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Jon Arnold and I finally got it all together and are proud to announce the launch of our new portal, IP Communications Insights.

I'll let the announcement we sent over the wire this morning fill you in on the details:

Robins Consulting Group and J Arnold & Associates Announce the Launch of IP Communications Insights

New Web Site is Home to IP Communications Industry Newsletter, Blogs, Podcasts, Newsfeeds, and Market Research and Intelligence

NEW YORK & TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Robins Consulting Group (RCG) and J Arnold & Associates (JAA) - both prominent IP communications industry research, marketing and consulting firms - have proudly announced the launch of their new independent Web platform "IP Communications Insights", located at http://www.ipcom-insights.com.

IP Communications Insights is the culmination of a partnership between the two firms that includes an array of marketing, communications, advisory, consulting and research services for IP communications technology vendors and service providers.

Designed to be an independent platform for industry thought leaders and market intelligence, the goal for IP Communications Insights is to offer valuable coverage, analysis and information not readily available elsewhere.

In addition, IP Communications Insights will publish an ongoing series of industry reports designed to be very topical, highly strategic, concise and affordably priced. One study in the works, "VoIP Mashups - Where's the Money?" is a critical evaluation and insider view of this rapidly evolving space. The possibilities for VoIP mashups are limitless, but the business case scenarios are not. This ground-breaking report will survey today's landscape and provide a strategic roadmap for making VoIP mashups a viable business.

Marc Robins, IP Communications Insights Co-Founder and Chief Technology Evangelism Officer of RCG, has been involved in the IP communications industry since its inception, and has served the industry as a reporter and analyst, conference producer and magazine publisher, and marketing executive and consultant.

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Jon Arnold just let me in on the official "hard" launch of a new Web portal called "IP Convergence TV", of which Jon is Portal Editor. Here's Jon's blog post about it.

IP Convergence TV is a non-profit initiative that Comverse is heading, along with a group of charter sponsors including Intel, AudiCodes, Tilgin, BEA, and Blueslice. All these companies support the initiative by contributing content about all the various aspects of IP convergence - IPTV, Triple Play, FMC, etc.

Already, there's a good chunk of content on the site, and it has a nice, clean layout and very easy navigation. Definitely worth checking out!

 

 

I'm off to the VON show in San Jose, CA tomorrow morning, and I'm interested to see if there's any truth behind Thomas Howe's brave post today about why he's not attending the event. I'll be meeting with other technologists while I'm there, so I'm curious whether this position is shared by them.

For my part, I'm looking forward to shooting the breeze with my industry friends, making new friends, and (hopefully) discovering new innovative solutions and sussing out relevant industry trends.

Also, let me extend an invitation to those also attending the event to contact me if you're interested in meeting up.

I just absorbed some sobering statistics, courtesy of Fareed Zakaria's excellent column "Hassle and Humilation" in the February 26 issue of Newsweek magazine,  about the state of our International visitor visa process and the negative impact it is having on business travel and tourism.

Apparently, the situation is getting so bad that many important meetings scheduled to be held in America are being passed up by International business travelers due to an "increasingly demeaning process for visa applications."

Prepare to sober up: According to the piece, a group of Arab leaders recently landed at John F. Kennedy airport to attend a meeting of the Arab and American Action Forum, launched last September at the Clinton (as in Bill Clinton) Global Initiative meeting in New York: The idea: to bring together 100 young Arab leaders from all walks of life and introduce them to a similar group of Americans. The Arab backers are all pro-American, pro-business individuals who have attended American universities and who have spent extensive time in the U.S.

According to Fareed: "the first group of participants, mostly CEOs of large companies, were pulled out of the regular immigration lines...made to stand for two to five hours as Department of Homeland Security officials grilled them {about} why they had come to America, and whether they had any experience using weapons, what they thought of the Iraq war, and other such questions."

And if you think this is just an Arab issue, when "Discover America, a group set up by the tourism industry to encourage travel to America, polled 2,000 randomly selected international travelers and asked them "'which one location on the map is the worst'" in terms of visa hassles and nasty immigration officials, the United States topped the list by far."  If you're thinking they were probably anti-American to begin with, 72% still had a overall favorable view of the United States when asked.

The impact of all this hassle: "Total international arrivals into the United States declined 10 percent between 2000 and 2004, and business travel has declined 10% in the last 2 years...Once No. 1, the United States has dropped to third as a travel destination."

What's more:  "Over the last 14 years, global tourism has been thriving, having increased by 52 percent. But America's share has been declining, down 36 percent in the same time frame...with travel and tourism...employing 17 million people and generating $105 billion in tax revenues."

