Whenever I go to a conference, I learn a tremendous amount from the people I meet at the show. I really enjoy the impromptu networking which takes place at events as it allows me to learn so much about what is happening in the market. Ironically, I generally learn things I didn't think I would learn ahead of time. Quite often, I wish I would have known more about peoples' experiences before I met with them as it would allow me to be better prepared to ask pertinent questions.

I further wish I knew who was coming to events and and moreover I wish I could get a "brain dump" from them before the event so I could have a frame of reference before our conversations take place.

Imagine how much better networking at a show would be if I had an idea what people were generally thinking about the market before I even say hello.

In less than two weeks the world with gather at ITEXPO -- The World's Communications Conference to help select products for purchase, learn about the latest events in the telecom market and network with peers.

It is this last area where this blog entry should be of maximal benefit. You see, over the past month or so I have been interviewing the telecom movers and shakers who will be coming to ITEXPO. I certainly didn't interview every mover and shaker (exactly what is a telecom shaker anyway  ;)  ) but this list should give you a good idea who some of the speakers and exhibitors will be at this year's show.

The questions each person answered below may be slightly varied but what is common is the person's thoughts on their markets and where they think things may be going. I truly hope you find these interviews useful and I hope to see you at the show September 16-18, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

NAME	COMPANY
Don Palmer	Sip Print
Jim Beuoy	OKS
Mark Stacy	Touchstone
John Nam	Phonevite
Jim Beuoy	OKS
Barry Sher	IVR Technologies
Ari Raban	Phone.com
John Doyle	CommuniGate Systems
David Mandelstam	Sangoma
Sharone Ben Levi	AudioCodes
Rupesh Chokshi	AT&T
Jeff Gallino	Callminer
Dr. David K. Schrader	Teradata
Mark Ricca	Intellicom Analytics
Xuedong Huang (XD)	Microsoft
Rick Dell	Mitel
Mark Lepko	Altitude Software North America
Liz Amaral	Enkata
Francis Carden	OpenSpan
Kevin Murphy	NEI
Chris Gravett	Aculab
Brian Schwarz	RedSky Technologies, Inc.
John Konczal	Sterling Commerce
Stefan Winkler	Symmetricom
Eric Thomas	FreedomVoice
Albert Chu	ACCESS Systems
Bill Miller	Digium
Randy Busch	Jazinga
Jeff Hicks	NetQos
Scott Charter	WBS Connect
Jim Slaby	Acme Packet
Dean Jordan	Telesphere
Justin McLain	Endeavor Telecom
Asif Rehman	Mitel
Steve Safley	VoIPConsultants
Frank Paterno	Intelliverse
Warren Sonnen	Epygi Technologies
Jim Jenkins	IQ Services
Jonathan Christensen	Skype
Mark De Clerq	Sitel Semiconductor
Ken Kuenzel	Covergence
Chris Lyman	Fonality
Michael Hermann	Cincinnati bell
Brough Turner	NMS
Shelley Veazie	CTI Group
Abdul Kasim	Critical Links
Eran Gal	Xorcom
Robert Messer	ABP
Todd Woodstra	SpinVox
Mike Coward	Continuous Computing
Laura Serna	Dialexia
James Rafferty	Dialogic
Ken Lowe	Sigma Designs
Rob McDougall	Upstream Works Software
Mary Boyd	Intrado
Henry Danser	Aspect Software
Gregory Giagnocavo	Vitelity
Vikram Saksena	Sonus Networks
Alastair Westgarth	Tango Networks
Greg Rothman	Cbeyond
Vivek Khuller	Divitas

I missed John Chambers on CNBC this morning. I wanted to hear what he had to say but unfortunately I was being interviewed about ITEXPO at the exact same time Chambers was on TV. Thankfully, Michael Dinan, a TMCnet editor was on hand to listen to Chambers and write up what he had to say.

Chambers seems relatively bullish on technology and anticipates growth between 12-17% for the long-term. In addition, the world's largest networking company announced a net of over 10 billion dollars for the fourth quarter. This is the first time the company has exceeded the $10 billion bogey.

Chambers also spent a good deal of time focusing on visual networking and the growth of this market. Since 1997 the company has predicted a CAGR of 46 percent growth rate in visual networking based upon their Visual Networking Index or VNI.

As many of us know Cisco cites the tremendous growth in wikis, blogs, social networking and video sites like YouTube as reasons for the explosion in the VNI.

For more check out this TMCnet article.

