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For nearly 13 years, Greg Galitzine has been a tremendously valuable part of the TMC team. His career started as an editor for CTI Magazine in 1996. Where he reported on the collision of the computer and communications spaces including what we called IP telephony back in the day. In 1997 we convened a meeting with Greg to explore whether it made sense to launch a publication in the IP telephony space. The outcome of the meeting was to launch what we hoped would become a cornerstone of what we hoped would be a new industry - Internet Telephony Magazine.

Greg became the editor of this publication and had the vision to see this is where the industry was going. Many companies in the communications space told us we were nuts for launching this publication as at the time there was no industry, just a few nerds calling each other on softphones.

Lo and behold, over the past decade this nerdy, niche technology revolutionized telecom to the point where business models have changed, new entrants have come into the telecom market and entire industries were transformed through international outsourcing made possible by inexpensive VoIP-based telephony.

In the last few years, Greg did a great job helping transform TMCnet into a major web force in communications and technology news. We are grateful to him for the years he has put in.

I am very happy for Greg as recently he has been given a great opportunity which involves a move to a new industry altogether. Galitzine has accepted a position with ISA, Inc., a prime contractor to the National Nuclear Security Administration and working in about 18 countries through Central and Eastern Europe to identify and interdict the illegal movement of materials for weapons of mass destruction. Greg will be taking his analytical and editorial skills to a higher level, contributing to national-level policy and operational support analysis for these major international nonproliferation undertakings.

While we all selfishly wish Greg wouldn't move on, we are happy for him and are sure he will make a tremendous impact in his new position.

If you look at TMC from the outside and find yourself asking how you can get a job as an intern at this global integrated media company which builds communities online, in print and in person while gaining marketshare regardless of economic climate, I have some great news to share. We are looking for a small army of interns who want to learn what it's like to take on major multibillion dollar media companies with infinite resources and consistently win.

We will teach you how to sell collaboratively - how to listen and to be loved by your customers (well most of them anyway).

We will teach you integrated marketing and online marketing - not theory but ever-evolving practice.

If you love media and want to work at the company that is light years ahead online, contact us ASAP. We are very picky so if you aren't a super-hard worker and collaboration and hat-wearing are not your middle names, let's end our relationship now as friends (it's not you it's me).

One last thought about TMC - our culture is unusual - we have the financial stability of a 37 year-old company with the energy and enthusiasm of a start-up.

The Sales & Marketing internship position at TMC is designed to provide hands-on experience that will be mutually beneficial for both the intern and the organization. The internship position is designed to challenge students and provide them with practical experience in the advertising and media industry.

TMC is looking for a dynamic, creative, enthusiastic, high energy professional to support the Sales organization, to help build advertising and marketing presentations for prospects and clients.

• Work with sales & marketing team to assist in the implementation of various campaigns
• Contribute to the creative input in building campaigns and support the campaigns
• Copyediting and proofreading
• Communicate with customers and peers
• Minimum Qualifications:
• Working towards completion of a college degree program in business, marketing or communication
• Excellent communication skills verbal and written
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite, specifically PowerPoint and Excel
• Excellent communication skills
• Detail Oriented
• Initiative and proactive thinking
• Team player
• Ability to multi-task and work in a fast paced environment meeting deadlines

Contact (mgenaro at tmcnet dot com) for more.

I would like to welcome back Patrick Barnard to the TMC editorial team. Patrick has covered a number of different editorial areas at TMC over the years and recently left TMC to work on Multichannel Merchant. He is now back and his return is just a continuing reinforcement of how TMC is continually investing in its editorial talent -- just as we are constantly evolving our web technology, graphics, analytics, reporting and more.

Thanks to influential readers like you TMC has been blessed with hundreds of advertisers and exhibitors each year who partner with TMC to grow -- even in the face of challenging economic conditions.

We take sponsor and reader loyalty seriously -- looking to constantly improve to provide you with the best products we can.

For over a decade TMC has covered AVST and their wonderful unified messaging solutions - which in the nineties were the talk of the industry. But as is sometimes the case, when the industry talks about the next big thing, it doesn't always take off overnight. While UM was slow to catch on in the nineties, the last few years have seen an explosion of interest in both UM and UC. While you may think this is a long time to wait, remember some are still waiting for the glorious age of OS/2 to finally arrive.

To catch up on what the company is up to since the release of CallXpress 7.1 I met with Tom Minifie - Chief Technology Officer and Denny Michael - Vice President of Marketing.

They have spent a great deal of time, effort and energy on the latest release of their CallXpress Version 8.0 which will be available this Summer and include Neverfail technology making it more resilient to outages. The entire architecture of the product has been improved allowing multisite organizations to centralize servers or distribute them with higher levels of availability. And this is crucial for a company which provides the backbone for the communications of companies worldwide, including law firms in the UK.

