an aerospace company, in a deal valued at about $400 million. Fairchild would add to the 52-year-old takeover artist’s growing array of industrial companies that are, quite literally, nuts and bolts businesses - a collection, with annual revenues of about $1 billion, that has made Mr. Steiner a nine-digit millionaire.

”I’ve long had a goal of building a company in a specific core business and becoming No. 1 or No. 2 in that, and now I’m close to achieving it,” said Mr. Steiner, a dapper chain-smoker who dresses in the European tradition of sports jackets instead of suits and whose New York office is decorated with Andy Warhol portraits of some of his children.

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Read the full news article about GLOBE-TROTTING TAKEOVER ARTIST Jeffrey J. Steiner.

The telephone has been a mainstay of society since Alexander Graham Bell first developed the technology.

Telephony has been rapidly changing over recent years, though, as the internet and digital technology open new areas for it, and expand the ways in which we can talk to one another.

Digital Phones

One of the first breakthroughs in telecoms was the advent of digital phones.

Known as DECT phones - Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications - this offers cordless technology and allows different users to share to the same frequency.

This meant that digital phones literally broke the cord that kept people attached to their phones. You could have a handset and wander around the office while talking to someone, and keep the phone with you wherever you were, so long as it was relatively near the room with the receiver, without having to dash through rooms at the faint sound of ringing.

Of course, you could already do this with mobile phones - but the big difference was in the pricing: DECT phones allowed you to make and receive phone calls based on a landline tariff so you were find to use 0800, 0870 and 0845 numbers more accessible for customers, while mobile phones tied you to much higher priced network tariffs.

Teleconferencing

The next big step in office telecoms was teleconferencing over the internet. No longer did you need to leave the office to meet with staff, clients, or other associates - and you did not have to just make telephone calls either. Now you could be seen face to face and set up virtual conferencing rooms online.

Webcams and conferencing software were obviously the big openers for this change, but it has taken a while for this to filter into more common use as the rate of broadband use has significantly increased its share in the market for internet connectivity.

VoIP

VoIP has been the biggest recent change to office communications. Instead of having to use a landline or mobile to telephone people, you can now use the internet for telephony instead.

Not only that, but the calls are often either free or very low rate when made over the internet.

This makes VoIP a very accessible way of making calls generally, and with software such as Skype you can connect with other business associate/clients/workers simply, easily, and with little hassle.

The Future

One thing is clear about the development of telecoms - it’s getting cheaper, and easier, to talk with people.

Not only that, but with digital technology and the internet, comes the promise that one day making calls on video using streaming media, will become as common as a voice-only calling is nowadays.

The world is getting better connected - the future for business communications can only get better.

Brian G Turner is an communications advisor with PMC Telecom, and also runs online libraries of DECT telephones and headsets made available in the UK.