Tello - What's the Story?

I know I'm late on this one, but people keep asking me about Tello. I had limited ability to blog while at TMC last week, and by now, the story has been well covered.

If you want an insightful synopsis about Tello, and where it fits in the scheme of things, Andy Abramson - as usual - has it pegged - http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2006/01/tello_explained.html

I'll just add my two cents here. Jeff Pulver has the best timing of anyone I know in this market, and I'll say this much - announcing the Tello launch during the week of TMC sure diverted a lot of attention away from the show (perhaps his main rival), at least when the news cames out. That was pretty evident to anyone who was there. The spirit of competition is a 24/7 thing, no doubt about it!

I'm also of the view that Tello is poised raise the ante as all the big players start making big moves to marry voice with the web. VoIP Inc. getting cozy with Google is an example of what's coming now, and I'm sure we'll see more moves like this soon.

Skype has been making its own share of announcements, and I suspect they might see more doors closing now than those that are opening. As the IM platforms add their own voice apps, Skype's appeal may falter, esp if they do not adopt a more open platform. Right now, this prevents them from "federating" with other, SIP-based platforms, and perhaps more importantly, it limits their ability to penetrate the enterprise market, which is where good money can be made. Tello is all about the enterprise, and my take is they have the right vision at the right time to make all these cool applications work seamlessly with each other.

ITExpo - TMC's VoIP 2.0 Conference Review

Last week was TMC's winter ITExpo, held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Another sign of the times, I guess - the show outgrew last year's Miami venue, and they moved a bit up I 95 to a bigger space. The venue was actually very nice, and was more comfortable than Miami.

The program was quite broad ranging - really too broad in my mind. It seems that as the demand for all things IP grows, shows like this take on a life of their own. So, the show tried to cover everything - enterprise IP, carrier IP, open source, WiFi, peering, SIP, IPTV, contact centers, IMS, E911, etc. The attendence seem quite strong, but I really couldn't gauge how well all of these tracks were supported.

I moderated two sessions - one was quite well attended, and one was pretty light. On the whole, I didn't see anything radical or very new, but to be fair, one person couldn't possibly cover all these tracks. In terms of star power, the two big names you don't normally see at these events were CNBC anchor Ron Insana and Tom Ridge, the Secretary of US Homeland Security. I missed both, but did catch an interesting session from General Motors, talking about the complexities of deploying on IP on a large scale. On the whole, it was a well-produced show - just too broad a pallette for me to take in. You just have to pick your spots, learn what you can, and make the most of your meetings - and enjoy the weather!

Here are some photos, courtesy of my Nokia N90 superphone....




Mr. T - Nadji Tehrani, TMC's founder - can you tell it was the first day of the conference?




Rich Tehrani, leading one of the general sessions





The "Cranberry" - coolest device at the show. It's actually a custom job for Howard Thaw - very neat - great attention-getter, and it's truly a one-of-a-kind. Gotta like that!




Colleague Tom Howe with Mr. Asterisk, Mark Spencer




Mark with me - thanks Tom




Andy "always on" (in more ways than one) Abramson




Eli Katz of XConnect chatting with Ari Moses of Kaufman Bros.




Howard Thaw w/Rich Tehrani - Howard's company, Iotum, was a TMC Product of the Year recipient at the show. Go Canada!




Ari Rabban - paying a friendly visit




David Simon - PBX.NET - doing booth duty for IPCC




Micaela Giuhat - Sipera Systems - so happy to be there!




James Brehm, from my alma mater analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan




With Ollie and Osvaldo of Miami-based Cyneric - an up and coming IP billing vendor

Major VoIP Cable Peering Deal - XConnect Wins Dutch Market

The endless stream of press releases is under way at the TMC ITExpo show, but I wanted to talk about one in particular. It's the announcement that XConnect has won the contract to handle peering for all the cable VoIP traffic in Holland. I posted about what's happening in the Dutch cable market last week, and now this development has become news.