One benefit of using this new architecture is users will be able to transfer calls and perform other call management tasks - even if a WAN link fails. 40,000 users will be supported and there are multiple PBX integrations as you likely know or expect.

The new architecture of AVST CallXpress Version 8.0 makes it more resilient

 

There are new applications available as well which support mobility - with "Wildfire-like" speech recognition/personal assistant features. Presence is also supported allowing intelligent call routing - and there is FMC - allowing calls to be transferred back and forth between cell and landline.

Users can benefit from a single mailbox and phone number and corporations can more easily integrate UC into their business processes allowing for CEBP - yes the term that has more lives than the entire global feline population. An example of the CEBP prowess of CallXpress is sending SMS alerts to people within an organization if an item is on backorder.

Personally I would like my server to be notified if something on the menu is out before I order that fancy tilapia special which I later learn is not available. I think this new version of CallXpress could be a tasty addition to the restaurants I visit.

As TMCnet has expanded I have to admit it is tough to keep track of all the sites we have which can help you in your job. To that end I decided to take a moment and list some of them which you may not be aware of. I thought this entry made sense as I have received some comments about how TMC should launch some of the sites listed below. This shows me there are just so many things we do that our 2-3 million unique visitors each month may not be aware of. I hope you find these sites of use:

• Europe
• Asia
• Africa
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Australia

• Mobile site
• iPhone site
• iphone news site

• Information technology
• Cable technology
• Robotics
• Satellite
• Green Solutions

• Jobs Site

Many people in the communications space have asked me recently what TMC's secret is. After all, we are in the toughest media environment of our lifetimes and we produced our best show ever and have more paying customers online than at virtually any other time in our history.

The answer may lie in a bit of luck and some skill. The lucky part is we built our first online community for a customer about a decade ago. And since this time we have invested a small fortune in building our own proprietary technology which allows us to build highly-ranked, viral, news-driven communities for customers. Well over 100 of these sponsored communities live on TMCnet and generally consist of the tabs at the top and down the left of most of our pages.

Moreover TMCnet now houses millions of pages of content which gives the site tremendous prominence. And we have ranked very high on search engines for many years which has generated a tremendous amount of links to the 100+ articles we write a day and other content such as blog entries on the site.

The community product is called a GOC or "gock" and stands for Global Online Community. When we launched the program the term "organic search results" was probably not common but now, these communities help our customers rank extremely high for a variety of keywords which are important to them.

I know what you are going to say. Rich, that is what those click ads are for. Well to be honest the value of an organic search result is much higher to the searcher because it is not blatantly paid for and moreover it is not in a sea of other ads. Most importantly, research shows less that 20% of people even click on search ads. What about the other 80%?

TMC's communities answer the request we have been hearing -- How do you recreate the best part of tradeshows online?(shots from last ITEXPO East February 2009 in Miami)

Finally, unlike search ads, these communities help your own site(s) rank high organically by providing links. Moreover they help companies build their brand and thought leadership.

In addition, as a news-driven entity, GOCs draw traffic from other pages on TMCnet, newsletters, the TMCnet home page, news search engines and traditional search services. They are multimedia in nature, allowing companies to interface with customers via audio, video and of course text.

Example of an IP-PBX GOC (click to see full screen image)

Many of you have told me over the years that there needs to be a way to combine the best part of trade shows online. The GOC program is exactly this as it brings in your potential customers from around the world and gives them a reason to come back and see your message as the news is constantly updated. It is a very busy 24x7 community consisting of the most targeted people available on the web. And it is targeted by the news you find important.

In addition, it is measurable, and includes a wealth of metrics which can be used to analyze your spend and justify it up the chain of command.

For the reader the benefit is clear. They come to the GOC and bookmark it so they can keep up to date on the latest happenings in the space. How many people come? Well our record is over 650,000 pages viewed on a GOC in one month but typical results are between 250,000-500,000 per month. Generally, each GOC will average about 100,000 unique visitors per month - and they are targeted exclusively by content. In other words, you can use this program to build a community of people interested in subjects such as colocation, IP communications, HD voice, next generation communications, fixed mobile convergence or anything else in virtually any field. Click on any of these above links to see how the design is different and mirrors the look and feel of the sponsor.

If you are interested in learning more, here is an updated (4/14/2009) video which describes the program. Feel free to drop me an email for more.

If you are interested in the stories and headlines I find useful, I invite you to bookmark my Google Reader feed which I update fairly regularly. I occasionally will add comments as well. In fact, since I started using this page, I have found myself blogging less. I hope you find this resource useful.

Great news for readers of TMCnet blogs. As you know we now have 40 bloggers and continue to innovate with technology and integration additions to our blogs which allow you to use your social networking login to comment on our blog entries. But that was so yesterday.

