Pulver.com held its first ever edition of the VON show in Canada this past week. Having attended US editions of the show that counted with heavyweights such as Henry Sinnreich (the father of SIP), Robert Pepper (Chief of Policy Development of the FCC), Eugene Roman (Group President for Bell Canada), Christopher Fine (VP, Global Investment Research Division for Goldman Sachs), and others, I would have to admit that the first VON Canada was a bit thin on high impact speakers.
However, to be fair to Jeff Pulver, Carl Ford, and the rest of the crew, it was still an amazing feat to accomplish what they did in such a short period of time (I counted less than 7 calendar weeks since the end of Spring VON, held in San Jose, which was a major success). Moreover, they also needed to overcome the wait-and-see cautious approach predominant within the Canadian telecom industry. The reason for that is the pending outcome of the CRTC ruling on VoIP, which has been discussed at length here and in other forums, such as Jeff's own blog. I suspect this reluctance in making public statements regarding VoIP definitely overhung a bit this show.
In addition, some exhibitors had already committed themselves to the Spring VON and the VON Europe shows, and with the Canadian event sandwiched in between both, simply could not attend all three events. Despite all that, there were quite a few highlights, including, among others:
- Niklas Zennstrom's (Skype CEO) presentation
- Robert Barry's (Goldman Sachs) industry perspective
- Mike Kologinski's (Executive VP, Allstream) talk about a Canadian enterprise VoIP survey
- John Yoakum's (Nortel) futuristic perspective
- Girish Patak's (Chief Strategist / CTO Telus) keynote
- Rolling Out Consumer VoIP Services session (Tuesday)
- VoIP and the Enterprise session (Thursday)
I had the pleasure to moderate an interesting session on the Canadian VoIP VC (Venture Capital) outlook, which was sparsely attended (probably because it was in the last room down the corridor and it also happened concurrently with the consumer VoIP services session, which attracted the biggest crowd). On Thursday, I also had the opportunity to give a talk on blogs and Wikis. While that particular session did not draw a big audience, it was very interesting to hear the perspectives of gurus such as James Thompson (from voip-info.org), Ross Rader (from Tucows) and Carl Ford (from Pulver.com) on the future of blogging and Wikis. More about these sessions will be discussed in a separate entry.
So, all in all, while it might have lacked a bit of flair in comparison to the highly successful Spring VON show in San Jose, the VON Canada event was overall worthwhile attending - it certainly puts Jeff Pulver on the map in Canada, and establishes a good beachhead for the next edition of the show set for 2005 in Montreal.