ON HIGHLIGHTS FROM IP TELEPHONY CONFERENCE

GOING, GOING, GONE...

Given my long-held belief that voice telephony as an "expensive, regulated, global, must have service", is soon going to turn into a "mostly free, unregulated, global, will-have-it-on-whatever-device-you-want-it application", courtesy of the wired and wireless broadband Internet, I wanted to highlight some relevant presentations from the Voice on the Net (VON) conference in Canada.  (whew...sorry for that long sentence, but I had to get that off my chest).

VON Canada was produced by Jeff Pulver, who is a long-time VOIP entrepreneur, thought guru, and co-founder of Vonage, one of the early companies in the space.
He has a US version of the conference coming up this September in Boston.

I wanted to highlight two presentations from the conference in particular. 

1. The first is by Niklas Zennstrom, the co-founder of Skype, last discussed on this site in the post "Dialing for Dollars" on April 17, 2005.  His presentation highlights the current, impressive momentum for the company, surpassing past "viral" Internet success stories like Kazaa (which he had also co-founded), and ICQ, the Israeli Instant Messaging company that was mentored by Yossi Vardi, and bought by America Online a few years ago.  His flash-based web presentation can be seen here...just click on the first page to start...highly recommended.  A key takeaway is the company's upcoming focus on mobile devices, having already built a 35 million strong user base on PCs and laptops.
2. The second presentation I want to highlight is by Tom Evslin, one of the few entrepreneurs I know who's had interesting careers at both AT&T and Microsoft, along with founding a few companies along the way.  As an aside, he's also one of the few people around that can have links for every member of his family on his bio page, who've also been high-achievers in their own right.  His blog, Fractals of Change is terrific, along with his powerpoint presentation from the conference here, which argues that voice telephony is going to become an essential application, just like email.  Also recommended. 

Separately, I'm intrigued by a new Internet telephony start up, Teleo, that seems to have a better mousetrap...it's in closed beta right now, but one to keep an eye on as an interesting application with some unique features.

 

Comments

[Bob]

Interesting read. Its heartening to see VoIP finally taking off. Yeah, for sure Skype will be an interesting bet. BTW, Skpe seems to be betting big on China. They tied up with TomOnline and ran some co-branded ad campaigns.
Anyway it would be interesting to watch the new game in the VoIP arena!