One of the most fascinating advances in political systems worldwide is the advent of technology like blogs and other web 2.0 initiatives such as social networking and video. But even the old technologies like SMS are coming into play as candidates look for any and every advantage to distance themselves from one another.

As you can imagine, with so much technology swirling around, making candidates more productive and efficient, we at TMC became mezmerized by it all. It got so interesting to us in fact we decided to categorize all of the stories we ran having to do with election technology. Afer a while we realized we had developed an entire website focusing exclusively on election technology and how it transforms poltics. I hope you enjoy it.

election-2008.tmcnet.com

It is worth mentioning that call centers are a vital part of of the election process and now that the government has more or less outlawed telemarketing for everyone but themselves, call centers continue to be a vibrant part of the election process. We will of course continue to chart the progress of this segment of the market as well -- as you may recall, TMC has been covering the call center space since 1982 -- before the term call center was even coined. :)

Here's a really good CNET article detailing the death of Yahoo's social network Mash and further analysis of the social networking landscape. It would seem we have a saturated market and if you are looking to break into the space with a new social network you need an angle.

One of these angles is clearly to link together existing applications and services in new and innovative ways such as allowing a news reader to automatically share links which are tagged. There are really millions of permutations of sites and services and uses which together certainly make the entire internet more social.

This is where a tremendous amount of excitement will be in the Internet space going forward.

I made a logical leap in my headline -- inferring you can get famous -- in this case, written up in Popular Science Magazine if you come to TMC's Los Angeles ITEXPO conference in just over two weeks. Let me explain.

About a year and a half ago, Ari Zoldan, CEO of Launch 3 Communications -- a company installing global WiMAX networks came to ITEXPO and won an Toyota FJ Cruiser at the show. Now he seems to be popping up everywhere.

I just read an article in Popular Science Magazine (a great pub BTW) where Zoldan in his new capacity as CEO of Quantum Networks, LLC explains to inventors the best way to go about getting VC money from a firm like his. A few points to consider are -- call the CEO directly and don't give up majority interest.

Here is the article (look to the right side of the page).

Oh, and in just over two weeks, ITEXPO will be in full force and this year we are giving away a Toyota Prius to one lucky winner. Will it be you? Perhaps. Come to the show and find out.

For over six years I have been espousing the virtues of 3D, stereo voice conversations with articles  and ITEXPO demonstrations mostly focusing on DiamondWare and the company's patented 3D technology which allows you to have a conference calls with others and place them on the left right, front or rear.

Until you have heard a conference call in 3D stereo, you have not heard a conference call.

In addition, the technology allows the addition of overtones like adding a metallic sound to a speaker or group of speakers on a conference call. This function could be useful if you are looking to find a way to discern what group a person belongs to -- the Los Angeles office for example.

You may recall that on May 15th of this year, I suggested Nortel would even buy DiamondWare. Well today is that day as Nortel did just that... They purchased the company and further explained how they have a portion of their R&D budget devoted to making VC-like investments but of course with a potentially different exit strategy.

Nortel believes the future of communications is likely going to be avatar-based and even if they are partially right -- let's say 5% of all calls, this could be a huge market.

A Nortel Avatar Demo of their web.alive business communications platform:


Nortel is further betting that the technology advantage they have as a result of this acquisition will help insulate them against others in the market who compete. That would be Avaya, Cisco and even to a lesser degree (at the moment) Microsoft. You see, I personally believe that 3D, stereo communications provides such a rich immersive experience that once you have tried it, you will have trouble going back to traditional telephony.

This move is the second acquisition in a few weeks for Nortel as they just picked up Pingtel as well. For the Canadian-based company these moves are bold as Nortel seems to be gaining momentum in the enterprise. Many of us are aware that most acquisitions fail and Nortel's past acquisitions have not seen success above industry averages.

What the company has done these past weeks though is buy easily digestible companies which are relatively cheap. These companies are M&A training wheels and if the company can get better at acquiring, it can present a more formidable resistance to the Cisco onslaught. Over the years, I have heard more than one story of how Cisco has acquired Nortel partners and damaged Nortel in the process.

In order for technology companies to compete effectively against Oracle and Cisco, they need to know how to acquire successfully. So for Nortel, the world is their oyster... They have the DiamondWare 3D technology and  are now a player in open source and have time to practice the M&A game.

How the company handles these two new companies will show me and others if they are able to successfully pull off more deals and become a bigger competitive threat to other industry players.

