Recently in conferences Category

from today's HARO:

"The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley is now accepting applications to present to their Investor Forum on December 5th, location in Silicon Valley (TBA).

 Over the past 6 years, 50% of presenters to our Service Provider and Investor Forums have started talks with our members and 20% of those lead to a deal.
This Quarterly Investor Forum meeting attendees include both the Service Provider and Investor members of the Telecom Council who gather for one purpose - to invest in new telecom technologies and companies. As a start-up in the telecom industry, there is no better room to be in, and no better audience to pitch to. In addition to providing high level networking and quality investment opportunities to our forum members, another one of the Telecom Councils goals is to help interesting start-ups kick start their business development cycles. For an idea of who to expect at our December meeting, past attendees include AT&T, Sprint, Orange, Vodafone and many more.

It is free to apply and applications to present to the 12/5 Investor Forum will be accepted until 11/8. Please submit requests at:
http://www.telecomcouncil.com/speakers.php
All applications are reviewed by the Investor Forum steering committee, and companies selected to present will be notified on November 10. Presenter registration is free for Telecom Council members, or $500 for non-members.
Feel free to contact Liz Kerton for more information on the forum, liz (at) telecomcouncil.com."

BarCamp Tampa Bay was held this weekend at USF College of Business. Over 350 people pre-registered for this Un-conference. (Don't know what a BarCamp is? See BarCamp.org.)

Ours was just one of 4 worldwide this weekend - South Africa, Houston, Little Rock and Tampa Bay.  The whole idea behind BarCamp is that everyone shares, learns, participates. It is engaging. There isn't an agenda - until the morning of, when the participants design it. We had 3 or more rooms going with over 60 people giving talks, some as short as my 7 minutes on the Triumvirate of the Consultant. The longest was 2 hours on Drupal. Adobe was there to talk about Flex both days, which resulted in a rant about Flex and Advertising issues and a suggestion to try Adobe Flex hosting with Influxis because you can do webinars from the platform too.

Other topics: Twitter (5-6 sessions, including metrics and research tools); Blogging; Podcasting; Python; RubyonRails; Second Life; iPhone development, and a voice app. Gavin Stark put the schedule on the mobile web AND wrapped it in an Asterisk app (with Ruby?) so that if you dialed the conference phone number, the schedule was read to you. How cool is that?

BarCampTampaBay was a huge success. How do I know this?

1. The main room was empty except for lunch and breaks -- everyone was in the session rooms. That means Engagement, which is the Holy Grail of event planning.
2. People were asking when the next one was - AND offering to help.

BTW, plenty of noise on twitter and pics/video around, just look for barcampatampa.

At Andy's wine dinner at Roy's last night, the first wine was a 1999 Pinot Gris that was Excellent! And the first Pinot Noir (2001 Siltstone Oregon Pinot Noir from Oregon) was very good. Even the chardonnay was nice (and I am not a Chard guy).

My panel this morning with Unity Business Networks, Telesphere Networks, and Aptela had a full room as we discussed deploying hosted PBX. The pitfalls and pain of the deployment. The stickiness too.

Here at Room 502B at the IT Expo West, we have the largest press room ever! Ten columnists / bloggers lined up with desks and laptops and eleven tables for people to hold meetings.

Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, and CableVision showed up for a panel at the Channel Partners Expo in Boston today. As you can imagine the agents let them have it. The question the panel asked is Why Cable? Why, indeed. It sounded like the program is temporary or "in trial". MSO's don't really know the SMB market. Cablecos don't know the channel either.

Currently, they are selling basic voice and data packages with security, hosted email, and backup/storage. So What Wins?

Quality of Service. Fair compensation (20% plus spiffs). NNI and inter-connection of the 5 top networks, which hit 92% of the US land mass. The cable execs handled some of it well until Macario had to halt the conversation as it neared collusion and anti-trust.

All of them have a Business Broadband product. Twelve phone lines and less. Hosted PBX in the pipeline. Managed Services with Response Point and Cisco CallManager. TWC is launching PRI. Cox is rolling out SIP Trunk. Some programs are referral only.

It was an interesting talk. I appreciate them for showing up and being forthcoming. ILEC's better look out.

To be a speaker at the IT Expo, there is a lot of paperwork. And I have procrastinated so that I now have to scramble to meet tomorrow's deadline. I will share with you some of the questionaire:

What has been your company's biggest achievement in 2008 so far?

Getting my book finished.

What can we expect to see for from your company for the next 12 months?

I will be helping many service providers fine tune their message, train their staff, and help them sell more services.

How do you see the communications market evolving?

I see VOIP being sold as an Overlay rather than as a "Cheaper Alternative to POTS"

What company made the biggest contribution to communications this year?

No idea. It all looks the same to me.

How has Google changed our markets?

Everybody thinks free is possible - moreso than before, which is annoying! They made SAAS more acceptable.

How about Apple?

That damn iPhone.

What mobile phone(s) do you use?

A brick from Sprint (PPC6700)

Who will win in an Apple/RIM war?

Blackberry. Not everyone likes ATT. Not everyone wants an Apple. And between Apple and ATT, something will mess up that turns folks off. RIM already had their mess up during the patent battle. The first one with a hook to Broadsoft's Broadworks will win.

What do you think the communications market might look like in five years?

I can't see that far in advance. The pace that change gets adopted is logarithmic. I think we should all have video phones now! And UC should just be how it is.

Lots of travel the next 7 weeks.

• Next Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I am attending Future of Web Apps in Miami Beach.
• March 6 is the webinar How to Sell SAAS with HyperOffice. (There is a webinar with NeuStar about Recursive DNS in March as well. Email me for more info or to register).
• Then March 9 through 12, I am in Vegas for Channel Partners, where I am moderating a panel on Virtual Office.
• NCTA is holding an executive forum in Tampa from March 16-18.
• VoiceCon is in Orlando on March 17-20.
• An ISP association is meeting in Orlando on March 20.
• I'll have copies of my book with me every where I go

The one show I am skipping is CompTel. Why? SSDD. It never changes. CompTel needs fresh air. The speakers hardly change: Sherm, Crowe, Arunas. Oh, and Deb Tate. What can she add? She has voted against every CLEC issue at the FCC. (Will they hit her with a whip cream pie? That would be worth going for.) But to listen to old-timers talk about the business that hasn't changed much in 10 years is boring. What have CLEC's done for you lately?