So, what are we to do while we wait and wait and wait for our State Department to significantly improve the situation? Continue Reading...

I just returned from travels south, to Fort Lauderdale and Internet Telephony EXPO -- and arrived in Winter in New York. It was bound to arrive at some point (although I thankfully missed the deep freeze, eight-degree temperatures of a couple of days ago).


The show was great -- well-attended and full of good content in the conferences.  Jon Arnold and I spent some time together basking in the glow of our recent announcement.  See Jon's post about show highlights.

And yes, I did spend a little time in the sun -- and barely escaped serious harm. Continue Reading...

Jon Arnold and I figured that since most everyone else was making some sort of announcement, issuing press releases and generally making noise  -- especially to pull in the crowds at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO East going on right now -- that it was OK to make some noise of our own.

Hopefully it will be music to your ears

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NEW YORK, TORONTO, and FORT LAUDERDALE, January 23, 2007-- Robins Consulting Group (RCG) and J Arnold & Associates (JAA) – both leading IP Communications industry research, marketing and consulting firms – have proudly announced a new partnership that includes the two firms joining forces to provide an array of marketing, communications, strategy consulting and market research services to their growing roster of IP communications technology vendors and service providers.

In addition, RCG and JAA will be jointly developing new information resources, including an electronic newsletter and related Web site, which will offer unique industry analysis, a healthy dose of opinion, provide a new platform for other industry thought leaders, and offer valuable coverage and information not readily available elsewhere about the rapidly evolving IP communications industry.

Veteran industry thought leader Marc Robins, RCG's founder and Chief Evangelism Officer, has been involved in the IP communications industry since its inception, and has served the industry as a leading reporter and analyst, conference producer and magazine publisher, and marketing executive and consultant. Continue Reading...

I'm looking forward to a little travel now, just as the weather is starting to behave wintery (pretty soon NYC will look like this).

Thankfully, upcoming travel will take me south to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Internet Telephony Conference and EXPO East.

I'll be moderating, checking out the latest technology on the show floor and sussing out the latest trends, holding meetings in the press room and elsewhere in the convention center (maybe out on a sun-drenched  patio) and generally enjoying catching up with folk and putting new faces to new names.

I'll be attending from midday Wednesday, January 24th till the show's end on Friday afternoon. If you're also attending the show and would like to meet up, please let me know. Continue Reading...

The folks at blog VoIP Lowdown have come up with a great list of ten leading-edge VoIP, VoIM, IP and mobile applications we should all be keeping our eyes on -- apps that go WAY BEYOND plain vanilla VoIP calls. The writer -- the mysterious "ewriter" -- is definitely a person after my own heart.

Tomorrow, November 28, I'm honored to be the opening presenter at the 4th Annual Industry Conference on Broadband Communications and VoIP, hosted by the New York Society of Security Analysts (NYSSA). The event is a half-day investor conference attended by institutional investors and analysts, and features companies that want to get more exposure on Wall Street, and includes CTI Group, mPhase, and VoIP Inc.

The New York Society of Securities Analysts (NYSSA) is the premier membership organization on Wall Street for portfolio managers and security analysts, and the largest society of its kind in the world. Founded in 1937, it is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to educating investors and advancing the competence of investment professionals. Founders included Benjamin Graham, considered to be the father of security analysis.
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According to a new 2007 Industry Review study from Boonton, New Jersey-based Insight Research Corp., the worldwide telecom industry is in a strong growth mode, and overall industry revenue is expected to climbs to $1.3 Trillion in 2007.

According to the study, strong growth in wireless is leading the way as wireless service revenues are expected to grow at a compounded rate of nearly 10 percent over the next few years, while wireline service revenues grow much more modestly at two percent. Nearly all of the growth in both sectors is expected to occur in broadband services, with wireless broadband service revenues expected to grow at a compounded rate of more than 60 percent over the forecast period, while wireline services grow at 10 percent over the same forecast horizon.

“The 2007 Industry Review states that in the growth environment set off by the rush to meet subscriber demand for broadband services, service providers are trying to create viable business models on the fly in order to deliver new types of IP-based services, including Residential Video Telephony, Fixed Mobile Convergence, File Sharing/Downloading Services, Audio/Video Streaming Services, Location-Based Services, and Presence-Based Services.

The study highlights rapidly growing industry segments such as VoIP, WiFi and WiMax, fixed-mobile convergence, IMS, IPTV and streaming media, as well as technological innovations such as grid computing and DWDM and WDM in fiber optics. Continue Reading...