In the mean time, these moves should serve as a signal to competitors that Nortel seems to have gotten its mojo back and for customers, I suggest you join me in pushing Nortel to get DiamondWare technology into the company's entire product line ASAP.

See Also

Jon Arnold's take
Press Release

I find the debate over FiOS to be incredible. Some Investors didn't think the investment made sense and analysts even say there will be no way to get the investment in fiber to the home (FTTH) paid back.

What these arguments miss is the point. Consumers want faster and faster connections to the internet and this will only become more of an issue as homes get even more computers and internet connected devices.

Remember that the latest televisions at 1080p can provide a viewing experience which broadcasters are yet to support. This trend will likely continue -- hardware vendors will get farther and farther ahead of broadcasters. As it does, consumers will begin to opt for programming which is provided exclusively over very fat pipes.

These fat pipes will compete with the TV delivery of cable and phone companies mind you but that is a different angle on this story I will not delve into at the moment.

If consumers pay thousands more for TVs which are capable of showing higher quality programming, won't they also pay for higher quality programming? The answer to me is is certainly yes. This means there will be incentive for broadband-only super HD channels to exist.

We can also expect virtual world use to increase and this could be another driver of large amounts of bandwidth.

In short, applications which suck up bandwidth at once preposterus speeds are being invented constantly. Soon, the company which provides the fastest broadband speeds will have an amazing advanatage over others.

Just as Verizon Wireless is doing a great job of taking share with a fast and broadly available wireless broadband network, expect FiOS to become a bigger differentiator as consumers start to clamor for gigabit plus download speeds.

The only concern of course is WiMax and BPL -- but neither of these technologies seem to be capable yet of gigabit per second speeds which the future will call for.

Check out this DSL Reports article for more.

I have so much to write about today that I just don't have the time for separate blog entries so if you excuse me, here is a list of unrelated but important topics.

Spam Arrest

I get too much spam. I get thousands of emails a day and it is killing my productivity. I now have a challenge/response system on my email which means users have to prove they are humans before I get their emails. I also check a web interface to ensure I don't miss important emails but  things got out of hand with all the spam and this new solution should help.

Text to Speech Gets New Voices

I had a recent meeting with Cepstral and they showed me demos of their service/software which provides a variety of voices for text to speech applications. There is one of George W. Bush and others. It is worth a try -- demo sites are here and here.

Applications include talking avatars, talking blogs, talking video game characters and of course talking devices around our home. What? You say... Well there will be a proliferation of web-enabled consumer electronics we will feel compelled to buy and many of these will speak to us. The losers in this scenario are living pets but it will happen. Disagree do you? Then check out chumby.

American Airlines Gets WiFi -- Leave your VoIP Headset Home

American Airlines now has WiFi on its planes but has decided voice applications such as VoIP will not be allowed. Let's see if I understand how this works -- they put phones on planes and charge $5/minute. There was no limit on how long you could talk on these phones. No one would pay this rate so they pulled the service. Now that voice does not bring in incremental revenue over the $12.95/flight it is banned. Hmm -- something seems amiss.

Microsoft to Improve Search

Microsoft is looking to improve its search algorithms and even has a plan to do so. They will look deeper into queries and try to determine user intent. The trouble is, Google has a bigger search database than Microsoft does so this will not be an easy task. Moreover, you can bet anything Microsoft is thinking of, Google is as well.

Microsoft's only hope in search is to Xobni-size their applications. Basically, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is a service which connects to Outlook and brings in relevant information regarding an email you are viewing. For example how many emails the sender has sent you, what files they have shared with you and even other people in their network. I really liked its ability to connect with LinkedIn and get a photo . The one problem I had with Xobni was it was too slow so I uninstalled it.

The point here is Microsoft needs tools which hook into Word and Excel, look for keywords and query the internet while I am working. Bring me back relevant information as I work. For example -- if I write General Electric in a Word document, pop the latest company news and a stock chart on the company. Show me a few blogs of importance while you are at it.

Here is the scary part of my suggestion. Allow users to have Google be the search engine for this function but try to retain control of the ads -- this will require some explanation at a later date. Also, start coding soon because if Google does this first you are screwed.

You might have thought there are enough word processors on the market and there is absolutely no reason for any company to go through the expense of developing a word processor when Microsoft owns the market and Google is coming on somewhat strong. If this was your thinking, you may not have heard the latest news.

You see, Adobe has been watching this competition from a short distance away and has subsequently decided they can do an even better job than Google in the desktop application business by bringing their knowledge of graphics to bear on their competitor from the world of search.

