Stop me if you've heard this one...

A guy is driving around the back woods and he sees a sign in front of a house:

“Talking Dog for Sale.”

He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a Labrador retriever sitting there.

“You talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the Lab replies.

“So, what’s your story?”

The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running.”

“But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down.

The Thursday morning keynote featured a presentation from Richard Tworek, vice president of Enterprise Communication Servers at Nortel.

Tworek addressed the assembly with a keynote entitled enhancing the human experience with enterprise real-time secure converged communications.

Reminiscing on the history of the industry, Tworek recalled that we have passed through several revolutions since the early days of 1998-99.

Tworek is a self admitted technophile and a classic early adopter. During the first “revolution,” Tworek had downloaded some software and attempted to call a friend in Virginia from his home in Maryland. Of course it took some time and lots of effort and configuration and reconfiguration sending e-mail back and forth until his wife finally asked, “Why don’t you just pick up the phone?”

The second revolution consisted of a so-called arms race, where bits and bytes, feeds and speeds, my phone works better than your phone were the order of the day.

Revolution number three is current: “What are we concerned about today?” In Tworek’s view, the ‘Top 3 Technology Initiatives for 2006’ include Security, Open Standards, and Personal Communications (any where, any time). “It’s really about enhancing the user experience,” he said.

He expanded on the theme and noted that the only consistent thing over the three revolutions is business.

The second keynoter of Wednesday’s lineup was Myrle McNeal, Senior Vice President of Local VoIP Services for Level 3 Communications. McNeal has responsibility for P&L, operations performance and marketing strategy for the company’s Voice over IP portfolio including (3)VoIP Enhanced Local, Local Inbound and E911 Direct services.

McNeal spoke about marketing VoIP services to consumers. He started with some background on what Level3 sees happening with the marketing of VoIP services and what we will need to do to accelerate the acceptance of VoIP services.

“Awareness is happening,” he said, “yet there’s still work that needs to be done to make everyone aware of VoIP. We’re just starting to move the mark, but the prospect for significant growth is higher then ever.”

Level 3 recently conducted some research on the VoIP market.

A joint initiative comprised of UPC Netherlands, Casema, MultiKabel, Essent and CaiW, totaling more than 7 million subscribers with more than 450,000 telephony subscribers - today awarded the VoIP Peering contract to a partnership of XConnect, the world's largest provider of "Plug and Peer" Voice over IP (VoIP) interconnection services and Kayote Networks, a leading provider of interconnectivity solutions for routing and peering. This landmark agreement enables all participating operators to share VoIP traffic directly over their IP networks, completely bypassing traditional phone networks and thereby eliminating PSTN interconnection fees.

Eli Katz, founder & CEO of Xconnect is speaking at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO tomorrow during the VoIP Summit.

"This groundbreaking deal is a momentous event highlighting the tremendous impact VoIP is having on the paradigms and business models of today's telecommunications," said Katz.

Tuesday evening’s keynoters represent a vast cross section of the industry. AT&T, arguably the most recognizable carrier in the world, Pingtel, a provider of open source SIP-based PBX technology, and General Motors, a behemoth enterprise consumer of telephony services.

As I sit here waiting for them to begin their discussions I am struck by the variety of keynoters and the variety of conference attendees. I guess it remains as true today as it was when we began publishing Internet Telephony magazine and putting on the Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO events: Magazine readership helps drive the attendance to the conferences. And so long as we serve a cross section of the industry with the industry’s number 1 magazine, we will continue to attract a cross-section of attendees to the events as well.

On to the keynotes…

Eric Shepcaro, AT&T

Eric Shepcaro led off the afternoon session.

It's 34 degrees in New York.

It's 34 degrees in Boston.

It's 34 degrees in Chicago.

It's 73 degrees and sunny in Ft. Lauderdale.

If that's not enough of a reason to come down here, today is also the opening day of  INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO East. Final preparations are underway as we get set for a week of VoIP at what promises to be the largest VoIP event ever.

Things get rolling at 11:30 this morning with a keynote address by Mark Spencer of Digium.