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Why Don't All VoIP Shows Come With a Guarantee?

I received a call today from a telco blog reader who asked if we were serious about our conference guarantee at Internet Telephony Conference and Expo. Of course I replied "YES" and he asked why we have never seen this policy before in the industry. I answered that it could be because that this industry has so many financial alliances between show producers and vendors in the industry... These show producers on the take would lose money if they offered any refund. They would take a bath. I know this for sure as we get new conferees switching from other events regularly and the sentiment is always the same. They come to ITEXPO to learn. Not for a concert, picnic, magic act or drinking festival.Having run telecom conferences for close to 20 years now, we at TMC know there is tremendous value in inviting only the best companies to participate as speakers. BTW we have found that many (not all) CEO speakers lack the ability to refrain from giving you a sales pitch. My toughest job is getting people with CXO titles to understand that the conferee comes first. Many times they think they come first and conferees are second.Many of these people aren't invited back to ITEXPO yet they seem to pop up at other conferences. Here is the actual text of the guarantee. We mean it. If you don't learn anything we don't want your money. We are sorry for wasting your time and hope you will forgive us. I am unsure why we are the only conference company giving a guarantee but I have an idea.Please come to our show and judge for yourself.Conference Guarantee

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Indiana Telco Regulation Explained

I came across Wetmachine today and read just one article about the dire legislation situation in Indiana and wanted to cry. To sum it up the incumbents are doing their best to keep the state from providing any service such as broadband or telecom to their constituents. Here is a link to a digest of the Indiana Bill. Here is an excerpt. This is a great piece and worth reading if not for entertainment value alone:Lets peel this rotten onion back section by section.

Sec. 1-3 are definitional. Sec. 3 provides as broad a possible sweep for any services a municipality might wish to offer by referencing every relevant definitial section of the Communications Act so no offering broadband as an information service if the statute only prohibits telecom service!

Sec. 4 starts to get nasty. First, Sec. 4(a) provides a grandfather clause to protect pre-existing systems. Under this guise, it freezes systems in place as they exist today. No expansion to any unserved area within the municipality after June 30, 2005. And no system upgrades to provide new services after June 30, 2005. Hope you're in the right neighborhood to be covered...

Sec. 4(b) prohibits any municipality from providing any cable, telco or other vaguely internet-like service after June 30, 2005 unless the municipality jumps through a number of hoops vaguely reminiscent of the quest for a shrubbery and cutting down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring. Sadly, munies don't get to say we'll do no such thing. They must:

1- Send certified mail to anyone who either provides the service in the municipal area or might be able to do so in the next 9 months. If anyone responds that they (a) provide service in that area, or (b) intends to provide service in the next 9 months, the municipality is prohibitted from providing the service. (Sec. 4(b), Sec. 6).

Please note that the statute makes no comparisons regarding price, quality or speed the way the PA law does. It merely requires that the services be of the same type. So if a municipality wants to provide internet service at 45 mbps (both ways) for free to a poor inner city neighborhood or to a business district to keep jobs, and the local telco or cable co offers 1.5 mbps (downstream) for $49.95, the municipality is out of luck.

Also note that this pretends not to give a private actor a veto over a municipality. It is merely an investigation by the city to make sure that it only provides municipal systems where needed, and does not rob already existing private businesses of potential customers by competing with the private sector. The nasty details get overlooked and the bill is spun by its supporters as a reasonable protection of private enterprise rather than a transfer of rights from citizens of a locality to a private company.

We'll skip over for a moment that this is only reasonable if you buy the basic premise that municipal systems should only offer service if there is no possibility of a private entrant. But even if you like that rule, the fact that a company can say they intend to provide service of some sort to the designated area in 9 months has the same effect as a right of first refusal in PA. Worse, because the right of first refusal actually required the private company to offer a comparable service on a reasonable time table.

Happily for telcos, cable cos, and their wholly owned subsidiaries in the legislature, few people read through a statute.

But lets say a municipality gets past that hurdle and no one wants to provide even lousy service at inflated prices. The municipality must still:

2- Compile an incredibly detailed report projecting costs and benefits over three years. (Sec. 4(b)) The bill's drafters clearly anticipate the cost of compiling the report will be prohibitively expensive. What makes me say that? Sec. 4(c) requires the municipality to use the first revenues from the muni system to pay for the report. So not only is this viewed as expensive, it guarantees that the system is born in debt.

3- After compiling the report, the municipality has to hold a public hearing on the proposal.

Again, note the ability to spin and defend against PA-style attacks. The Shmooicide Squad will defend the requirement for a cost benefit analysis and a public hearing, without mentioning the unusually high cost of the analysis required in the bill. If this is about local citizens controlling their own resources (an argument that resonated well in PA), how can anyone object to a public hearing and the prudence of a cost benefit analysis? Again, since few folks will read the actual bill, and the mechanism of muni intimidation is devious, it provides splendid spinable political cover.

As if this were not enough, the bill drafters want to insure that any surviving shmoon are starved at birth. The statute prohibits financing the system in any way except by subscriber revenue or by bonds (Sec. 5(b)) (cable cos and telcos, it should be noted, subsidize their system expansions with rate increases on video and voice subscribers respectively as well as accessing private capital in the form of stock sales or private debt instruments, but watch how this gets defended as creating a level playing field and preventing municipalities from unfairly subsidizing their own systems at the tax payers expense). Note that this effectively kills any sort of free service to stimulate job growth or bridge the digital divide. (Another difference from the PA law, which had an exemption for any free service. Under this bill, a city can't even provide a public hot spot in the park.)

