Two weeks back I attended VON Boston 2007 thanks to the gracious invitation by Jeff Pulver and Carl Ford. My main objective was to meet people to show off EnThinnai and also to establish contact with people for my consulting business. As usual the exhibition show floor was very informative and the few sessions I attended were interesting. Due to schedule conflict, I had to miss the keynote speeches from Tom Evslin and Jeff Pulver. But luckily for me both the talks are available for playback. Tom recreated his recorded speech live and spoke about the three stages of VoIP evolution. He observed that the time is ripe for the third stage, given the widespread availability of broadband and adoption of social networks. Of course, my own opinion is that the fuel for the third stage will be availability of multi-modal end devices that is closer to a phone form factor as opposed to a PC. Jeff talked about the Facebook phenomenon and how such social networks are facilitating both asynchronous and synchronous communication. He calls this IP Communications continuum. In my opinion both of them were telegraphing the plans of their newly focused venture, FWD International.
I spent a quiet a bit of time on Innovators’ Track and the Unconference. A memorable Unconference session was the session that was nominally titled, “Can VoIP be sold as a product?” Many years back, a thought leader had declared that VoIP is a product and not a service, by using Vonage as an example. Later on he changed his mind about Vonage, but then he used Skype to insist on his claim. Of course, now it is widely accepted that even Skype is a service and not a product. The title of this session is a tacit admission that such a categorical claim that VoIP IS a product is not valid. It turns out that the session was not scheduled to address this academic question. Instead it was a session where people can vent about Ooma and an opportunity for that company to respond to questions. The usual questions were raised – delivery of caller id, ability to tap a call and so on. These questions were fielded with the usual answers – caller id is not delivered, taps will be detected and will be handled etc. Carl Ford asked about revenue growth and possible escalation of support cost. At that time, the company representative indicated that they are planning to introduce new services that will bring in recurring revenue. As I recall, he made the point that PSTN interconnect is just the hook for consumers to buy “an expensive phone”. For me this is a clear admission that Ooma is not being viewed as a product, but it is indeed a service. Of course we never discussed that point. Will a business plan that is truly offering a product ever see the light of the day in this industry?
Alec Saunders led an Unconferece session on Social Networking. He pointed out that Facebook is slowly becoming a business tool as it is now dominated by middle aged professionals and not time wasting students. He also moderated a session on Social Networking as part of Innovators’ Track. In that session I spoke about the need for a new way of realizing the services usually offered by social networking sites, like maintaining social graph, data sharing and real-time communications. I called this “User-centric Social Network” and remarked that EnThinnai is a realization of this model. Other speakers talked about their (mostly voice based services) that utilize social graph of their users.
For me the most memorable session took place on the last day. It was titled, “Old Suns, New Stars” and was ably moderated by my friend Robert Logan. I wish that session was recorded and is made available to everyone. It was such a treat to hear Scott Bradner and Jon “maddog” Hall. I especially liked Scott’s dig at ENUM.
All in all good three days. Thanks Jeff.
Posted by aswath at November 12, 2007 03:26 AM