I’m at VON the next 2 days in Boston.
VON’s the industry’s #1 get-together, with over 9000 attendees. It’s a “must-go” event in at least one of its global incarnations. Yet, as I rather sarcastically said last year, there’s somebody not here — the end user. Whilst the promise is
“…we won’t just emphasize IP voice and video as a technology, we will evaluate their impact on the end user…”
the reality is that the word “user” doesn’t actually appear in the rest of the schedule. Some of this is a natural by-product of a vendor-centric (and vendor-funded) event, and changing means of production of networks (FMC, IMS, etc.). Still, if there’s one thing that I’d say there was the least certainty about, it’s how the user experience of telephony should change.
For example, every year there are sessions on ENUM, which is a useful (but under-used) technology for creating directories of user identifiers and locators. It’s interesting, but inwards-looking. A user-centric session would instead consider what the business card and contact manager of the future would look like.
This inwards-looking view is what incited a few of us to start up the Voice 2.0 conference, which isn’t in competition for big vendor bucks, and isn’t a deal-making forum. It’s a rare chance to debate the user with other industry thought leaders, and if you can afford an airline ticket to Ottawa it’s going to be worth your time.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:23 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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