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I am thrilled that a past ITEXPO keynoter Carly Fiorina will be running for the California Senate. Carly is a charming, personable and knowledgeable thought leader who gave a captivating address to a standing-room only crown in Los Angeles a few years back. Fiorina was a major executive at both Lucent and HP where she was CEO. It is my humble opinion that having a candidate who understands telecom and technology will benefit this great country of ours if for no other reason than she will be in a position to really understand the issues.

This is more important than you may first realize. Without pointing anyone out in particular, it is apparent that politicians don't have a clue about net neutrality and these are the people who set rules for the US which will likely be duplicated worldwide. In addition, Fiorina will understand and appreciate the brain drain which is taking place in the US and how this hurts us. Why? Well we bring the smartest people from around the globe to our universities and allow them to get the world's greatest education. We then chase them away and force them to start new companies in other countries and in the process we lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of valuable jobs.

Perhaps most importantly, Fiorina is a political candidate who has run something. She has hired. She has fired; she has faced competition from Asia and other parts of the world firsthand. She knows what to do to make the US a more competitive place and this means more jobs for our ailing economy.

This is not theoretical knowledge - she learned by doing.

I believe we need to stop electing candidates who have little to no experience running companies. How is it these people who have never run anything are in a position to dictate to the private sector how to run companies? Do they have more experience than a random college graduate? No. And that is why our country is in trouble today. We need more government officials who care about the country and do what is best for it. I am not talking about doing what the special interest groups with the most money dictate, I mean doing what is good for the people that elected them.

We will see how this plays out but I for one am all for electing politicians who understand business and have run successful companies.

I got a tip that Adtran was acquiring Objectworld. My take? Objectworld is a company with great UC technology and no brand recognition. Adtran is a company with a product line similar to Cisco but much smaller. Still, with a market cap of over $1.4 billion, Objectworld can really get a boost from Adtran's access to capital, infrastructure, reseller network, carrier relationships  and improved branding.

Here is a link to a cached page mentioning the acquisition. Keep it tuned to TMCnet and my blog for more.

Just a kid, that's all I was in the early eighties in high school as I took a class in BASIC. I was always fascinated by all things electronic and whether it was video games or advanced scientific calculators, I couldn't get enough. At Westhill high School, they had a Prime minicomputer and it was on this machine where I was instructed how to program. I also had a Commodore 64 at home and with it I wrote my own video games at night and on weekends.

In the early eighties, Route. 128 in Boston was the stuff of legend... It is where all the minicomputer companies lived - Wang, Prime Computer, DEC and many others. Prime was my link to this area and it seems like it was yesterday when I wrote a math quiz program on the schools's minicomputer which I used to better prepare me for the math portion of the SAT. Today, Rt. 128 is a distant second to Silicon Valley in terms of technology and of course all the minicomputer companies missed the PC altogether and are gone.

If you are wondering why Silicon Valley took the lead over Boston, you may want to refer to this article from Vivek Wadhwa which discusses how the Valley follows a more open model where innovation is more readily shared with small companies and moreover spread through job hopping. In addition, he points out a book from AnnaLee Saxenian (which was published in 1994 predicting that Boston would be the loser in the tech race

Here is an excerpt from the article:

She noted that Silicon Valley had an amazing dynamism about it. There were extensive professional networks, job hopping was the norm, information was exchanged openly, and the culture encouraged risk taking. The Silicon Valley ecosystem supported entrepreneurial experimentation and collective learning. In other words, Silicon Valley was a very open network--a giant social networking site working in analog before the concept of such a thing even existed.

This organizational mechanism was in sharp contrast to that of Route 128. Dominated by large, vertically integrated, and secretive minicomputer producers such as DEC, Wang, Prime, and Data General. Technology, skill, and know-how were trapped within the boundaries of the large corporations.

