Disruptive Telephony

If any of you are heading out to ITEXPO tomorrow through Thursday in Los Angeles, I'll be there on Wednesday. As I note on a Voxeo events page, I'll be speaking twice, pretty much back to back:

9:30 – 10:15am, Exploring Applications in the Cloud

11:00 – 11:45am, SIP Trunking and Security

The first is a panel discussion that should be quite interesting. The second is another version of the VOIP / SIP Security talk that I've been giving at Ingate's SIP Trunking Seminars for the past few years (and that always seems to be popular). More details and session abstracts on the events page I set up.

I'm looking forward to catching up with many friends at the show, including Andy Abramson, who I haven't seen for a while.

If you will be out there, please do say hello.

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As I mentioned over on one of Voxeo's blogs, Rich Tehrani pulled out his iPhone 3GS down at SpeechTEK last week in New York and shot a quick video of me talking about Voxeo's booth and the 20 Acer netbooks we had there running a 2,000+ node telephony cluster. Rich blogged about the interview and posted it in a way that I can embed:

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, speechtek, prophecy, itexpo

This week, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I'm on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn't happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am... but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference "backchannel" on Twitter by following the hashtag "#e2conf". Here's an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

I expect to have a very cool Voxeo announcement out on Wednesday, too... but more on that then... ;-)

P.S. And why do I do the silly "I (Dan York)" construction at the beginning of this post? Because I see my content being scraped and so "I" alone doesn't make sense in other places the content winds up :-)

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Technorati Tags: e2conf, voxeo, danyork, dan york, enterprise 2.0, boston

Out an eComm last week, Jon Arnold posted a set of pictures that included this fun one of me (click for larger version):

For those not aware... I've been wearing "western boots"/"cowboy boots" for years... in fact, I wrote up a fun story a while back about how Twitter and Facebook helped me find cowboy boots in Ottawa.

(And boots purists will note, of course, that the pair pictured here at eComm are not really real western boots in that they don't have a leather sole. These are in fact my winter western boots that have a rubber sole with a tread. Smooth leather soles don't work too well in New Hampshire winters with ice and snow ;-) And while eComm was in San Francisco, I did have icy parking lots in NH to be thinking about. I'll be able to start wearing the other ones real soon now... )

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, boots, danyork

Will you be down in Miami at ITEXPO February 2-4? If so, please feel free to drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere there.

I'll be arriving Monday afternoon and then on Tuesday, February 3rd, I'll be donning my VOIPSA VoIP Security hat to participate in a SIP Trunking Workshop sponsored by Ingate Systems on "SIP Trunking And Security". These workshops are always fun to do and as they are free to anyone attending ITEXPO (even just with an exhibit pass), they are usually well-attended. I'll be bringing my recording gear, too, and the talk will eventually go out in my Blue Box Podcast feed so you will be able to hear it later.

Speaking of recording... I'll have my video gear, too, and so if you have some new product or service in the "emerging communications" space that you think I might be interested in recording for my "Emerging Tech Talk" video podcast... well... pitch me. :-) I know I'll be recording a number of videos down there and I would certainly consider doing some more.

Wednesday evening I'll be driving back to Orlando and in Voxeo's office on Thursday and Friday so if you're in the Orlando area, please feel free to let me know as well.

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Technorati Tags: danyork, itexpo, miami, orlando, voxeo

Over on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh put up an interesting podcast on "Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony". It's well worth a listen for those of you interested in the larger picture of what we are building for a communications infrastructure...

P.S. And if you are interested in that topic, you really should consider attending eComm March 3-5...

Technorati Tags: ecomm, communication, telephony, rebelvox, voip

As has been widely reported within the VoIP corner of the blogosphere, the VON brand has now been reborn under the new ownership of Virgo Publishing. After the demise of Pulvermedia and the VON tradeshow in the spring of 2008, many of us wondered if new owners would be found to bring back the show - or was its demise just a sign of the times and the fact that the conference / tradeshow space related to VoIP is already quite crowded. We watched both Jeff Pulver and Carl Ford move on with their lives and new endeavors... and it seemed that maybe VON would just be consigned to the annals of IT trade show history. Or would it?

The answer came earlier this month when Virgo announced the launch of www.von.com as a portal for VoIP news and also announced a new VON Conference and Expo for September 2009 in Miami.

The rebirth is intriguing on a couple of levels. First, with Pulvermedia, "VON" was the conference/tradeshow and magazine brand, but the web portal was Pulvermedia.com. Now, it's all "von.com". The portal, newsletters, tradeshow and everything else. The tag line is also no longer "Voice On the Net" (or later "Voice/Video On the Net") but rather "The Voice of Network Convergence". As Jon Arnold notes, Virgo has ditched Jeff's distinctive purple color theme for a more traditional blue. And the show is also co-located with Virgo's "Channel Partners" show.

It will be interesting to see how the show goes. As several people have written about, there was a certain "magic" around the VON shows, especially in the earlier days. As Carl Ford wrote about the original VON:

Jeff (Pulver) was on the cool apps side, while I brought in the people who wanted to make efficient networks to support them. That to me was VON, but to our audience VON was a lot of things. It was Cool Apps, New Opps, brillant minds and the switch to cheap voice, etc.

