The SIP Forum had a kick off reception tonight at VoIP Developer and it was an opportunity to get a number of developers together to start networking and discussing the opportunities in VoIP. A number of old friends and some new ones were there. What surprised me most was how many different types of companies I met with. There were contact center companies looking to IP enabled their offerings. Product testing vendors looking to add VoIP to their offering. Finally, I met with government buyers looking to add VoIP to their applications. The buzz in the reception was that TMC really timed this event perfectly. There is no other event filling this niche. There are partnering shows, enterprise events, service provider events, etc. Nothing else gets these hard core developers out in droves. In this case droves will equate to about 500 people. There is a chance that a strong walk up will move those numbers far northward but we are comfortable that 500 will be there for sure. I had a long talk with AT&Ts Chris Wood. Chris is the director of CallVantage. A little known fact is that although AT&T has pulled out of consumer long distance, CallVantage is just getting rolling. We can expect to see them inking deals with other domestic service providers who will resell their service. The scoop is that there are lots of services that arent included in the service yet because it would be overwhelming to consumers. We will see them rolled out slowly. Very soon, we will see the ability to import addresses for example. Another interesting tidbit is that international expansion in a handful of countries is in trials now. We talked about speech recognition a topic close to my heart as we just launched Speech-World, an event in the speech technologies space. Although I couldnt remember the name during the conversation, I mentioned that other service providers are ahead of the curve as they offer speech today (I was thinking of Z-Tel). Chris told me that AT&T has a product called VoiceTone that does something similar. It hasnt really caught on. Regardless, I think we are ready for speech in service provider networks. Chris agreed that they may have been ahead of the curve. Case in point, who has all of their contacts in their cell phone, home phone and office phone. It is about time to have Outlook integration with the address book, pick up the phone and say, Call Dominos on Main Street. I have friends I dont call as often as I would like because I need to boot up a laptop to get to their cell or office numbers. Certainly I cant be alone. We talked about the future of VoIP. Chris makes a great point that focus groups arent the ones that will decide the future of VoIP. After all, which focus group would have told you they wanted MP3 players? Sometimes compelling applications build markets. That is why the worldwide development community is convening in San Jose this week. To explore what these opportunities The products and services will be. Thanks to those of you that will attend, our sponsors and our Platinum Sponsors, Avaya Developer Connection Program, Aculab and SIPfoundry.