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January 2007 Archives
Toshiba is a company you think about in just about every area of tech. In fact I recently ditched my old laptop from another manufacturer for a Toshiba laptop and so far so good. When you think of this Japanese electronics giant you may not think about VoIP or even communications.But Toshiba is in fact taking the communications space very seriously and in fact they have had business communications systems for a long while. Generally the company has kept a low profile on their communications products in the US but perhaps that will change going forward. I have seen a bit more activity from them in the past 12 months and this in encouraging.
Last January, the company announced the appointment of Brian Metherell as Toshiba America Information Systems’ vice president and general manager of its Telecommunications Systems Division.
Since he was having his first anniversary I decided it was a great time to ask Brian a few questions about his vision, open source and the competition. Here is the full Executive Suite interview.
Why did I pick Metherell as a person to interview? In a word – quality. In a meeting a while back he reiterated his company’s desire to deliver VoIP systems with the best quality. He drilled it into my had in fact.
If the company can deliver on the quality promise and also continue to up the level of noise they produce in the market, they are in a position to gain some share from other vendors.
Michael Robertson over at Gizmo Project has some thoughts on how he expects the world to embrace free advertising supported content. His company SIPphone has launched a new service called GizmoCall.com allowing anyone to speak for free to virtually any phone for up to 5 minutes. If you register you can speak for 10 minutes. If you pay, you can speak longer.The genius of GizmoCall is that it does not force you to download software – you just use Flash. And since the program uses Flash it can support the display of ads as well.
Michael likens this approach to exactly how YouTube became so successful. His point is that services proliferate much more quickly when they do not require you to download software.
Is this an accurate statement? Absolutely. The challenge is that this new service is obviously behind Skype in terms of popularity and it seems people do not mind downloading Skype and other software packages. In my opinion, had this service come out a few years back it would have forced Skype to change business models.
This doesn’t mean I believe the service isn’t destined for success. I think there is ample room for many VoIP players and this is a unique enough approach to providing VoIP that many people will use. This is especially true in situations where people are not allowed to download software to their computers.
I have a great deal of respect for Robertson and I wish him luck with this new “project.”
Here is Ari Zoldan from Launch 3 based in Garfield, NJ. His company is in the investment business - they invest in communications companies worldwide.
On this day he walked away with a great education as well as a new SUV. Wow – now that’s a show.
About 30 minutes later when I accidentally saw him on the road he seemed elated. I think the shock wore off and it turned to happiness.
Note to self. We would get even more people to shows if we didn’t have chalk boards in the exhibit hall. Seriously – this booth – Ask The Geek was stroke of genius from Interactive Intelligence. They staffed the booth with really smart engineers who answered questions from attendees in an objective and no nonsense fashion. PS: If you want to stump them just ask them in a very serious tone why the Pussycat Dolls don’t sound so good on a VoIP line.
This bag is the only other thing in this world with more frequent flyer miles than me. For some reason thinking about this is best done with my eyes closed.
Aculab’s Jo Taylor is one of the few people in the industry who is jet-lag proof. After traveling 25 hours in a row the Aculab team seemed as fresh as ever.
Andy Voss had a SanSaytional show and is selling session border controllers like hotcakes it seems. I met many of his new customers at ITEXPO.
For some reason I decided to lead an impromptu prayer service at the Stratus Technologies booth. They seem impressed.
Gregory Giagnocavo learned that at ITEXPO in Ft. Lauderdale you can have an amazingly successful show without a single booth babe. The absense of booth babes at his booth was bad news for TMC as we no longer knew where to find our sales team.
Chris Dunk the President and CEO of BandTel actually crouched down for the photo so as not to make me look insignificant in his shadow. He still towers over me. Now I know how he got his last name.
Either the Dialexia team had a good show or they were just happy to be out of Canada in January.
The team from Ingate was thanking me for a great show. Here is a testimonial from CEO Olle Westerberg
Actiontec had a great show even though they were located in the back left corner of the hall. I could barely get to the booth during the whole show.
Apparently I was making some really important point to Ditech Network’s Homayoun Razavi. What it was I have no idea but it looks like I really meant it.
Idle banter at the LumenVox booth.
