Disruptive Telephony

A little bit ago, Andy completely surprised me with a call via Skype (it was 8pm-ish on a Saturday night and I just happened to be at my computer printing out boarding passes for tomorrow's flights) with some terrible news.

As Andy relays in his blog post, fellow VoIP blogger Russell Shaw passed away suddenly in his hotel room in San Jose sometime over the past couple of days. Russell was out there to attend eComm 2008 and Andy said that several folks were wondering where he was as he never made it to the actual show.

I've enjoyed Russell's writing on his IP Telephony blog at ZDNet and while I never really worked with him in any way, I would often run into him at the various VoIP conferences (and often at Andy's famous dinners). He was "one of us"... those who choose for whatever reason to write about VoIP/IP Telephony/Unified Communications/whatever... and so it is definitely sad to learn of his passing.

My thoughts right now are certainly with his family, wherever they may be, as they come to grips with this very sudden change.

Rest In Peace, Russell... you will definitely be missed!

P.S. ZDNet's Editor, Dan Farber, also has a nice post up about Russell.

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