I think the challenge the old VON had was that its audience did become extremely fragmented in recent years. Was the show about voice? and cheap voice? was it about carriers? enterprise? was it about video? Or was it about social networking? I think VON tried to be all of those things and in the end that dilution of focus may have helped in its demise. Will the new VON try to focus a bit more? Or will it try to be more?

In this tough economic climate and in a space already filled with shows, I commend anyone who takes up the challenge of mounting a conference / trade show event. The "new" VON is now nine months out... and it will be interesting to see what it evolves into. Right now there's not enough info up on the website to really understand what it will be... but we should see soon...

P.S. Note that the VON Call for Speakers is open until January 30th

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Technorati Tags: von, voice, conferences, voip

If you are in the San Francisco area (perhaps for VoiceCon?) and are interested in "emerging communications" or "emerging technology", would you like to join a group of similar folks at a dinner Wednesday night (Nov 12, 2008)?

Lee Dryburgh, the organizer of the eComm Emerging Communications conference, is hosting a private dinner in conjunction with Thomas Howe at the San Francisco Airport Marriott (Burlingame). There are currently some 50+ folks attending and some seats left and if you are tracking or pushing things forwards in the communications space you may like to try and reserve a seat (75.00 USD) by emailing Lee.

I'll be there, naturally, along with Thomas Howe, Eric Burger, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker and many others who are involved in the space. If you do want to join us, please email Lee very soon.

Technorati Tags: ecomm, ecomm2009, voip, san francisco

If you read this blog, the Voxeo blogs or follow my Twitter stream, you know that I very frequently travel and speak at conferences related to VoIP, telecommunications, etc. Often to the tune of 1-2 weeks per month. I enjoy the presenting immensely in that I get to teach people and tell the story about the disruption going on within telephony and communications in general... and also get to learn from some of the amazing people out there about what they see happening all around us.

Yet while I greatly enjoy and find so much value in the large VoiceCon and ITEXPO shows and so many of the others that I attend, one show stands out each year among them all:

eComm

.... eComm 2008 as well as the O'Reilly ETel shows that proceeded it in 2006 and 2007.

Why? Mostly because eComm and the earlier ETel shows were NOT the big conferences. There is no massive trade show. There aren't a huge number of different tracks. It's small... it's focused... and it has some amazing speakers who are truly out on the bleeding edge of how the ways in which we communicate are changing. It's a place to learn from those who are out there leading the disruption... it's a place to forge partnerships... it's a place where many startups have found interested investors... it's a place where you can sit and randomly meet those who are creating the "Post-Telecom Era".

Now if you would like to be one of those amazing speakers at the upcoming eComm 2009 to be held on March 3-5, 2009, at the Burlingame Marriott right near the SFO airport, the Call For Speakers is now open. The deadline for proposals is November 17th, but I expect the speaking slots to fill up before then. I'm on the eComm Advisory Board and we're already starting to see proposals come in by way.

If you've got an idea for a talk you'd like to share, please do submit a speaking proposal - please do note that eComm is very definitely NOT a place for sales presentations and such talks get quickly rejected. As the site says:

This isn't a traditional telecom conference. The eComm audience has very high expectations of speakers. They are both seizing opportunities of the post- telecom era (or re-inventing traditional products and services) and can engage the audience. Rules include a ban on "brochure speak" from stage (overt marketing pitches) and a strict enforcement of the clock.

Plenary presentations lasts just 15 minutes including 2-3 minutes of Q+A. We've found this format of carefully prepared presentations keeps the atmosphere charged. This format also helps us to fit in more than 70 speakers over 3 days. Thanks to the intimate feel of the venue and the energy and attention of the audience, many speakers find it to be a great public speaking experience.

Some of the topics we're looking for include:

• Democratization of communications innovation; anything from VoIP community, XMPP enabled social networking to DIY 12-volt telephony
• Convergence of the media industry with personal communications
• Theme "telecoms is becoming software"
• Telecom restructuring, threats, or new business models
• Telecom trends, particularly Asian
• iPhone or Android applications
• The new old - traditional carriers or vendors who are changing the game
• Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) applications on any platform; any socio-centric devices or applications will be considered whether mobile or not
• Social Computing
• Mobile leveraging of Cloud Computing or Telco in the Cloud
• Future of Social Networking Applications
• Network Equipment Providers plans for next 1-3 years
• Facilitating business processes with voice
• 4G Technologies
• P2P modes of production or networking

We're looking for all those topics and more... basically any topic related to how what we have known as "telecom" is fundamentally changing all around us... if you have an idea, please do submit a speaking proposal as soon as you can.

And if you don't want to speak - but do want to stay up on where the bleeding edge of telephony is - please do mark March 3-5, 2009, down to join us in San Francisco! (and follow the eComm 2009 blog to know when registration opens).

P.S. If you'd like to help promote eComm 2009, web site badges are available.

Technorati Tags: ecomm, ecomm2009, conferences, voip

As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I'll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I'll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I'll be speaking about "Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud", a favorite topic of mine these days.

Voxeo will also have a booth and I expect to be there. I'm also doing some video interviews and other media work (actually on both sides of the camera). I'm looking forward to catching up with a good number of folks out at the show.

If you read this blog and are out there at either the Communications Developer Conference or ITEXPO, please do come by and say hello. I posted the schedule of talks over on Voxeo's blog site. You should be able to find out more about where precisely I am through either twitter.com/danyork or twitter.com/voxeo.

Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, los angeles, dan york, voxeo, danyork, cloudcomputing, sip, sip security, voip security