The many faces of ITEXPO – a photo set of the people at the show

While speaking at ITEXPO and the Cloud Communications Summit two weeks ago, I naturally had to bring along my new Nikon D90 DSLR and take a few photos. Following the lead of what I’d watched RJ Auburn do a few times (notably in this set from the Voxeo kickoff meeting), I wound up focusing on people for a change, and the resulting set of photos is now up in Flickr and previewed below (click the image to go to the larger Flickr set):

Faces of ITEXPO East 2010 - a set on Flickr-1.png

If you’ve been around our industry for any length of time, or been to any of the many events, many of the faces will be familiar to you. Others may be newer folks you’ve not yet come to know. I’ve put their names on the individual Flickr photos and their affiliations in the Flickr tags. Obviously this is just a subset of the many folks who were at the ITEXPO event… just people that I ran into during the course of my time there.

Anyway, the photos are up there… enjoy… and yes, it’s probably something I’ll do again as it was fun to do – and man, I love how a 50mm prime lens can create great images.

I also posted a set in Voxeo’s photostream of Voxeo speakers:

Voxeo Speakers at ITEXPO

And I posted another set of photos of the Miami Beach area:

Miami Beach Places and Landscapes (ITEXPO East 2010) - a set on Flickr-1.png

Fun, fun, fun…

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Speaking at ITEXPO / Cloud Communications Summit Jan 20-22 in Miami…

itexpo.jpgOn Monday I’m heading down to Voxeo’s corporate headquarters in Orlando, FL, but the week after that I’ll be heading down to ITEXPO in Miami Beach, FL, where several of us from Voxeo will be speaking

Ironically, I won’t be speaking actually at the formal “ITEXPO”, but rather at the Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars and then at a new “Cloud Communications Summit” coordinated by Thomas Howe. Somehow my sessions wound up back-to-back… I’m just hoping the rooms aren’t too far apart!

Voxeo will also have a couple of exciting announcements, so it should be a great event. Here’s my speaking schedule:

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

11:30-12:00, Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars, Dan York

“The Enterprise Edge and Security”

Representing the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA), Dan York will give an overview of security concerns related to Unified Communications and VoIP with a focus on SIP trunking.

12:00-1:30pm, The Cloud Communications Summit, Dan York

“Cloud Telephony for the Enterprise”

This session discusses tradeoffs in deploying communications applications behind the firewall, with a hosted partner or through elastic mechanisms such as Amazon’s EC2.

Other speakers planned for this session are Troy Davis, CEO of CloudVox, and Evan Cooke, Co-Founder and CTO of Twilio. Thomas Howe will moderate the session.

If you are going to be at ITEXPO, drop me a line. I’ll have some of my podcasting gear and other equipment, so I intend to be producing some content from the show floor. I’ll of course be tweeting, both as @danyork and @voxeo

See (some of) you there..

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Mitel files for an IPO (again)

mitellogo.jpgOver the holidays I was pleased for all my friends still at Mitel to see in Techcrunch that Mitel filed for an IPO on Tuesday, December 22, 2009. The timing, just a couple of days before Christmas, was definitely not good for publicity, but I’m guessing that they had some reason to file it before the end of 2009. Those who enjoy the gory details can read the full Mitel F-1 form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

I was employed at Mitel back in 2006 when the company filed for an IPO the first time. As the only “blogger” at Mitel at the time (writing here on this site), we had a number of internal conversations with the communications team about what I could and couldn’t say. The rules for the “quiet period” of an IPO are very strong and at the time it was unclear (to me, anyway) about what could be said in social media. The result, as I recall, was that I didn’t write about Mitel much at all during that time.

That IPO attempt ended with the Inter-Tel acquisition in 2007 (which also ended my employment at Mitel) and the company has been working away privately since that time.

I wish them all the best with this second attempt. There are some great people there and they have some great products and technology. Congrats to Sir Terry Matthews and all the rest there!

