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Attendees shake off black swans and come to the show in large numbers

The results are in for ITEXPO West 2009. This is the second year in a row where some major black swan event took place the day before the show kicked off. Last year it was Lehman collapsing which sparked fears of a depression. This year it was wildfires and news media that hyped the incident in a manner which led many to believe the whole state was on fire.

Still, with significant headwinds, the total attendance was up 3% from last year - due to increased buyers in the exhibit hall.

Of the 6,109 in attendance, those from the enterprise comprised 28.5 percent. Service providers accounted for 26 percent. Resellers/integrators constituted 31.8 percent of attendees and developers/manufacturers made up the remaining 13.7 percent.

Thank you all for attending and also thanks to all the companies who hosted dinners and receptions. Andy Abramson and his team hosted a great "wine dinner" which coupled some of the best food you'll ever eat with a discussion of the wines being served based on his personal experience. Here is a video.

Last night I was at a media event focusing on WiMAX and 4G sponsored by Cisco and I spent some time discussing Clearwire's plans with Peter Cannistra who is in charge of market Development for the company. Peter detailed just how fast the company is rolling out towers and even mentioned New York and at least southern Connecticut will get coverage soon. I am very much looking forward to testing the service in TMC's Norwalk, CT headquarters.

One of the more interesting parts of the story is the complexity of getting fiber backhaul in New York from an "unnamed" company which Clearwire competes with.

We also had a chance to discuss the natural synergies his company enjoys with WiMAX operators which are in different territories which of course leads to the logical decision to deploy mobile roaming agreements with other operators.

The 20^th ITEXPO which began on September 1, 2009 was nothing if not full of buzz and industry news thanks to Skype has been a news-generating machine.

Video clip of the ITEXPO Keynotes



I have rarely seen any company in fact generate so much news I, the unofficial news-generating machine of the event. It is as if the company came out of eBay hibernation and unleashed an assault on the blogging and reporter communities.

Skype Gets Sold

As ITEXPO opened, news of Skype being sold broke. Ebay received $1.9 billion in cash from a group of investors including Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andresen and the value of the company currently works out to $2.75 billion. As a side note, I think I may have been the only person who thought the eBay purchase of Skype for a super-high valuation of about $4 billion in 2005 made sense. What I didn't know at the time was that eBay wasn't going to try to integrate the companies in a serious manner. Yes, it is still shocking to me that the company says there were no synergies between Skype and their core business. Just showing ads for auctions should have generated huge amounts of revenue for the company. Then there is this list of items - most of which were never were acted on. Another option I suggested was to show Google ads on Skype which I predicted could have grown the bottom line by billions.

JoldID

By now it is well-known that the technology which gives Skype its P2P smarts is actually being licensed by JoltID Limited, a company in control of Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, two people who left eBay on not quite the best terms and are currently suing the auction leader and if they win they could shut Skype down.

At ITEXPO, the talk was that the Skype acquisition was at a high valuation because there were some behind-the-scenes discussions about the outcome of the lawsuit. Joe Nocera of the New York Times sums up my thoughts about Skype from the show quite nicely.

Since that time Joost said they are removing Mike Volpi from his role as chairman. Joost was also founded by Friis and Zennström and the conflict seems to have been caused by his roles both at Joost and private-equity firm Index Ventures, one of the firms involved in the Skype purchase.

Folks, the last time we had this much excitement in communications was when someone hacked into Paris Hilton's mobile device.

At one time Zennström mentioned to me that before the idea to build Skype he considered launching Joost and that there wasn't enough bandwidth at the time so he started a VoIP company instead. He further mentioned he can see a time when Skype and Joost would integrate with one another. It is unclear if that will ever happen now. In fact the only thing which is clear to me regarding Skype these past weeks is that nothing is clear.

Digium, Shoretel PBX Connectivity

But perhaps that isn't 100% correct, for while the world was digesting the news of Skype being acquired, the company was busy integrating with PBX vendors. At ITEXPO in fact Skype announced Skype for Asterisk Software and shortly thereafter, Shoretel was first to market with Skype for SIP interoperability.

No Extras Credit

But the Skype gift of September news is far from over as last week the company decided to nix its Extras program, leaving many developers hanging. Some like Stuart Henshall had some pretty harsh words to say about the company's developer relations and prominent blogger Om Malik was not far behind.

More recently, Michael Arrington wrote that Skype is looking to embrace developers in its next generation platform.

Out of all the news coming from the largest IP communications software company in the world, I think this last bit is the most mystifying. You see if I were to devise a way to anger as many developers as I could I wouldn't have to think - I would just duplicate what Skype just did. Bloggers, developers and everyone else seem determined to point out how incompetent the company's developer relations are.

At a time when developer programs are all the rage, how can Skype be such a disaster in this area? It is pretty mystifying actually and a massive opportunity missed.

It reminds me somewhat of the missed opportunity the company had with integrating with eBay and rolling our more revenue generating services over the past few years.

Conclusion

In terms of positioning, there are few companies like Skype -- they are still on a massive number of desktops and the software is migrating to the mobile space quite quickly. This soap opera is far from over and as this month has progressed I have found myself watching less and less TV as just keeping up with the day-to-day news at Skype has proven to be quite entertaining.

