« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
Posted at 14:16 in Conference Presentations | Permalink | Comments (0)
I've made it to the Collaborative Technologies Conference being held this week in Boston. The event appears to be well attended, I've heard estimates of around 800 total attendees, which is about twice the attendance of last year.
The exhibitors are an interesting mix of companies covering various facets of collaboration, including content management, web conferencing, blog/wiki/rss management, and security. These vendors are intertwined with IP telephony vendors including Cisco, & Nortel, and mobility offerings from Orative. The mix of vendors underscores the increasing merger of real-time communications and collaboration with more traditional collaboration offerings.
I've had the chance to speak to a couple of attendees as well. What I've found interesting is the concern over collaboration from a policy/organizational perspective more so than from a technical one. One attendee I spoke with was most interested in understanding how organizational dynamics, including office atmospheres, could be optimized to support collaboration.
I'm now in a session on security, as usual it's the typical battle between risk and reward, with risk concerns being a limiting factor on the ability of enterprise organizations to take advantage of emerging collaboration & communication tools.
Technorati Tags: ctc2006
Posted at 13:57 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Om analyzes Vonage and finds that the numbers just don't add up. As I mentioned in one of my presentations at Catalyst, I don't see how a company can spend hundreds of dollars per subscriber in acquisition cost, then spend most of their subscribe revenue on local access fees, and ever expect to return a profit.
The only way out of this mess for Vonage that I see is for a quick global migration of the world to VoIP services that directly peer, thus eliminating local access fees paid to ILECs, but that ain't going to happen anytime soon.
Andy Abramson predicts big changes at Vonage and talks about the impact that Skype Casting and free Skype calls to anywhere in the U.S. might be having (though I don't really see Skype and Vonage as competitors just yet).
Again though, what do you change if your fundamental business plan is flawed?
Posted at 12:37 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I've switched the feed of this blog to FeedBurner now that it integrates quite nicely into TypePad. You might see double-posts if you subscribe to the feed, but that should go away with new posts. Let me know if you have any problems with the feed.
Posted at 12:34 | Permalink | Comments (0)
IPv6 has been a hot topic at Catalyst this year. After watching Alex Lightman of the IPv6 summit debate our own Jeffrey Young, I gathered some thoughts and posted them on VoIP Loop.
Posted at 12:29 | Permalink | Comments (0)
The IMS Insider blog has a great post on the potential effects of SIP-based clients on service provider's plans for IMS-based services. It seems to me that this is the "smart vs. dumb" network argument all over again. Mobile service providers are spending a lot of money to build intelligent IMS-based networks to deliver a suite of advanced communications services.
Meanwhile, as mobile data network service speeds improve via 3G/4G roll-outs, and handsets get more intelligent, I think the mobile providers will find that their customers simply want fast, reliable data pipes that they can use to run their own SIP (or Skype) clients. Of course, providers may fight back by instituting walled-gardens, or optimizing their networks for their own voice services.
(E.g., the same thing we've seen in the last few years in the residential broadband VoIP space.)
Posted at 18:15 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Catalyst is an intense conference. Sessions run from 8:30 to around 6:00 PM with only a 90-minute or so break for lunch. At the end of the day most people need a release, which is provided by a dozen or so vendor hospitality suites. One such suite last night featured William Hung of American Idol fame. Hearing him sing "Achy Breaky Heart" was one of the more interesting things I've ever heard. Pictures from my Treo 650 are posted below.
Posted at 14:42 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Stowe Boyd recently interviewed me for Collaboration Loop. We discussed trends in real-time communications & collaboration, and my upcoming presentation at CTC on the Real-Time Economy.
Posted at 16:42 | Permalink | Comments (0)
As expected eBay announced today that it would enable SkypeMe integration into a select number of on-line auction areas.
Most of the times I list something for sale on eBay I get messages from individuals asking me to close the auction and sell them the item directly (thus avoiding eBay fees). It will be interesting to see if the Skype links are used for these same efforts to circumvent eBay.
Posted at 16:35 | Permalink | Comments (0)
There will be integrating Skype into the Enterprise at eBay's developer's conference starting tomorrow. The first link above is to a session description, the presentation, and a blog on the session.
Thanks to the VoIPSA Blog for the link.
Posted at 22:32 | Permalink | Comments (0)