The differences were evident at many levels: venture capitalists in Silicon Valley had deep roots in local networks and were far more nimble than their east coast counterparts; educational institutions and research labs in the West partnered with local startups as well as more established firms, while those in the East worked only with the largest corporations; and the meritocratic openness of Silicon Valley made it a magnet for non-traditional talent and immigrants.

By the mid-1990s the east had missed the shift from minicomputers to personal computers as the flexible Silicon Valley ecosystem sped ahead with innovation across a diversifying range of components and systems going from chips, routers, and application software to ecommerce and search engines. Today Silicon Valley is the leading location for cleantech venture activity, an area widely considered to be the next big value creation engine for the U.S. and the world.

Boston, however, is no slouch. The Route 128 community remains the second biggest in the U.S. in terms of venture funds committed. Boston has powerful research institutions, still, and lots of very strong companies. In some areas, such as biotech, Boston may even rival Silicon Valley. But overall, its pretty clear that the Valley has not only won but is racing further ahead.

Most entrepreneurs and engineers that come to Silicon Valley, come to experience this network and to embrace the culture it has created. That's why I came, too. Network effects don't just work for fax machines. But then again, most of them knew that intrinsically. University guys like me need to do a bunch of surveys to figure it out. They voted with their hearts and feet.

At this point the game is even tougher to win if you aren't in Silicon Valley due to the propensity for exit strategies to present themselves more readily where the acquirers are. Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Oracle are just a few of the companies responsible for billions of dollars worth of M&A dollars. And as this these companies have grown, they  have made so many millionaires that they in turn go out and launch new companies and/or invest in others which are nearby.

If you are looking for a lesson here it is that a company which mirrors Silicon Valley and is more open, flexible and shares information more readily will likely always beat the company which is inflexible and contains many silos.

I really excited to speak at the Illinois Institute of Technology Rice Campus for the VoIP Conference and Expo 2009. This will be my first time to this event and interestingly the third time in recent weeks in which I am in Chicago instead of Vegas for a show. Maybe the city didn't get the Olympics but they certainly seem to have gotten all the shows - WiMAX World, Supercomm and now this event.

Getting back to my talk - I am moderating a Keynote Panel titled: Are the "Bells" ringing for Carrier VoIP? And my panelists include Carl Ford, Crossfire Media; Anne Lee, ALU; Gaston Ormazabal, Verizon and Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University at 4:00 pm this Thursday 10/29/2009. I hope to see you there. Here is the schedule with my panel in yellow at the bottom.

Here is the website for details.

Yesterday I discussed TMC's evolution to a company growing rapidly by building communities in a number of new topical areas. One such space is the smart ecosystem market which focused on the rich relationships between partners in various markets. For example the iPhone app store is a huge ecosystem as is Avaya's DevConnect program. I also mentioned yesterday that TMC is partnering with experts in other areas to combine our community building technology and infrastructure with the absolute best content available.

Our smart ecosystem industry site is called SPEC and this stands for Smart Products Ecosystem Connections and our partners on this initiative are Mary Cronin, professor of Boston College and Crossfire Media. Mary is a well-respected authority on the subject of intelligent ecosystems and we are thrilled to be working with her and her team.

There is some incredible and thought provoking content coming from Mary and others and you will want to visit the Smart Products or SPEC page on a regular basis to stay informed. One of the most interesting recent articles I came across discusses Neustar and NeoMedia and their relationship in the 2D barcode space which has the potential to link print and product codes to rich media and consumer engagement.

Here are where all of Mary's articles live - I hope you find her writing as excellent and useful as I do.

Here are a few more articles of interest from the site:

• Local Nets Are Sprouting Smart Connections
• Memo to Michael Dell: Strategy for Winning Smartphone Wars
• Smart Mobile Health Connections for Better Patient Care
• T-Mobile Gets Clean Power from Medis

I wanted to alert my readers to some exciting news happening at TMC. As you likely know TMC is among a handful of media companies growing at a time when the media landscape is in dramatic decline. As you might imagine this growth is primarily online. Over the last decade and especially in the last few years we have focused on building online communities (Channels and GOCs) for customers who sponsor these areas as they rapidly attract focused decision-makers from around the world.

