I admire and greatly appreciate the bloggers who post during conferences and various live events. Don’t look here for that, at least not yet. I was on the road earlier this month to Globalcomm2006 where I had an opportunity to speak and then to the Ebay Developers Conference. If I failed to report live at least I can offer my observations.
It is always nice to visit Chicago, which was my first home but now feels like my second home. I had not attended the predecessor Supercomm, so I won’t attempt to make an unfounded comparison. The event had more dimensions than the SciFi channel and it was a challenge to figure out which co-located events were what. McCormick Place offers plenty of opportunities to walk a mile in your own shoes, wishing for someone else to do it for you.
The somewhat sparseness of the show floor traffic was exaggerated by the widest aisles I have ever seen at a tradeshow. CES would need twice the floor space of such aisles were attempted there. No chance of that happening. Because this is more a maintstream Telco show I could zero in on the few points of interest for myself and TeleVoce. It would be difficult to have a show with as many exhibitors that I could not find some business opportunity. I am a tradeshow geek.
The most interesting booth visit for me was the Ditech booth, now Ditech Networks, I presume to deflect calls for mortgages. They had some very impressive demo’s of what their network equipment can do to clean up IP voice. Recovering 30% packet loss was very impressive. The only trick is that it is for G.711 only. The surprising conclusion that I am imagining is that I think I would rather have a network with this capability than a high bandwidth vocoder, such as on Skype, on the Internet. A good Skype call is unmatched right now, but you cannot count on the performance, so that got me thinking. What if there was an option for connecting over IP that was routed to deliver the advantages that I observed on the demo. The bad news, I think, is that there is no such option, but it did make me think about the variables that enter into a network voice conversation.
My mission at Golbalcomm2006 was to speak not to visit the many booths. I was on a panel discussion of innovations. We were scheduled right after lunch so my fellow panelists and I were not too sure what to expect. We were very impressed with the full SRO turnout and especially the attentiveness of a crowd after lunch. The track on innovations was well attended overall so it is clear that the telecommunications industry is paying a great deal of attention to new technologies. Thanks to Lynda Starr of Frost and Sullivan for inviting me to the panel. I have been amazed in the past at how much speakers are willing to share, so now I surprised myself by sharing a great deal. Your job, if you care, is to figure out what I told you.
On to Las Vegas for ebay Developers Conference and ebay Live. I was in attendance for the Skype Developer track. Skype is making great advances in reaching out to developers. This is always a game that evolves in time. I think developers, in general, are more comfortable with Skype and the roadmap they are following. The only conclusion that could be made is that Skype is working diligently to create a developer ecosystem which should be enough warning to anyone wondering what is happening with Skype. I am interested in other clients as well but they have done a great job of shaking up this entire marketplace.