Recently in Verizon Category

Suzanne Bowen over at DIDX is a past ITEXPO exhibitor and I noticed some nice words from her about the show. In her words:

Both conferences attract a huge and robust mix of professionals, developers, early adopters, SMEs, voip companies, anything over IP companies, and more which results in exciting discussions and new innovations. When a conference only concentrates on one type of participant, the results will be the same as always.

Feel free to read the entire post and I hope to see you at the show next week. Suzanne, thanks for the nice words and to my readers - thanks for your ongoing participation.

A recent Forbes survey shows business executives prefer face-to-face meetings over those of the virtual type. As expected 58% of respondents said they were travelling for business less today than they were at the beginning of the recession in January 2008, with more than a third (34%) indicating they were travelling much less frequently.

What seems obvious (to me anyway) is that executives still expressed an overwhelming preference for face-to-face meetings, with more than eight out of ten (84%) saying they prefer in-person contact to virtual.

Even more interesting, those that prefer face-to-face meetings believe they facilitate the following: Building stronger, more meaningful relationships (85%), the ability to "read" another person (77%), and Greater social interaction (75%).

Other tidbits worth sharing, 64% of those who prefer technology-enabled business meetings like them because they allow them to multitask and 87% agree that there are tangible business benefits to in-person, face-to-face meetings that outweigh the cost savings of alternative, technology-based meeting methods such as web conferencing or videoconferencing.

I find this survey refreshing as it confirms what we may all know - that

face-to-face meetings are much better than meeting in any other way.

The timing of these survey results are interesting as I am headed to TMC's ITEXPO (Sept. 1-3, 2009 in Los Angeles) -- (This photo was taken at the last ITEXPO this past winter in Miami) to engage in a live event which focuses on virtual meeting technology based on IP communications. As it happens, the attendance to the exhibit hall portion of ITEXPO is ahead of last year and I am thrilled to welcome the global crowd to the exhibit hall and conference areas.

I take this as a sign that although IP communications technology is gaining more traction by the day, sometimes, face-to-face gatherings are the best way to learn more about how to meet virtually, save money on communications and boost productivity.

I am happy to hear from a number of companies attending ITEXPO that they are being overwhelmed with requests to meet and do business at the show. This is yet another signal to me that the communications markets are resilient and from what I hear, a number of companies at the show are expecting nice growth for the rest of the year. A few first-time exhibitors told me they think they have sold products to companies who saw them on the exhibitor list. This is great news as ITEXPO has always been the premiere communications event attracting buyers and sellers.

But what I haven't shared is how we at TMC are doing our best to foster the buyer and seller relationship by adding tools to our community which allows them to arrange meetings with one another at the event. The service we added is called DealCenter and the details are below. I hope you find it useful

The ITEXPO DealCenter is now
available for attendees

and exhibitors to begin pre-show
networking!

NEW TO ITEXPO WEST 2009:THE ITEXPO DEALCENTER!

All registered attendees and exhibitors coming to Los Angeles for ITEXPO West 2009 are eligible to use the ITEXPO DealCenter to network and plan meetings with other attendees and exhibitors on-site at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The ITEXPO DealCenter is an online list of registered attendees and exhibitors available to meet on-site in Los Angeles. Attendees and exhibitors who create a profile in the ITEXPO DealCenter can view one another's names, titles, companies and industry sectors to determine with whom they would like to meet with on-site at the show. 

The DealCenter allows you to arrange 30-minute meetings with new prospects and partners, thereby introducing you to new business potential and increasing your event ROI. These meetings can be held at the on-site ITEXPO DealCenter meeting area, your exhibit booth, or any location at the Los Angeles Convention Center that you find convenient.

HOW DO I LOGIN TO THE ITEXPO DEALCENTER?

First you must register to attend or exhibit at ITEXPO West 2009.

Once an individual is registered for ITEXPO West 2009, please Opt In by sending a note to Michael Genaro from ITEXPO West and let him know you'd like to be included in the list of ITEXPO DealCenter participants.

If you have any questions about the ITEXPO DealCenter, please email support@deal-center.com or call 201.839.0177

To see the ITEXPO West DealCenter please click here.

Recently I had a chance to speak with Alan Burnstine - Sr. Product Manager at Aspect and he had some very interesting things to tell me about how his company's IVR/ACD/dialing solutions integrate with Microsoft's Tellme for post-call surveys. As he explains, in this economy you can't necessarily compete on price so you have to compete on service. This means you need to know how good your service is. Moreover, a hosted speech-based survey solution from Tellme is tough to beat as the company handles directory assistance for AT&T and Verizon meaning they have the largest library of speech utterances which in turn means the most information available in one place to help improve speech rec quality. And then there is the whole hosted/SaaS OPEX vs. CAPEX argument which continues to be the way to go for many companies in this economic climate.

Here is a video of Aspect's Alan Burstine explaining Aspect/Tellme integration in his own words.

