Like many of the VoIP faithful, I made the pilgramage to Boston for this years VON conference. Others have previously described the public events and offline activites in much detail. I wanted to share some observations that I had of VON.
First, Jeff Pulver is a solid human being. He cares for people, he is passionate about this industry, and he is genuine. Everyone in this industry should support Jeff in his various efforts. There are few people like him moving around in this world. Great job Jeff on a successful show.
While I was walking around the show floor, I kept trying to place the VoIP industry in the context of the commercialization of the Internet. I came away from Boston feeling that excited about the turnout and clear interest in the space, yet sad that the floor was virtually full with folks selling gear. It was like a flashback to the early Internet days, going to a show where all one could see were displays hawking Cisco routers, Sun boxes and an occasional telco selling T-1's. That's what I felt walking the floor. There were a ton of folks selling gear. Virtually all, save for the shining lights of vision emanating from the booths of Digium and Popular Telephony, were pitching the replication of existing services. Save for the two companies referenced above, I did not see any vision for harnessing the technology to create something radically different other than cheaper POTS. That's a shame.
On that point, the day that VON opened Lucent put out a press release touting its ability to deliver customized ringback tones. In other words, one can select the sound that a caller hears when dialing your number. Pretty cool! The mind races with ideas: AOL using this in their VoIP service to provide audio branding in the way thier ubiquitous "You've got mail" sound file did. Or, one could envision a radically different business model for VoIP whereby service is provided for free with the proviso that ringbacks are branded by companies one selects form a list of sponsors. Well, you can see the direction I am going here. Excited by this announcement, I visited the Lucent booth, where a bunch of folks who look like they are more familiar selling the 5ESS than thinking about applications development, sat around talking to eachother. I asked one of them if they could show me the ringback feature. One guy grabbed another, and yet another....you get the idea. No one could help.
VoIP needs innovation. The innovation needs to come from the development of unique features and business models. The industry needs to move beyond the stage of being proud of its ability to replicate existing features for less. The truth is that the features we have today aren't so great. We need to innovate. we need applications developers and creative entrepreneurs who can look at these capabilities and build the next EBAY, Amazon, Google or Overstock.
So my wish list for next year is to see the following:
The Dell (Apple) Pavilion: Selling a range of fixed and wireless communicators (voice and video) bringing a familiar brand and a powerful distribution channel to bear on the emerging market for IP communications gear
The VoIP Developers Pavillion: Providing a range of innovative VoIP enabled applications and services, from language translators on demand, to customized ringbacks to voice messaging applications to hyper local voice service development, to ........
Collaborative Applications Pavillion: Highlighting a range of collaboration applications, from Blogs to Notes to Istanbul which integrate voice as a feature.
I could go on, but I think its best to leave it at that. We will know that VON's time has come, when the show and the floor are dominated by applications developers, not equipment vendors. Bring on the applications developers!
As always, feel free to write back!
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