The visitors who come to these communities benefit from a massive amount of free content which helps them make informed purchasing decisions. For example people looking for products in Call Recording, Smart Data Centers, IP communications, HD Voice, Fixed Mobile Convergence or Next Generation Communications can come to the respective communities focused on these topics and have access to hundreds and in most cases thousands of TMC written articles detailing the news in their specific area of interest. Our business model is straightforward; aggregate massive amounts of focused and quality content using custom-built content targeting technology - make it relevant and pertinent so as to attract the right readers who need this information as they research the products and services they are looking to buy.

For our sponsors, these communities allow them to rank high organically on search engines to get their message out to a focused audience while simultaneously being able to measure the traffic to ensure they can justify their spend to the sales and executive management teams.

Basically, this suite of communities replicates the trade show model online and just like a trade show that attracts more attendees as the exhibitor base grows; the 120 monthly sponsored communities on TMCnet attract a massive audience which in turn attracts more sponsors.

In short, I am very confident we can continue to provide free quality content in all the areas we enter. Meaning while other media companies are beginning to charge for their once free content and many others are reducing their editorial teams, TMC is adding to its editorial, sales and marketing teams as we have a model which works exceptionally well for our readers and sponsors.

We are growing our team as we enter a slew of new markets with our business model of providing laser-focused content - backed by over a decade of proprietary content targeting technology; essentially building targeted online communities which rank high on search engines as they attract large amounts of focused traffic.

Here is my quote from a press release we put out today mentioning the hire of a brand new position - VP of Business Development. Matt Weiner is filling this position and his background of working for Penton and Yahoo! make him a good fit for the position."Over the last decade, TMC has invested in the technology and people necessary to build a next-generation media company which creates communities online, in-print and in-person," Tehrani continued. "By providing our audience with top quality news, training and information, we have attracted global purchasing decision-makers to our communities. As TMC's global communities have increased in size and quality, they have attracted hundreds of advertisers and sponsors who receive regular measurable results for their marketing and SEO budgets. Our future strategy involves continuing to build communities which draw large amounts of targeted traffic as we continue to connect buyers and sellers -- and adding Matt to the team is an integral element of that strategy."

Aside from Matt, we have added a number of other positions and just as importantly we continue to ink partnership after new partnership as we enter new spaces where we leverage our community building engine in combination with the thought leadership of individuals and/or corporations in new markets.

Thank you for continuing to support our rapid growth - thanks to our readers and existing and news sponsors - we look forward to helping all of your companies grow with ours.

Recently I had a chance to visit Xirrus in their offices in Thousand Oaks, California and meet John Merrill, the Director of Marketing and Dirk Gates the CEO. Dirk is legendary in tech as he was the president and later CEO of Xircom, the company which made those PCMCIA cards which allowed a laptop to connect to a network and modem. The company was later sold to Intel and Dirk stayed on at Intel for a number of years and later left to found this company.

I had a chance to have a tour of the company and see their Wall of Wonder or WoW where they do testing of access points. I also learned about how the company is growing, what new products are coming out and we even took apart some product and went through the components.

Dirk explains that most companies in the space don't innovate in the access point space, they spend more of their effort developing software. And the chip vendors they tell me focus on chips which are focused on the low-end of market or consumers.

This was the opportunity Gates saw as he founded the company. He noticed that cell towers have multiple radios arranged in a radial fashion with directional antennas and wondered why APs did not. He decided to leverage ideas which worked in the cellular world to build a next generation access point with better performance and coverage. Up to 24 radios can be in an access point allowing a high capacity, high density solution which allows rapid deployment.

Merrill thinks this solution is the only one which allows the replacement of wires in an organization.

I hope you enjoy these videos.