But a city can still fund with bonds, right? Sure, but the Shmooicide Squad have gutted the cities ability to raise bond revenue for the new system. Sec. 7(b) requires that financing the bonds can only come from revenues raised from subscriptions to the muni system, and if the city doesn't bring in enough revenue the bonds are void. How many of the financially conservative institutions that are among the biggest investors in municipal bonds are likely to invest at that level of risk?

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VoiceGlo VoIP Service

According to my colleague David Butcher, Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine, VoiceGlo has been busy. His witty VoiceGlo article points out how many simultaneous things VoiceGlo is doing like letting their GloConnect product connect to 600 million instant messenger users, such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ. Yesterday's Will PhoneGAIM Unseat Skype blog entry also hinted the way to take Skype out is with messenger integration. After all, 50 million Skype downloads is tough to compete with if you don't have a built-in network of your ownDavid further points out that VoiceGlo is running a massive ad campaign and actually lists the stations where you can see the ad. It seems like they are spending a  fortune. What I find interesting is how a company like Skype was able to virally grow a user base and others don't have this same luxury. I can't find how many VoiceGlo clients have been downloaded for example. Is this a good or bad sign? Skype seems to have done a great job in leveraging Kazaa relationships to get their client positioned as the VoIP equivalent to Kazaa and that resonated with millions of broadband users worldwide. Pretty smart. Others now are trying to cause this same viral expansion and it will work for some and not others.VoiceGlo is augmenting viral marketing with television and web ads. Will this be the way to unseat Skype? Maybe. I saw research recently that says VoiceGlo is the #2 VoIP app being used. I don't recall where I saw it and am open to comments on this post about market share. VoiceGlo's President Ed Cespedes will be keynoting our Miami Internet Telephony Conference & Expo and I am looking forward to hearing about their future VoIP plans.

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Broadlook Finds You New Customers

I had a chance to talk with Dan Hughes of Broadlook about how their company has progressed since I wrote about them in Customer Interaction Solutions in June 2004. If you recall, the article was titled, Innovation Returns to CRM and Contact Centers. The company makes a suite of needle in the haystack customer profiling tools.One of the products I wrote about before was Broadlook Profiler and it is now in version 3.0 and has a bunch of great tools to help with finding people on the vast Internet. Using a  list of web sites it can find specific people in companies by searching the Internet by title and it can even pull up bios on these potential customers.The software takes the laborious process out out of sales and marketing and automates manual research. What you need to manually search for today can be automated by adding these statements in the search area. For example if you are a recruiter looking for people who have worked in the Navy, you can automate the system using terms such as "Naval career," or "Naval education," or "Navy graduate." You can also include products as search terms such as "Oracle Financials," or "Salesforce.com user."The Eclipse program still allows you to build lists of companies from the Internet as it did before and there is a new product called Ballista which the company says is "Beyond SIC Code Generation." If you ask any marketer, they know SIC codes are the way all companies are classified. TMC for example is in publishing, Sears is in retail, etc. You use the product to generate a list of companies for you via expressions. For example if you want companies in VoIP (a search I actually watched put together) you enter a few terms into the VoIP category such as "IP telephony," "Voice over Internet," "Voice Over IP," etc.You then do a  preliminary search that actually uses google and other engines to come back with a brief number of companies. You then refine the list by excluding keywords from results you don't want. For example, TMC would be a VoIP media company and if you didn't want us in the list, you could exclude "publisher" or "magazine" or a number of other terms. I saw many companies I knew on the list, some publishers and many companies I never heard of. It's a pretty powerful tool. The Broadlook suite is a powerful addition to your sales and marketing team. It is worth further investigation if productivity and increased customer acquisition are important to your company.

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Death of the Personal Blogger?

Om Malik writes a great piece on the death of the personal blog which I agree
with. From a  search engine standpoint, the larger sites that aggregate
blogs always have the advantage as well. This wasn't really mentioned in the
article but I have noticed this trend. I have also noticed may independent
bloggers being solicited by large sites to write based on ad revenue share
programs. Bloggers may have an easier time generating revenue if they team up
with a large site that has a following already.
What we are seeing is the birth of blog syndicates which is a natural
evolution of a loose network of bloggers. Big business always consolidates and
maximizes profits. It is capitalism at its best and on the Internet it works the
same way as it does everywhere else. Just a lot faster.

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An Interview With The CEO of Vertical, Bill Tauscher

I spoke with Bill Tauscher the chairman and CEO of Vertical, the company that was known as Artisoft... For those of you with a long history in telecom, you know Artisoft has been in the business for ages, first catering to developers by producing CTI applications and later deciding to build and sell a PC PBX. I was always impressed with their marketing and their products. Our TMC Labs reviewed a number of their offerings and they always did well. They recently purchased Vertical Networks, a company that also makes PBXs and Bill tells me the reason for the name change is the company is new and more than twice the size of the old Artisoft. It is a break-out company. They are growing faster than any industry benchmarks and will be measured as larger than the competition. So why did they choose Vertical? They wanted to find a name that was short and easy to remember and of course acquire the domain name. We all know how tough it is to find a domain name these days. They owned vertical.com and the name made sense so this was a natural choice.
Their target market is still enterprises of all sizes. In the SMB space they sell their TeleVantage line and Instant Office is their offering to the large enterprise. The tie in to the new name is that they will be selling vertical applications based on industry. Bill will be keynoting at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo this February in Miami and I asked for a sneak peak of what he will say. He will focus on the ROI of phone systems, integration, the value of VoIP, etc. He sees this as a break out year for VoIP and tells me his surveys of SMBs tell him the demand for VoIP is greater than it has ever been. I am looking forward to hearing him at the show.

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