A sample Buzzword document which subscribers can access in read-only mode.



Witness the Adobe Buzzword Beta, a SaaS offering meant to compete with Google and Microsoft. I have had a chance to demo the word processor and am very impressed with the graphical capabilities it possesses. It could possibly even be mistaken for desktop software by some.

The word processor is smart, notifying you of mistakes such as trying to post a graphic from the clipboard.



You can also add graphics easily into documents and have them automatically flow.



Tables are no problem either.



Adobe has slowly become a major force in technology but compared to Google they are are very under the radar. They own VoIP collaboration tools, conferencing, amazing graphical design products and this isn't even mentioning the ubiquitous nature of Flash and Acrobat. The company is slowly organizing its various applications to work more cohesively with one another and as this happens, expect there to be more pressure on Microsoft, Google Cisco/WebEx and other major industry players.

Of course the important question worth asking is will Adobe's hosted applications have an advertising model associated with them? Assuming this becomes part of the company's strategy, will they have a relationship with Google to show ads. Would Google go for this? Would it be better to work with Yahoo?

While on the topic, would Yahoo and Adobe make a good combination? The two both have tremendous web reach but few competing products/services and Adobe understands graphics and as the web becomes more graphical and web users embrace SaaS, doesn't it make sense to combine a very large ad network with a company which can design graphically superior hosted services?

Both companies have market caps int he mid 20 billion dollar range so a merger of equals may make sense. This could be extreme -- perhaps just an MOU would work between the two companies for now.

I suggest you give the service a try and once you do, you can check out the somewhat silly document I created.

One warning: It is worth noting that this service could crash your browser quite often.. So if you try it, get in the routine of saving your work often.

Two days -- two shows, two cities and two trains which left at dawn. Wow... What a rush. What I picked up from the Channel Partners (Boston) and SpeechTek (New York) shows is  the communications market and the call center market are doing well, based on what companies in the space tell me.

Yes, of course some sectors are doing better than others but some are amazingly strong... Open source anything for example is a good place to be. The speech market too is doing well as companies are looking to automation as a way to save money.


In addition, businesses have begun to realize the contact center is extending its presence within the entire corporation making almost all people within the company call center agents. Seems like Nadji Tehrani was right when many decades ago he proclaimed, Every Company is a Call Center.

As this happens the need to monitor quality by companies like Empirix grows and a conversation Susan Anderson at the company showed this to be the case.

A discussion with Jim Jenkins at IQ Services -- a communications testing company also confirms that the testing market is growing.

Discussions with Nuance were interesting as well, as the company seems to be transcending the world of speech and embracing a larger portion of the customer interaction pie. Not unlike Nortel, Cisco, West Interactive, IBM and others, the company is looking to capitalize on the growth of 3G devices and the convergence of outbound, inbound calling and voice portals.

Nuance is even helping companies design user interfaces which marry the best aspects of speech recognition and the GUI, allowing for example to tell a GPS device that you want to find a local Italian restaurant and rather than listen to 10 responses which you have to pick from, you see them on a screen and at this point can say, "Pick number 3".

My conversation with Nuance's Lynda Kate Smith and Michael Wehrs was very instructive and since Smith represents the call center line of business and Wehrs represents mobile, it was interesting to hear how technology developed in one area helps in other parts of the value chain. Our discussion even got into using speech on the device and within the network to interact with stored information in the cloud. For example telling your mobile phone to play music which could reside on your device or in the cloud and having the software be smart enough to figure out how to get the right information back to the user.

Voice biometrics too is gaining traction for things like password resets but I don't see this space as taking off -- rather it will grow slowly but surely and in the process, save companies tremendous support costs in areas like password resets and others.

What I am most excited about however is ITEXPO as I am seeing a resurgence in call centers and massive activity in the communications API space. This means that not only with ITEXPO have a very strong showing (early registration numbers show this to be the case) but the two simultaneous events, Communications Developer and Call Center 2.0 should also have nice attendance levels.

Remember that the purchase of Ribbit by BT has really legitimized communications APIs and development. We now see that major world power service providers are interested in extending their networks to developers everywhere and in doing so they will extend their importance in the new world of communications.

What communications will look like in five years is tough to know for sure but what I can tell you is the thought leaders in the communications and technology space will be at ITEXPO in a matter of weeks (September 16-18, 2008) in Los Angeles and if you want to know what is important in the market today and tomorrow so you can do your job more effectively, you should be there.

I hope to greet you all personally.