Stealth Communications had a great show and I had a chance to catch them Jon Arnold in the booth. This is the first show after I declared it the year of VoIP peering. I guess this is the year of VoIP peering + 1.
Doug Vilim and I had a brief chat about the show. Sangoma was another happy customer.
Mark Spencer is a competitive weapon at Digium and is well-liked by many in the open source community. It was evident to anyone who knows Mark that he is spread thin as a coder, manager, chief strategy officer and company spokesman. As the company expands the smartest thing the company could do is divide Mark’s responsibilities allowing the company continue its rapid growth rate without having to count on Mark for everything.I just read on Tom Keating’s blog (he heard it from Alec Saunders) that Mark will become Chairman and CTO and Danny J. Windham, President, Chief Operating Officer and director of ADTRAN will become the new CEO of Digium.
There is a synergistic relationship between ADTRAN and Digium which you can learn about on Tom’s blog. I believe this a great moved for the company and for the open source community as a whole.
Many people have told me about the Steven Colbert video about AT&T and thanks to Manuel Vexler of the IMS Forum who sent me the link, I have just seen it myself for the first time. It is pretty funny.
Google is now providing some relief to the many presidents and others who have been targets of Google bombs. Google bombs work when a number of people get together and decide to use link text as a weapon. I could link the word “miserable failure” to the biography page of a president for example. Search engines would then have a higher propensity to return the linked web page when people search on the term used as link text.
So for example miserable failure once returned search results to Jimmy Carter’s biography page on the White House website.
Over the past years many presidents were targets of these attacks and eventually Google decided to take action and prevent these bombs from being dropped. In my informal research it seems that the bombs have been diffused for some terms but not others. Some have surmised Google has hard-coded something into its search engines to prevent the leading search engine from being “associated” with politician bashing of any sort.
I wrote about Google Bombing about two years ago and in the article I surmised that companies would be bombing one another for their taglines. One example I gave was “ultimate driving machine” which any self-respecting car enthusiast knows refers to BMWs. At the time I wrote the article this query on Google returned a number one result of www.bmw-car-for-sale.com. Interestingly it now comes up with BMWUSA.
On a related note you may not be aware that Google banned the German version of BMW because of so-called black-hat SEO techniques – specifically the use of doorway pages. This may be the highest profile website to be banned by the search engine in fact.
So sadly, many bloggers and other politically motivated web citizens will have to find new and more interesting ways to bash their political opponents. For now anyway, bombing search engines will have no effect. Until new ways are invented, many people will have to go back to the tried and tested technique of getting at their political adversaries --- calling them unpatriotic, stupid, etc.
If you want to read more about how Google is trying to prevent bombing read this great article from Rahul Prabhakar.
Here are some more photos from this past week’s ITEXPO. I tell you the show was like one massive week-long adrenaline rush. It was just absolutely great to be part of this show. I am looking forward to the next show September 10-12, 2007 in Los Angeles. We have some amazing ideas for the next show that will hopefully blow you away.
I received this e-mail testimonial today from Olle Westerberg, CEO of Ingate Systems AB and my first reaction was happiness, satisfaction and then pride followed by gratitude. I will explain each in order.
Happiness: There is no better feeling in my opinion than delighting customers. I walked away from ITEXPO this past week with great pride knowing the attendees, conferees and exhibitors all thought this was the best IP communications event they have ever attended. Thankfully many of these testimonials are videotaped and written down. You will see them all soon.
Satisfaction: ITEXPO has been growing nicely for years but this show has been our personal best and we are thrilled about it. The show was launched in 1999 and we experienced some tough years after the telecom meltdown. We are thrilled to be part of the rebirth of IP telephony – commonly referred to as VoIP or IP communications.
Pride: I am lucky enough to have found the best team in the trade show business to work with. But TMC is also the leading media company in IP communications – online, in print and at live events. I can take no credit for this. It all goes to the first class team that works so hard to make everything TMC produces a market leader. Thank you team.
Gratitude: Without attendees, exhibitors and the first class team I am lucky enough to be surrounded by I would be merely a blogger or perhaps a well-read figure in the IP communications space. So thanks to the TMC team and the thousands of attendees, exhibitors, analysts and members of the press that made this show such a success.
