Disruptive Telephony

As you would know from watching my Twitter stream or the #enterprisecon hashtag on Twitter, this past week I was in Orlando, FL, speaking at the Enterprise Connect conference and trade show. Of course, that wasn't the only event happening last week... there was this wee little gathering happening in San Francisco to talk about a new bright, shiny object... :-)

So on Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, the attention of many of us at Enterprise Connect was not entirely on the speakers or presentations, but rather also on watching sites like the Engadget Live Blog of the iPad2 event. Analyst/blogger Dave Michels happened upon three of us in the press room who were watching the news... and naturally he had to take a picture (and naturally we had to ham it up a little bit)...

In the picture is InsideCTI author Eugene Liu, myself (Dan York), and Ovum analyst Ian Jacobs:

Thanks, Dave, for taking the fun picture.

P.S. And yes, of course I have a Voxeo sticker on the back of my MacBook Pro... would you expect anything less from me?

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If any of you will be in South Beach, Miami, next week I'll be there speaking as part of the Cloud Communications Summit and SIP Trunking Workshops. I've got a page up on Voxeo's site that shows my schedule at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/itexpo-east-2011/

I know a good number of other folks from the VoIP/UC/Cloud Telecom/Voice Mashups/SIP/etc. world are all going to be down there, so I'm looking forward to catching up with some folks there.

If you are down in Miami for ITEXPO, the Cloud Communications Summit, Digium/Asterisk World or any of the other events, please do stop by and say hello... or find me down at one of the sessions I'm in (my schedule is online). You can always email me or ping me on Twitter.

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Do you want to learn more about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and how it enables Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications? Want to learn how it works? What it does? How it can be used? How secure it is? How does SIP relate to HTML5 and what is going on with the "real-time web"?

If so, consider attending the SIP Tutorial at ITEXPO next week in South Beach, Miami, Florida, on Friday, February 4, 2011.

Taught by Dr. Alan Johnston and Dr. Henry Sinnreich, two veterans of SIP and IETF work, the day-long session covers a wide range of topics. In speaking to Alan Johnston, he said that for the first time this session next week will particularly get into some of the real-time communication coming into HTML5 and related technologies.

If you would like to attend the session you can still register. Alan passed along that the priority code "SIP" will get you a 50% discount.

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For those of us who have been around the "VoIP industry" for some time now, the "VON Conferences" put on by Jeff Pulver were the place to be in the early days of VoIP. We were all mostly early adopters and embraced with enthusiasm this idea of sending voice and later video over the IP networks... there was a real community of both attendees and speakers... all of us chasing that vision of real-time communications over the Internet and other IP networks.

"VON" as a name continued to morph and evolve... it became a series of conferences... the "V" included "video"... it spawned the VON Coalition on public policy issues... Jeff and his Pulvermedia team launched "VON Magazine", issues of which can still be found online in some places... www.von.com became a media hub around VoIP issues... "VON" became many things...

And then it all ended in early 2008 with Pulvermedia's investors seizing assets and then with Jeff's resignation. Fast forward to December 2008 and the VON brand was reborn through Virgo Publishing. I and many others wondered if Virgo could recapture and rebuild the VON community. They tried. They had a VON conference in 2009 (and I was a speaker there). They seemed to try a bit with online content.

But it never really worked. Times had changed... the industry had evolved. "VoIP" and even video are now mainstream and no longer solely the province of early adopters. Voice/video communication is not the only way we communicate... social media, in particular, as well as mobile communications and apps have changed what we do. While the conference industry in general declined, too, new conferences emerged, with many early adopters joining events like eComm or Jeff's own #140conf events... or the myriad of "____Camp" events happening on a smaller scale all over the world.

Virgo Publishing subsequently cancelled the VON 2010 show to focus on online content...

... and now, as of Monday, January 17, they've killed the VON name. Henceforth, all the VON URLs and content are under the "vision2mobile" brand. They provide a rationale which sounds reasonable on some level.

Still, for those of us who been in this industry for a while, it is sad to see the passing of the "VON" name, even though in many ways "VON" died a few years back.

R.I.P., VON... it was great to know you!

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If you have become a fan of Tropo.com for creating applications that use voice, SMS, IM and Twitter and want to speak about Tropo to a local user group, meetup, BarCamp, WordCamp or other event, the Voxeo Labs team has put together a pretty cool "meetup kit" that you can request (for free) for your next event. It's got some T-shirts, stickers and even some USB drives.

