It’s the third week of March, it must be time for San Jose and Spring VON. It is, it is. And I in fact arrived last night to beautiful sunny weather here in the Bay Area.
It’s a lightning visit for me this year, as I have to head out tomorrow morning for some client meetings. But that makes me more determined to maximize my time here, to see old friends, to conduct some business, and to get current on the trends and nuances in the IP communications industry. We already started last night with an excellent town hall moderated by Jonathan Askin (now Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and blogging here), where we explored the policy playing field and who’s pushing for what at the FCC and congress. The ususal suspects get up in arms, but I don’t know, maybe the nice weather mellowed me out but my sense is that things are going ok, and that there is siginificant public will behind network neutrality. I mean, look how fast Comcast got slammed down with their bittorrent fiasco.
No speaking engagement for me this visit. I was offered a chance to moderate a fun panel on what to do with all those phone numbers as people retire second and third lines; but it’s after I leave. (I was able to pass this opportunity along to Michael Cerda of Jangl, who is the perfect moderator for this topic — should be a good session and I wish I could attend)
I also attended the VON advisory board dinner, where we had a great discussion about the role of face to face conferences and trade shows in the increasingly internet web 2.0 world. We also talked about the dark clouds on the economic horizon, and what this might mean in particular for the telco industry. My own perspective is a bit contrarian in that I think there is quite a lot of money to be saved by moving to IP communications technologies. and in economic downtime the CFOs of enterprise get very interested when you tell them that you can cut 40% of their NETEX costs. But of course this is what Ampersand does for a living, so I might be expected to have that perspective.
Technorati Tags: Spring 2008 Von