This past February at ITEXPO East 2009, I was honored to host the first panel in the world (that I know of) on the topic of HD Voice. Since that time lots of other people have jumped on the bandwagon which I think is great. A tremendous amount of credit goes to Polycom actually for being a true pioneer in the HD voice market. For over a year in fact the company has sponsored a Global Online Community on TMCnet titled HD Voice.

As you can see in the video below, one of the drawbacks to ubiquitous HD voice adoption is the wireless carriers. This is why I am thrilled to let you know Orange Moldova seems to be the world's first carrier to embrace HD voice in all its glory.

The challenge of course is you have to have a specific Nokia handset the 6720c to take part in the HD voice party. And of course you and the party you connect with have to be in Moldova - which by the way is sandwiched between Romania and the Ukraine.

Other facts of interest - the country's network has recently been upgraded to 14.4 Mbps and the Nokia phone uses Adaptive Multi Rate - WideBand (AMR-WB) technology. This is great news for the communications market as this new standard could be helpful in generating new sales of communications servers and endpoints as the world transitions to better sounding communications solutions. Expect the discussion to continue at ITEXPO East 2010, January 20-22^nd in Miami, FL.

Isn't it incredible how areas of tech go out of favor quickly? RFID for example was talked about everywhere a few years back but now it doesn't get the attention it once did. Perhaps we are so overwhelmed with social media sites, 4G and smartphones that we don't have time to look at how RFID is evolving. This is why I was quite happy recently to see solid coverage of RFID on the Next Generation Communications blog and related Global Online Community which live on TMCnet.

What caught my eye is how Alcatel-Lucent has renamed its contactless tikitag service to touchatag while enhancing its related APIs and barcode support. There is tremendous application potential here - you can use this technology to improve event and travel ticketing as well as electronic payments and coupons.

Then there is the opportunity to use the technology to share contact information and distribute targeted advertising. Other areas of interest are smart toys and the ability to access corporate and government data based on location. This blog entry goes in a bit more depth and developers should check out the related community.

I almost forgot -- what caught my eye today was the fact that Alcatel-Lucent has announced a Vienna Jungle Scrum competition which challenges developers to come up with the most innovative near field communications (NFC) urban game. According to the blog post:

Urban gaming - also known as location-based gaming - leverages GPS and NFC technologies to create real-world games, like point-to-point races, scavenger hunts, problem solving - not unlike a localized, mobile-device based version of the popular reality TV show, Amazing Race - as well as interactive local tour applications.

The Vienna Jungle Scrum is open to developers across the globe through September 18, 2009, with winners being awarded a total of €5000 in cash prizes.

It seems with all the interest in location based applications, a blend of GPS and NFC can bring more value than GPS alone. I will be watching this space very closely and hope to see some game-changing (pun sort of intended  )applications soon which brings RFID back into the mainstream.

Companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades to ensure their contact centers are as efficient as possible. In a business where you have hundreds of agents in a call center you have to worry about any excess spending and you must minimize waste. Calling queues and skills-based routing are just some of the simple technologies call centers have used for decades to efficiently connect the right agent with a caller. Amazingly, the average healthcare worker makes 2-5 times as much as the average call center agent and we don't spend the money to automate healthcare processes the way we have in the contact center. Obviously hospitals use technology but their processes can be automated the way ACDs and predictive dialers have automated the contact center.

There is a tremendous opportunity to automate healthcare through unified communications and other related technologies and Nortel is one of the companies looking to seize this market. I recently visited the company's corporate campus and saw a demo of their solutions in action and yesterday I had a chance to speak with Wes Durow, VP Nortel Enterprise Solutions about how his company is helping hospitals and municipalities with their healthcare automation needs.

Have a listen.

At ITEXPO West 2009 in Los Angeles, I had a chance to sit down with the founders of inVox, the company behind a new easy-to-use cloud-based IVR system which allows rapid application development. Here is a video of my interview with company execs.

I travel a great deal and have had a chance to test AT&T's wireless

service in areas such as Dallas, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Los Angeles, San Francisco and others. What I have noticed is the service is improving and aside from occasional glitches, surfing the web on an Apple iPhone 3Gs is a more pleasant experience. I don't think it approaches Verizon Wireless yet but then again, VZW doesn't have to deal with the onslaught of wireless data requests generated from legions of iPhone users. AT&T has an opportunity of a lifetime to upgrade its network before it loses iPhone exclusivity (assuming it does).

To say the company is rushing to improve its service would be an understatement - in fact it is doubling its data speed through the use of HSPA in six cities -- Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Charlotte. This is great news as the next ITEXPO and - East 2010 and the collocated 4G Wireless Evolution will take place in Miami this January and these upgrades should be in place by year's end. I am looking forward to testing the service out then.

A big theme at last week's ITEXPO was broadband stimulus and a number of people told me they have bookmarked and are using the new Broadband Stimulus GOC (Global Online Community) on TMCnet as their home page so they can keep up with the exciting developments in the space and the billions of dollars which will be distributed.

Here are some of the recent articles from the site if you haven't visited yet. Be sure to check out the community for yourself. These are certainly exciting times for the broadband market - indeed, any time the government gives billions of dollars in subsidies it is an exciting time - in any market.

Thank you all - sponsors, analysts, members of the press, keynoters, partners, attendees, speakers, friends, colleagues and the TMC team. ITEXPO West 2009 was one of the best events TMC has ever put on thanks to your support.

I will be collecting my thoughts for a while and will have more to report soon.

For now, please enjoy some photos and news from the event.