Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Sylantro Summit - Day 2

This summit continues to go well. Yesterday's breakout sessions were all interesting, and we got good feedback on the hosted IP session I moderated, which was nice.

Here are the highlights. Again, photos courtesy of my Nokia N90 phone.

This morning's keynotes have been very good as well. The sessions began with Geoffrey Moore, who's well known for his book "Crossing the Chasm", and has a new one, "Dealing with Darwin".

Geoffrey did a great job applying his principals about innovation to IP communications, and cited Sylantro as a textbook example of being an innovator. He talked about 4 types of innovation and gave relevant examples of each - Disruptive innovator - Skype, Application innovator - Sling Media, Product innovator - Sylantro, and Platform innovator - Qualcomm, with CDMA. Very interesting stuff, and gave the audience a lot to think about the value of innovating, and what happens when you stop doing that.

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Continuing on the innovation theme, Sylantro CEO Pete Bonee (far left) moderated a session on this, including Geoffrey Moore. He did a better job moderating than telling jokes - but you'd have to be here to know what I mean.... :-)

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Another strong preso came from David Axam of British Telecom. He talked about their 21CN initiative, and the role VoIP plays there. His message was very Voice 2.0, and to me, is certainly in line with the direction AIM Phoneline is going, which is great to see. His message is also on the same wavelength that Geoffrey Moore is talking about, and shows that big telcos can be just as committed to innovation as startups.

I agree with Geoffrey on this one - the Darwinian notion of innovate or die - applies to companies of all size, and he rightly cited big name examples like IBM who have done so, as well as those like Polaroid who did not. It looks to me like BT is in the former camp.

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Finally, if there's an author in the house, it only makes sense to have a book signing! I got my copy, and once I finish the book I brought with me - High Fidelity (it's great) - I'll get started on this one.


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