Through the hard work of the development team here at TMC, we now have deep integration with a variety of social networking sites. For example, we can now have Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates directly imported into our blogs. Moreover, I will scan about 2,000 headlines in a given day and I flag many of them for later coverage. Many times I assign these articles to members on my editorial/blogger team.

Now however I can share news items directly from my Google Reader which brings in news from thousands of sources and all these items will show up on the Recent Activity area on the right of my blog under the search box.

If you want to bookmark my social media feeds, here are links:

• Rich Tehrani Twitter Feed
• Rich Tehrani Facebook Status
• Rich Tehrani Google Reader Feed

Please note that I will no longer update my status on Twitter but instead use Facebook. My Facebook status updates will be automatically copied to twitter and then my blog - at least that is the theory.  I set all this up a few minutes ago and am now testing.

Hi all, thought it made sense to pass along this press release TMC is about to put out so you know what is happening at ITEXPO this Monday-Wednesday in Miami. Hope to see you there soon.

Oh -- and I used the highlighter pretty liberally because i was in one of those moods. Hope you don't mind.

--

HD-Voice, Unified Communications, and Service Provider Panel Discussions Top the Agenda for Next Week's ITEXPO Conference in Miami

Norwalk, CT - January 28, 2009 - Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC®) today announced details - including the complete lists of panelists - for three General Sessions that are attracting significant interest at Next Week's INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO (ITEXPO) in Miami.

Each session is free for all attendees. Registration is now open.

On Monday, February 2^nd at 4:45 PM, representatives from Nortel, CommuniGate, Interactive Intelligence, Aspect Communications and Objectworld will present their Unified Communications solutions - and position their products against one another.

Each panelist will make the case for choosing their offerings by laying out the business case; explaining their differentiators; and providing a quick demonstration of their systems. The "shootout" format provides just seven (7) minutes for each to make their case, and the session provides a detailed Q&A for attendees to dig deeper into each vendors' claims. INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine Editorial Director Greg Galitzine will moderate.

On Tuesday,February 3^rd at 9:15 AM, executives from 8x8, Inc., Broadvox, MagicJack, Telefonica, TW Telecom, and Verizon will share their thoughts on the state of the market; today's economic climate; and they will discuss how anticipated changes in Washington will impact the telecom industry.

The session, moderated by respected communications industry blogger Andy Abramson, will also provide attendees with a glimpse into the future of mobility and next-generation wireless technologies. Attendees are encouraged to bring their questions for these industry leaders who are best suited to provide the answers.

On Tuesday, February 3^rd at 12:15 PM, TMC president Rich Tehrani leads a panel of experts discussing howIP Communications solutions have exceeded the fidelity and clarity of the PSTN - and they will discuss upcoming HD-Voice solutions that will take advantage of this new fidelity.  Participants in this session include: Alan Percy (AudioCodes), Tim Yankey (Polycom), Debbie Greenstreet (Texas Instruments), Bill Bumbernick (Alteva) and James Awad (Octasic).

"ITEXPO helps attendees understand the current landscape, and provides a glimpse into the future state of all aspects of the IP communications market; it showcases all of the latest technologies, and it provides the face-to-face networking opportunities that people need to conduct business," said Michael Genaro, vice president of marketing for TMC. "We're looking forward to a tremendous show next week in Miami. Conference pre-registrations are up 27% over 2008, the exhibit hall is filled with more than 150 vendors, and the conference program looks to be the strongest that we've ever offered"

General and media registration are open.

Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) is an integrated global media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online. TMC publishes Customer Interaction Solutions, INTERNET TELEPHONY, Unified Communications, and NGN magazines. TMC is also the first publisher to test new products in its own on-site laboratories, TMC Labs. TMCnet, TMC's Web site, is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries. TMCnet is read by two to three million unique visitors each month worldwide, according to Webtrends. For more information about TMC, visit www.tmcnet.com.

For Immediate Release PR (for ITEXPO)

(617) 262-1968 x 101

While many of you were busy in the malls this past weekend or trying to find the best price on that new digital camera yesterday on Cyber Monday, the dedicated team of designers and programmers here at TMC worked day and night and night and day to bring you a new look and feel.

Over the past years, many of you have told me that you love to come to TMCnet on a daily basis and the hundreds of stories and blog entries we write on a daily basis contain everything you need to navigate the telecom and tech worlds. At the same time, many of you have told us the interface TMCnet has looks busy. Others have told me it is not clear that 50-100 writers contribute to TMCnet on a  daily/weekly basis.

Our new redesign is meant to adress all of these great requests and we hope you enjoy the new TMCnet.

One last point... Thanks to the 2-3 million communications and technology decision makers who visit TMCnet monthly and thanks to the TMC team for doing such a great job on this redesign. I should also mention this redesign is ongoing and is still being rolled out over our millions of pages. If you see something that you think can be improved, please drop us a line.