The Tropo blog post has info about how to request a kit.

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Are you interested in creating applications that can open up government? Apps that can give people better access to government data?

If so... and if you are in the Seattle area or are attending the GnomeDex event happening this weekend, you can join in to the 24 Hour Open Government Hackathon starting at 5pm tomorrow, August 21st, at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. Here's the basic info:

Who Should Attend?
Ruby, Python, PHP, web developers, coders and anyone who has a passion to code, hack or kluge applications that will free (or otherwise enhance) the accessability and usefulness of government-shared data. Although the sprint takes place August 21-22 during Gnomedex10 in Seattle, you don't have to be attending the conference to join us. Participation is free and open to anyone...we just ask that you register in advance so we know how many individuals or teams we need to accomodate. What's Going to Happen?
The nature of the Hackathon will be fairly free-form. Hackathon Partners will have organizers onsite to help get things rolling initially. At the end of the 24 hours, each app will be evaluated by the Hackathon Partners and prizes will be awarded to those teams or individuals that develop the best applications in the 24 hour period.

It sounds like a great time! I won't be there... but I know many of the folks attending. (The Tropo cloud communications service, one of the services of my employer, Voxeo, is one of the sponsors of the hackathon.)

Registration for the event is free... you just have to get to the Seattle hotel tomorrow at 5pm.

Here are some posts from others about the event:

• Hackathoning Government (from the CTO of the City of Seattle)
  
  
• Announcing the GnomeDex10 Open Government Hackathon

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what applications will emerge from the event.

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Just one day left until AdhearsionConf 2010 opens in San Francisco tomorrow. The schedule looks outstanding and I know that the Voxeo Labs team is already on site getting everything ready. I've seen via Twitter that some hardcore Ruby telephony developers are already enroute.... should be a great time!

Sadly, my schedule doesn't allow me to be there, but the good news is that if you are unable to get there in person, you can follow along on the UStream channel:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adhearsionconf

If you are in the SF area, or can get there, check out more info about the conference at:

http://adhearsionconf.eventbrite.com/

Great to see an event like this happening!

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This week I've been down at the SpeechTEK conference in New York and in the Voxeo booth we had a system that was running 16,000 simultaneous phone calls using our new software release, Prophecy 10. While there, I recorded a video interview with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor where he explained what we did and why we did it.  I thought I'd post it here, because while I'm obviously biased, I think it's a fun example of making a demo system for a trade show/conference. Enjoy!

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Will you be at the SpeechTEK conference in New York August 2-4? If so, I'll be down there as part of the Voxeo team staffing our booth and speaking on Monday about unified communications security (related to my book). Details can be found on the Voxeo Event page for SpeechTEK 2010, including a discount code.

SpeechTEK was honestly a show I'd not attended prior to joining Voxeo some 2.5 years ago. It's a smaller show, focused on the speech and voice/IVR industry, which is obviously where Voxeo started and continues to have an incredibly strong presence. Excellent community of people and a great agenda of sessions, case studies, technology deep-dives and much more.

SpeechTEK is also the show we use at Voxeo as an annual organizing event to make major announcements... and so naturally we have a number of great announcements in the works. ;-)

Will be fun... and I'm looking forward to seeing folks down there.

P.S. If you are in the media or a blogger and want to get advance briefing on our announcements, please email me. Thanks.

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When I was down in Miami speaking at ITEXPO East back in January, one of the interesting parts of the event was the "Startup Camp Telephony" that Larry Lisser produced where a number of startups stood up and gave their pitch on what they are doing. As the pictures on the bottom of the TMC page show, there was great attendance at the event.

Larry's back at it and has plans for "StartupCamp 2: Comm Edition" at the ITEXPO West event in Los Angeles on October 4th:

Five startups will be selected to give brief 5-minute “pitch” presentations following which a panel of industry experts and the audience will ask questions and provide valuable feedback. Early stage telephony companies – voice, mobile, video, network and other - wishing to be included in the pitch roster, should click here to enter their details. Startups will benefit from significant exposure leading up to, at and after the event

I'm slated to speak out there doing my usual security part of Ingate's SIP Trunking sessions, so while I'm there I'll be looking forward to seeing what startups show up and what cool things they are doing!

P.S. TMC did put out a news release about the event with more info.

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