Well, this term may not be a wide spread acronym – yet – but given that the guy that came up with it also came up with several other well known industry terms it will probably catch up during 2009!

On Tuesday VoIP industry pioneer and promoter Jeff Pulver, founder of Pulver.com, the VON conferences and also founder of numerous VoIP related companies (including Vonage) is hosting SocComm in New York City.

Alon Cohen , Phone.com’s Executive VP and CTO who will also be speaking at SocComm, was (directly or indirectly) the reason Jeff entered the VoIP space about 13 years ago. Alon was Co-founder of the first Voice over IP company and of the first Internet Phone product. When Jeff saw it he fell in love and eventually helped create the industry knows as VoIP by promoting the technology all over the world for the past 12 years. Mainly through his VON conferences but also through hundreds of keynotes and interviews and lobbying with the FCC.
Small disclaimer: I had the pleasure to work with Jeff on managing the “Pulver Ventures” group that helped incubate new IP Communications ventures.

Now Pulver is looking ahead again, combining internet TV, social media and other means of communications. Perhaps not something that is as obscure as VoIP was back then but Social Communications (…SocComm) is certainly still in its “wild west” days. As technology, business models and acceptance evolve we will see more and more use for both business and pleasure of SocComm. One of Pulver’s other terms is MICE: Media / Internet / Communications / Entertainment and SocComm will have well known speakers that come from all four letters of MICE and will share from their experience as to how all four are being combined.

At Phone.com we do our share to “contribute” to SocComm (not only by being an event sponsor) but also with our products and services, especially from the C side of things. During the course of 2009 we plan to launch several new products that will combine more of the MICE letters. Our new Phone.com – Chatcalls will evolve into such an application and we will write more about it the months to come as we roll it out.

We look forward to SocComm conference this coming Tuesday in NYC.

Congratulations America!

With Barack Obama swearing in as the 44th President of the United States the White House website also went through an overhaul and has been updated 12:01 EST to reflect the new President, his strong technology agenda and the era we are in.

The Whitehouse now also has a blog with an RSS feed. Communications, Transparency and Participation are the three priorities the new whitehouse media activity will focus on. Read the first blog post to learn more.

As President Obama declared throughout his campaign we should expect a lot of focus in the coming months (or years) on development of technology, new communications tools such as broadband and better use of the internet.

So go Visit www.whitehouse.gov and share with your kids.

In a year end piece summarizing the VoIP industry in 2008 and looking forward towards 2009, analyst Jon Arnold published this article for TMCNET magazine.

In the article titled “VoIP in 2008 – Im not dead” Arnlod mentions 10 companies that made a difference in 2008 and Phone.com is among them.

Arnold says about Phone.com: “— there is no shortage of SMB IP telephony solutions, but this one really shows what’s possible with a Web-based service. They offer residential service as well, but more importantly, Phone.com makes ease-of-use a priority, and shows just how flexible do-it-yourself VoIP can be.”

Ease of use, flexibility, feature rich and 24*7 friendly customer service is what Phone.com is about!

Happy New Year to all!

The end of every year is always a time when lots of predictions for the new year appear in various publications. Today I wanted to comment on NetworkWorld and the Top 10 predictions for VoIP and convergence for 2009. I agree with the authors, Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick with most (if not all) of their thoughts as I have also stated in some of my predictions.

First, as I wrote in my previous blog, i do think that we need to NOT generalize and call it “Predictions for VoIP” as Voip is to general. Any replacements are welcome… the NetworkWorld report did add “and convergence” and whether it was intentional or not I think it is an important addition!

Second, i completely agree with their comment about “attention paid to every “single” user’s experience wherever possible“; though different for every business we can see from our experience at Phone.com how listening to our customers comments, suggestions and requests has helped us improve and grow our service. We all tend to think of the next big thing and sometimes forget about what is needed and can be offered today.

This leads to my third comment: some of the big opportunities for VoIP is in UC and mobile voip. Again i agree with the NetworkWorld prediction that working on ROI is key: “proving the ROI thresholds will be more important than ever, so suppliers need to be prepared with the best possible modeling tools that prove the case for UC“.

This is why I predict that just as it took time for VoIP home phone service market to grow (whether pure play or MSOs), it will also take another year or so for mobile voip and UC to really emerge with the general public. Despite the big opportunity in this segment we still dont (and wont in 2009) see general use of mobile phones with voip enabled services nor enterprise voip services / systems that seamlessly transfer between the office phone and the mobile phone.

So this leads to the final comment: 2010 will have more mass introduction of VoIP services and 2009 will be the year to get ready for it!

We may be going through some hard times but we believe the future (for our industry and for our entire economy) is bright!