John Merrill gives us a tour of Xirrus HQ

Dirk Gates explains the reason he founded the company and the next enterprise network upgrade cycle

Xirrus WiFi Array Deconstructed

Speaking with Sprint's Wayne Ward you come away amazed at the potential ahead for wireless carriers in the burgeoning machine-to-machine or M2M space. Just what exactly is M2M? It is simply machines communicating with machines. Quite often this interaction is to satisfy the needs of a person, corporation or system - for example when an automobile senses a mechanical problem and signals the manufacturer for a wireless diagnostic which determines the car needs service and subsequently alerts the driver.

In other cases sensors communicate with backend systems which perform some action as a result of the conditions where the sensor is located.

Wayne explained the opportunity in M2M and moreover that human subscribers in the wireless market have reached saturation with most of the growth coming today from switchers (churn) and prepaid users. He said emphatically on a recent phone call, "The M2M market is wide open."

If there is one thing which is happening faster than change in the communications space it is the pace of convergence. Social networking widgets on televisions, cars which sync with music players, phones with GPS, PCs which double as home entertainment systems, photo frames which can receive MMS photos, there seems to be no stopping this trend.

The consumer, business, wireless and wireline businesses are converging as well and to respond to this new landscape, Sprint has rolled up a few of their existing units into a new Emerging Solutions unit to specifically focus on M2M and mobile computing.

The M2M category alone is massive and Ward is right to be enthused. These are just some of the markets touched by this technology: remote monitoring, asset tracking, fleet management, telematics, automation and control, automated meter reading, smartgrid, point-of-sale/ATM and wireless routing.

Sprint has had many challenges lately such as massive customer churn and general customer dissatisfaction. To fight back, the company is obviously looking at new markets such as M2M and the company touted its relationship with Amazon's Kindle as a major step forward in a new market. While the amount of money being made from the Kindle so far is not great, it is certainly a huge account you didn't want to see go to AT&T. Well, Amazon did leave Sprint for AT&T recently and one reason for this move was the need to access the GSM as the Kindle goes global.

Update: Here is an official statement and clarification from Sprint on the matter:

The Kindle DX will continue to operate on Sprint's network -- existing Kindles currently in use or already in the sales pipeline will still be powered by Sprint. We continue to enjoy a great relationship with Amazon. Though we are disappointed in their decision to work with AT&T for their international version, we understand their international strategy.

A consistent theme on our call was that Ward wants to see M2M getting pushed by other carriers as it grows awareness and the market. Just as the push-to-talk market grew more quickly when new players entered the market, he expects the same thing to happen in M2M.

He then explained how Sprint's various networks can serve the company well in the M2M-based world of the future. Often thought of as a liability in the world of wireless voice the combination of iDEN, CDMA 1xRTT, CDMA EVDO and 4G is a benefit in this new machine-driven world. The reason is, each of these networks has various advantages in terms of speed, performance and/or cost and subsequently the broadest array of networks is best in this new world.

I mentioned the Kindle is not a massive moneymaker and that should get you wondering about this market - can it generate serious revenue for Sprint and others? Ward says the old models of ARPU, subsidies and churn go out the window with M2M and instead there is a much lower ARPU and a small or nonexistent subsidy. What you get instead is a healthy customer lifetime value and higher profit margins. Why? Well, one reason is there is no human interaction as machines deal with rate plans and other issues without using customer service reps.

So what does Sprint's Wayne Ward want to see? Among other things, more M2M adoption which will lead to cheaper chipsets which will lead to even more adoption. He tells me there is lots of business in the pipeline and his company is talking with enterprise customers and their supply chains as well as chipset vendors, module vendors, 3^rd party application vendors, software developers, healthcare companies, VCs and many others.

To me the potential of this new market is massive. Coincidentally, I recently decided to purchase a GPS device because it could connect to the internet and I pay $10/month to keep it connected. What does Ward think about M2M's potential? He summed it up nicely by saying, "There are billions of machines we can assign an IP address to and wirelessly enable."

To stay up to date on the rapidly growing M2M space be sure to attend TMC and Crossfire Media's M2M Evolution Conference and visit M2M Evolution online.