It's a big deal in the sense that cablecos are seeing value in peering, and given the very high penetration rate of cable in Holland, this adds up to a lot of traffic in that market. As per my last post, I referenced a James Enck post stating that 6% of the Dutch voice market is now cable. That's an impressive number, and if XConnect can demonstrate the value and viability of VoIP peering among the Dutch cablecos, it will send a strong message to the PTTs and ILECs that there's strength in numbers among MSOs. And, by acting as one, they really lend legitimacy to VoIP, and more importantly the value of peering - not just to reduce costs, but to become more competitive. If that doesn't get the telcos more concerned, I'm not sure what else will.

Maple Blues Awards - Photos

I'm at the TMC ITExpo this week. It's quiet this morning, but things will get busy real soon. The weather is great down here - can't complain, that's for sure.

I've been meaning to post some photos of the MBA event last week. This is the major awards event for the Canadian blues scene, put on by the Toronto Blues Society. I took a bunch of photos my Nokia N90 phone. Very mixed quality, but here are some of the better shots. Took some video clips as well, and the sound is pretty good. I plan to post these on the bloggers site, developed specially for N90 users. Was planning to post these on Friday, but our high speed service went down that night, and my next chance was last night, but the PC I was using kept crashing on me! But now I've got the right horses, and here we are.




Rising star from Nova Scotia, Garrett Mason





Vancouver-based David Hurricane Hoerhl, blowing harp with the Maple Blues house band



Canada's telecom guru, Ian Angus, wearing his other hat as a TBS mainstay



The ever versatile and always excellent Colin Linden with the crack Maple Blues house band.

Maple Blues Awards Winners

Just a quick post about the winners on Monday night from the Maple Blues Awards, held here in Toronto. I promised to pass this on - you never know who might be a Canadian blues fan out there. The event was first rate, and if anyone was wondering if the blues were alive in Canada, this is all they would have to see to know what the real deal is.

I took many photos and some video on my Nokia N90. Being in a club, the lighting conditions were very uneven, but there were some photos worthy of posting. Also the sound quality on the video segments is pretty good for a phonecam! Just been too busy to get them posted - hopefully later in the week.

Canadian Thought Leaders Podcast - Skype From Someone Who Knows

This week's podcast for the PPN - Pulvermedia Podcasting Network - was with Andrew Hansen. He's a "serial entrepreneur" - where have I heard that before? - but one of his main focus areas right now is Jyve, one of the leading applications developed for Skype. Andrew is based in Collingwood, Ontario, a small resort town about 2 hours North of Toronto, and Jyve is a major client of his. He knows the Skype culture quite well, and Jyve won the global competition for Skype developers this summer - really!

Andrew was my guest on this week's Canadian IP Thought Leaders series, and we talked about the Skype culture, and how it's evolving in the eBay world. Pretty interesting, and I plan to revisit this later this year to see how things really are panning out there. Andrew was also at CES, and he shared his impressions of the show with me. To listen to the podcast, and learn more about Andrew and his blog, click here.

If you go to the site, you'll see there's a link at the bottom of the post to subscribe to my podcasts on iTunes. I think that's neat! I'd love to hear from anybody who'd doing this.

NOTE - no podcast from me next week. I'll be at the TMC show, and the PPN facility won't be available anyway. Pods will resume the following week, where my guest will be Henry Dortmans of Angus Dortmans Associates, one of Canada's leading telecom consultancies.

Andy's on a roll

There are bloggers, and there are bloggers. Andy Abramson's blog, VoIP Watch is must-read material, and I cite him regularly. He's definitely in the uber-blogger class, and Andy covers the tech landscape as broadly and deeply as anyone I follow.

If you follow his posts, you'll see several of his clients are experiencing success in a highly competitive market, no small thanks to Andy's guidance. It's not surprising to find him in demand everywhere, and he's not hard to find at all the major shows or in many of the leading media channels. And his broadcasts with KenRadio have been running for ages, so he's got the bases covered.

In this vein it was nice to see this news release yesterday about Andy being named as an Advisor to SightSpeed, a California-based company that enables free broadband-based video communications - video calls, video mail, and video answering, as well as voice calls. This sure looks like fun - it's not for me, but I think my kids would love it! Anyhow, it looks good on Andy, and it's nice for a change to draw attention to the good things people are doing to help IP other than what's on their blogs.