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Skype Finally Completes the “Undo” on the eBay Acquisition

skype_logo.pngCongrats to the folks at Skype for completing the sale of Skype from eBay to a group of investors. As Skype president Josh Silverman says in his post “Say hello to the future“:

The investor group is led by Silver Lake, and includes Andreessen Horowitz, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Joltid Limited and our founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

The deal valued Skype at $2.75B US, with eBay retaining approximately 30% of Skype, and the investor group led by Silver Lake controlling the remaining 70%

Back when eBay purchased Skype in September 2005 (Was it really four years ago?!?), I and many others thought it was a strange move, and certainly the synergies that someone thought would be there never really seemed to materialize.

I’m delighted for the many friends I have at Skype that they are now “free” from the shackles of a large public company. I wish them all the best and, as I said back in my post in September…

Onward the disruption…

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Two years with Voxeo…

voxeologo.gifIt truly amazes me to realize that it’s been over two years since I wrote that I was joining Voxeo. It’s rather symptomatic of how well it is going with Voxeo that although I tweeted about this anniversary when it happened 4 weeks ago, I’ve just been way too busy to actually write anything about it here.

I had all these grand delusions, too, about how I was going to write about all the lessons I’ve learned… about some of the great things I’ve done… the people I’ve met… etc., etc.

But the reality is that I’ve simply learned way too much, done too many great things and met too many great people to easily write such a post.

So here’s the short summary of what I’ve learned over two years:

Voxeo rocks!

It’s a great place to work with tremendous benefits (and we’re hiring)… there’s a fantastic team of people involved… it’s fun to be with a company on the bleeding edge of how communication is changing… that is this big massive SIP-based application cloud… that does disruptive things like give away speech recognition technology (and other products) for free… is focusing on innovation in communication and offering new cloud telephony platforms… and just took a $9 million strategic investment, not because the company had to but because it wanted to in order to seize opportunities and acquire more companies in this economy.

What’s not to like?

Sure, we work long hours and have our share of crazy days… but even two years later I wake up each morning excited for the change I can be part of that day. THAT is a key for me…

And yeah, I head up Voxeo’s marketing team, so you would expect me to say all this, right? But if so, you haven’t been reading my blog long enough. Here and over on Disruptive Conversations I call it like it is… and if I don’t have good things to say, I simply don’t write it.

So I’m utterly amazed that two years have gone by… and I’m very much looking forward to the next two years… there are many more stories to tell… and I definitely look forward to telling them…

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Frontier continuing to move ahead with purchasing Verizon landline biz…

Given that I’m a Fairpoint customer, and wrote previously about Fairpoint’s bankruptcy, I continue to watch with a bit of fascination the ongoing effort by Frontier to purchase Verizon’s landline business in a range of other states. Recently, three more states approved Frontier’s acquisition of Verizon’s business. And Frontier continues to make assurances that it will somehow not wind up in the same situation as Fairpoint…

I still find the whole process bizarre. I do understand the fundamental motivation… here in the USA, there are only three wires going into (almost) every home:

  • electrical power line
  • phone line
  • cable television line

If you want to get your service into a home in the USA over a wire, you have to ride over one of those three wires. That’s it.

So I can see the logic someone out there is thinking… he/she who controls a wire has a platform to launch services.

There are, though, two major problems I see:

1. WIRELESS, a.k.a. WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING WIRES – While there may be only three wires going into the home, there are a lot of wireless signals going into the home. While it may not have the performance of wired connections, I know a good number of folks who now have wireless Internet. And while much of this has traditionally been satellite-based, I’m seeing some folks going for the wireless WAN cards (or “air cards”) offered by the cellular networks – and some of the newer laptops with this technology built right in. Plus you have to wonder about newer technologies like WiMAX should they ever start to really take off.

2. LANDLINES ARE LOSING – As I mentioned in my last post, US residents are leaving landlines behind. The NHIS survey I referenced showed the number of homes without landlines at over 20% – and increasing rapidly. My own perception based on comments from people around me is that the cable companies are eating the telcos’ lunches when it comes to signing up new people. I need to pull some stats to back up that view – but anecdotally I’m finding more people signing up for cable Internet (often as part of a “triple play”) and I haven’t heard of anyone in recent times signing up for DSL from their phone company.

To me, I just can’t see the landline business as a great place to be these days… but obviously some folks out there think they can somehow magically make it work. I wish them luck.

What do you think? Would you invest in the landline business in 2009?

