VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

January 30, 2007

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.

January 30, 2007

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.

January 30, 2007

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.

January 30, 2007

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.