Today has been a blur of meetings, presentations, and hallway conversations with various acquaintances.
Jeff Pulver kicked off the day with a new set of material. A comment of his that stood out was “Culturally the communication experience of the youth is changing; the phone is an anachronism like the horseless carraige”. Then he observed that current VoIP offerings ala Vonage offer nothing to this generation. I believe that he is on target with this observation. Witness Skype. Jeff also noted the move of open source telephony projects, and that Digium (Asterisk!) has the largest booth at any VON event ever.
Jonathan Miller, AOL CEO came next, and outlined the 800 lb gorilla move into this space, which will be tied in with the AIM presence and messaging platform. PSTN connectivity is handled by Level(3), btw.
The most touching talk was by Michael Powell, who gave a powerful and emotional benediction of IP communications as his swan song speech after 8 years at the head of the FCC. I talked to the folks at Pulver about putting it up for streaming off their site, and if they do I will come back and link it here. It’s worth watching if you want to see the tone of the current FCC, and that of a regulator who “gets it”.
Jim Crowe also touched on intergenerational dynamics by poking fun at his own personal lack of style, and thus his amazement that ring tones are a $3B annual business. He wondered when VoIP providers would start offering ring and ring-back tones (hmmm, biz opp here?)
Christopher Fine of Goldman Sachs speculated that VoIP might be a necessity for current telco mergers to pull off a combined network / product offering.
To close out the day I sat in on an organizational session for the Global IP Alliance, a confederation of international companies desiring to support ENUM and advocate a light regulatory touch world wide. I was delighted to represent a Canadian interest at this session, and scarily enough I was the only “international” voice. We plan to fix this at VON Europe in Stockholm.