It's just what you have been waiting for - the 76-page show directory for ITEXPO which will give you lots of needed information regarding the show (Sept 1-3 in LA) . Virtually everything you need is in here - sponsors, floor plan, exhibitor list, TMC University, Trixbox training, Ingate's SIP trunking workshop, Reseller solutions day, keynotes, Asterisk Training, WiNOG, Sipera SIP Security, Wireless Broadband training, M2M, Smart Grid Summit, 4GWE, agenda and Q&As with industry thought leaders. Get it while it's hot and download it to your smartphone or laptop/netbook so you can refer to it often.

Be sure to check out all of the exciting news happening at ITEXPO. In order to get up to date news be sure to bookmark the show news page and check out the three show dailies which have already been produced. Check this page often to stay up to date.

August 20 show daily: SIP security, next gen IMS, VoIP boosts small biz, smart grid progress, Brightcom, Octasic, SIP trunking seminar, Digium open source Asterisk workshop, Terry Matthews keynote, cash for phone system clunkers etc.

August 25 show daily: Smart grid as global trend, mobile communications, Amdocs, 4G, mobile devices, consumer unified communications, Cbeyond and pretzels, Spanlink, wholesale and enterprise VoIP.

August 27 show daily: home energy management/smarthome, networking alternatives, open-source communications in Europe, Multi-Tech, WiMAX dead again, telepresence worth $4.7 billion, fax over IP survivability, SIP trunks

Last night in a post about Gmortgage I discussed how Google is helping to kill off the newspaper business with the help of others in the space such as eBay and Craigslist. Today I learned of an antitrust investigation against Google in Italy which was brought on by FIEG or the Italian federation of newspaper editors who are troubled because they feel they have no control over how Google presents their news on its site. Their only options are to block Google or give them full access.

Other than reading this article from the Wall Street Journal I haven't done investigation or read the complaint but on the face of it seems like a weak argument against Google. It is unclear what the search company is doing wrong - after all if you want traffic from Google you need to play by their rules.

Virtually all companies with websites know they need to work on their search engine strategies and improve them which basically means playing by the rules of Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others.

If Google loses this suit does that open up the door for all Italian companies to sue Google because they aren't happy with the lack of transparency in PageRank and where their results are? How about the rest of the world? Imagine a free-for-all of lawsuits claiming websites and specific pages should rank differently.

A colleague of mine here at TMC made an excellent point recently. He said the web is democratic and in the end, if a search engine doesn't present the most relevant content in the way a searcher wants it, they will switch search engines. In other words Google is forced in general to offer the most important and relevant content to searchers and news viewers.

Having said that, it is obvious the Google Adwords model is killing off newspaper revenue but this doesn't seem to be related directly to the suit.

In an effort to keep you up to date on the conversations online regarding ITEXPO, here are some of the latest items on the web I have been tracking.

Over at the DIDX blog there is a discussion of a broadband stimulus workshop at ITEXPO.

On Sys-Con there is a release about ITEXPO - specifically content targeting resellers and a panel I am hosting called "creatively" Reseller Day Workshop.

On TMCnet there is an article which describes an interview between me and Sipera's Adam Boone discussing his participating in ITEXPO, thoughts on the economy and SIP security.

I also ran across an article containing an interview with Columbia University professor Henning Schulzrinne regarding his thoughts on the smart grid which ties into the Smart Grid Conference taking place at the same time as ITEXPO in the LA Convention Center - Specifically Tuesday, September 1^st.

One final bit of news is that MultiTech is a sponsor of the collocated Machine to Machine or M2M conference and this is interesting to me as I have seen MultiTech evolve over the decades from a company which was a strong player in modems, then VoIP then broadband wireless products and they are now playing in the rapidly expanding M2M market. The M2M conference begins September 1, 2009 in Los Angeles as well.

Be sure to come to the most important communications and tech event of the year and bring colleagues -- there is so much to keep up with and I want to make sure you and your organization are able to absorb as much useful information as possible.

I ran into Dan York the Director of Conversations at Voxeo and had a chance to talk with him about his company's Prophecy 10 software which was running 2,000 calls on 20 netbooks at the recent SpeechTek 2009 in NYC. As Dan explains, a combination of better software and Moore's Law allow these small netbooks to really become efficient multichannel IVR processors. As he points out, imagine what they can do on more powerful computers. Here is the video below for more and an article with details. You can see Dan at ITEXPO next week in Los Angeles if you want to learn more.
 

The photo below may or may not accurately depict the following event

I just received this email which I thought I would pass along to my readers and attendees. Just so you know, if you want me to promote your event at the show you can just drop me a line ASAP. Thanks.

RingPlus, Inc. (Booth 321) is having their Exclusive Launch Party on Sept. 2nd after closing day of the ITEXPO Conference. We are currently one of the exhibitors for this year's conference and wanted to first invite you to attend and also invite the attendees of the conference to attend as well. 

The event is free and would love to share it with fellow conference attendees.