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FYI – you can sign up for my email newsletter…

I know that the concept of setting up an email newsletter sounds so… well… 1990’s… but as I outline on my Disruptive Conversations blog, I’m doing some experimentation with email management tools… and so decided to create a list as an adjunct to my online writing. If you’d like to join my little experiment, the form to do so is here:










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Over on my Disruptive Conversations blog, I do get into a bit more detail about what I’m doing (or think I’ll be doing) with this…

If you do choose to subscribe, thanks!

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Tim Panton’s VERY cool demo: Google Wave + Skype + Asterisk + Ibook

Over on Skype Journal, Phil Wolf posted about Tim Panton’s VERY cool demo which he gave at Astricon and then apparently just yesterday at eComm Europe. Tim from phonefromhere.com mashes up Google Wave, Skype, Asterisk (with Skype for Asterisk) and Ibook to make Skype calls from within a Wave, complete with recordings of utterances and, naturally, the ability to have an annotated collaboration session in Wave:

Phil quotes Jason Goecke (a colleague of mine at Voxeo) describing how it works:

“it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames.”

Read Phil’s full post for more info and for Phil’s views on what this all means.

VERY cool demo!

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Out at VoiceCon next week in SF – Presence, Web 2.0, Voice Mashups

voiceconsf2009.jpgIf any of you will be out at VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0 next week in San Francisco, I’ll be out there speaking at both conferences. I have the full schedule in a post on the Voxeo Talks blog, but for VoiceCon it looks like:

Monday, Nov 2

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Presence – Current Progress and Future Trends

Wednesday, Nov 4

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA

Thursday, Nov 5

8:00 – 9:45 am – Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications – Fad or the Future?

The full descriptions can be found on a page on our Voxeo Events page. I’m very much looking forward to all three sessions out there. The first is a “reactor panel” where we have a discussion around the issue of getting richer presence info between systems – and moderator Don Van Doren specifically asked me to be there to react to what the larger vendors will be saying. The second panel is just two of us (myself and a gent from IBM) talking about creating mashups and then the last is a “Deep Dive” that Irwin Lazar and I will be doing into what is the state of “Web 2.0 in Enterprise Communications”.

Should all be fun…. if you are out there at either conference, let me know. See some of you out there…

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Google enters the hosted voicemail game – Google Voice now lets you keep your existing phone number

googlevoice.jpgYesterday Google made another fascinating move in the telephony space… letting people use Google Voice with their existing phone number. This is key because previously if you wanted to try out Google Voice you had to get a new phone number that was different from any of your existing numbers.

Now a business or individual can move their existing number over to Google Voice… and Google can try to convert users over to their service from other services.

[UPDATE: Note that Google states that you can use Google Voice “with your existing mobile phone number“, i.e. not a landline phone number. Others have pointed out that essentially all you are doing is forwarding your unanswered calls to Google’s voicemail service instead of your mobile carrier’s voicemail service. In this way, Google Voice is basically just like Jott or any of the many other similar services out there. Except, of course, it is from Google.]

When you use an existing number, Google Voice gives you these services:

  • Online, searchable voicemail
  • Free automated voicemail transcription
  • Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
  • Email and SMS notifications
  • Low-priced international calling

With a new phone number under Google’s control, you get additional services like conferencing, call recording, call screening, etc. More significantly, you get what I consider the key feature of Google Voice:

One number that reaches you on all your phones

That’s the value I get out of Google Voice. If you call me on +1-802-735-1624, it rings me on my mobile, on my desk phone, on Skype (via SkypeIn), on a SIP phone… and could on other phones as well. That “one number” service is not available for existing phone numbers… but only for new numbers Google controls.

Without that feature, Google Voice is essentially a hosted voicemail provider for your existing phone number.

Except, of course, it is free.

Free and part of the ever-growing suite of Google services…. and still in beta and still invitation-only… but yet, it is Google. It will be interesting to watch over time what disruption this new offering causes in the traditional hosted voicemail market.

Meanwhile, it’s now out there and if you want to try Google Voice with an existing number, you can request an invitation or find someone with an existing GV account and ask them for one of their 3 invites. (Sorry, mine are all gone.)

UPDATE (10/30/09) – Also check out Dave Michel’s post about the broader ramifications of this story.

P.S. You can also watch this video from Google:

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