Innovation Award Deadline Nears

Is your company a communications technology innovator? Here's an opportunity to get some recognition. I've just learned that the 2006 TMC Labs Innovation Awards deadline for Internet Telephony magazine is just days away, May 25, 2006.

Follow this link to go to the online application form.

Here's a good writeup from Tom Keating, TMC Labs founder, explaining what the award is all about:

What are the TMC Labs Innovation Awards?

The TMC Labs Innovation Awards honor products that demonstrate raw innovation, unique features, and significant contributions toward improving communications technology. While innovation is frequently a question of firsts, often it is taking an existing idea and improving upon it or looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Challenging established standards, and then introducing different approaches to achieve distinctive results certainly helps to define innovation within this industry.

The TMC Labs Innovation Awards would not be granted only to the "best" (or best-selling) products in each category, but instead to those demonstrating raw innovation, uniqueness, and representing a significant contribution to the industry. It is our intent that this will be TMC's most prestigious award.

In fact, TMC Labs chooses only a few select products that we consider truly innovative. The TMC Labs engineers have extensive knowledge of the communications, Internet telephony, and call center industries from testing products as well as meeting with vendors and attending tradeshows. As such, in the first annual TMC Labs Innovation Awards, we selected winners solely based on our own knowledge of innovative products in these industries. Now we have decided to formalize the process and have an online application for companies to submit what they feel is an innovative product. Of these applications, only a select few are chosen. The ones that are chosen are given an extensive and detailed write-up within one of our publications.

We should point out that not all the winners submitted an application; some of the winners were selected by the TMC Labs engineers without an application. However, with thousands of products out there, we cannot guarantee that we will examine your product without an application. Only by applying do you bring your company/product to our attention and guarantee that it will be considered for this award. We should also point out that we do not need to actually test the product for a vendor to apply for this award. TMC Labs does extensive research to determine what truly is "innovative."

We should mention that the TMC Labs Innovation Awards are published in two magazines: Internet Telephony, and Customer Inter@ction Solutions. Applicants may apply to both magazines, but when selecting the winners TMC Labs decides which magazine would be the best fit for the actual award write-up. It should be stated that the TMC Labs Innovation Award is the same exact prestigious award in both magazines.

We realize the difficulty in developing a first-class product that integrates several components into one unified product suite. With the convergence of voice, data, and various media types (fax, e-mail, chat) comes increasing complexity, often resulting in products that we consider to be engineering marvels. We tip our hats to the engineers and developers of the award winners.

AB -- 5/18/06