In the last two weeks I drove (well I was in the car anyway) for more than 1,500 miles meeting with tech companies in Montreal, Ontario, Massachusetts, Rochester, NY, Los Angeles and San Diego. The last stop on my latest trip was at CTIA where I saw dozens of companies from around the globe.

Most of my travels involve learning about companies in the communications and technology space and often advising them on how they can be more successful. Sometimes I get to see some very innovative solutions which I can't share at the time for a multitude of reasons (embargos, etc) and other times I get a firsthand look at things which I share as soon as I can. In many cases, companies ask me about TMC's experience in helping companies with their thought leadership, branding and lead generation activities.

As CEO of a media company which builds online, in-person and print communities for millions of global purchasing decision-makers each month, I have an unusual role of also writing about many of the companies, products and services I see. What is fun for me is finding new ways to bring buyers and sellers together. Buyers want to quickly learn about which products they should consider before purchasing and sellers are looking to sell as much as they can while spending the least amount in doing so.

It is an amazing place to sit because extremely often I see industry-changing technology which languishes because an engineer sets the marketing budget and has the corporate communications skills of sheetrock. Remember, I have an engineering degree so I feel I am uniquely qualified to beat up my brethren. Then there are the companies I visit where their products shouldn't be accepted for free, yet they sell in volume and make massive margins because they are able to communicate the benefits properly.

Then there are a slew of "Hail Mary" companies which have really cool products but no business model to speak of. Sometimes I can convince the founder of such a company to modify their offerings to actually make money but other times the companies die on the vine because they think they know best - after all, I just meet a thousand companies plus like them a year - what do I know?. Sometimes though the amazing happens and they  get purchased by a Google, Cisco or Oracle and thus the "Hail Mary" designation.

I am thrilled to act as a trusted advisor on PR and marketing issues and I figured it is unfair for me to only share information with people I choose to visit and subsequently I spoke on a webinar a month or so ago about hosted SEO which was well-attended and generated lot buzz in the industry. So many companies wonder about search engine optimization and what the trick is to ranking high. While there are lots of factors to consider, the basic premise is to write lots of content which people want to read and share with others.

SEO consultants get paid to help companies rank higher and in some cases they can boost a company's search rank for a while. But in the end, steady and relatively large amounts of content are what companies need to generate to rank high on various terms.

I could go on about building communities and improving SEO for hours - I am truly passionate about figuring out how to instantly bring a group of people with similar interests together on a single web portal. Coming from the world of magazines, it used to take TMC six months to build a mailing list and in many cases you really needed 18 months to do it right. Oh and did I mention you had to mail at least half a million subscription offers and it would cost you about $400,000 at a minimum to rent lists, print and mail your subscription forms? To show you how much things have changed, TMC has been involved in projects in the past few months where we built communities on new topics which are up and running and attracting hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of a few weeks. It is truly amazing to see how media has evolved through the use of news-generated, laser focused community building.

Again, these topics are a major passion of mine and something my team at TMC has gotten great at focusing on. The next webinar I will speak on takes place Thursday of this week, October 15^th at 12:00 PST and on it I will discuss how you can partner to boost your search engine marketing. I look forward to seeing you there. Be sure to register now so you don't miss it. As a reminder, you can view the archive if you aren't around at this exact time. Just be sure to register. Also, be sure to bring any questions you have. I look forward to answering them this week.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today talking about Dallas-based venture funds which flopped by investing in telecom and networking companies. It explains that funds in Silicon Valley and Boston are doing better than those in Texas, Washington state or New York.

Coincidentally, today there is also news that online video company Ooyala has now raised $20 million and online video conferencing company ViVu raised $3 million. Both as you guessed it are based in Silicon Valley. Most importantly of course is the fact that wireless equipment maker Mass-based Starent Networks just got sold to Cisco for $2.9 billion.

If history is any guide and this trend continues, we can expect Mass and Silicon Valley to be parts of the country which recover more quickly from the economic downturn than the rest.