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Dear Rich,
Sitting on the plane back to Sweden I am reflecting back on a fantastic Ingate week at the IT Expo in Fort Lauderdale. Even in our wildest dreams we had not seen a conference room filled to absolute capacity.
People standing at the back. People not getting in the room. Extra chairs being repeatedly delivered.
Agreed, we had chosen a topic - SIP Trunking - that has hit a cord among the audience but without the good cooperation with your team and without their marketing efforts this would not have worked out so well.
I would like to congratulate you on having assembled such a great team and hope you will pass on my gratitude and respect for the work that your team has done for us.
Again, thank you for your support and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Best Regards,
Olle Westerberg
CEO
Ingate Systems AB
Box 10013
121 26 STOCKHOLM-GLOBENh
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Thank you Olle and the Ingate team for being part of Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. Without our sponsors, speakers and other people who travel from around the globe to be part of ITEXPO we wouldn’t have an event. We always push to under promise and over deliver. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to do this for your company!
When Om Malik sent an e-mail about 27 different ways to improve conferencing I thought to myself there was no way that there are 27 discrete things you can do to have better conferences. I guess I was wrong. Great ideas included in this post include having an excuse ahead of time if you get caught not paying attention. This can happen if you are checking e-mail for example. Of course I wouldn’t know anything about this.
Another important idea is to close with a summary of action items. For the other 25, check the post for yourself.
Another important idea is to close with a summary of action items. For the other 25, check the post for yourself.
The rumors swirled at ITEXPO that Skype would be releasing a new version called Skype Pro which would allow a calling package for Europe for a fee. Here is the post that breaks the news and the web page that can give you the details. By the way the Unyte Desktop Sharing application is getting downloaded thousands of times a day and is a slick package from Webdialogs. You can download it and use it free for 30 days and after that you can keep it free for one to one conferencing or pay to conference with more than one person. I had a chance to catch up with company CEO Lou Guercia at the show and things seem to be going very well for the company.The package will launch soon at 2 Euros per month and will include:
€0 per minute calls to national landlines*.
Free Skype Voicemail.
€30 off a SkypeIn number.
Also included
Exclusive discounts on hardware for Skype.
Up to €15 off the Unyte Desktop Sharing extra.
Two free avatars from CrazyTalk.
Two free ringtones from Emotive.
I thought this was an excellent article about the Democratically-controlled Congress and how they may clash with the FCC and especially Chairman Martin (read Martin’s past views on broadband competition). The article also touches on the relationship between Chairman Martin and Commissioner McDowell. The democrats could put a great deal on Chairman Martin as he is a Republican who is very close to the Bush administration.
What does this mean to IP communications? Well Martin is generally pro-ILEC and if anything has made life very difficult for cable companies and VoIP companies. Of course things aren’t so black and white but Martin seems to believe a few large companies will give us all the competition we need.
This view is has not been great for IP communications. I expect Democrats to push Martin to do the opposite of what he is currently doing. Isn’t that what politics is all about? Subsequently we can expect a better climate for IP communications companies and possibly cablecos as well.
Guess who won the Toyota FJ Cruiser SUV? This lucky gentleman named Ari Zoldan from Launch 3 based in Garfield, NJ. His company is in the investment business - they invest in communications companies worldwide. The website is www.launch3.net.
I did not expect to see Ari on the road but there he was right next to me as I headed to the airport. What an amazing coincidence. It was a great show and if you missed it be sure to be at the next ITEXPO in Los Angeles, CA in September of this year. Hope to see you there.
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Take a look at this EarthLink news and it becomes apparent that Vonage can now offer triple play services consisting of voice, broadband and wireless. Utilizing municipal wireless limits the range of wireless service to certain regions but still this is better than no wireless service. This is good news to those who fear Vonage will be squeezed out by other service providers who can offer triple play services consisting of video and broadband or even quadruple play services including wireless.
This kind of agreement just shows you how fast things change and how Vonage has more growth potential than initially realized.
Thanks so much for coming to ITEXPO this week. It has been an amazing show and we have you to thank for it all. The TMC team and I really appreciate you taking time from your busy schedules to be here.
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