Media Roundup - November

It's been unusually hectic the past two weeks, but I did want to post about this for the record. November was a bit quiet media-wise, and a few items didn't run until this month, so my December roundup will be quite a bit stronger.

First, a couple of media citings in the business press:

- ZD Net Team Think - Cisco Announces Hosted Email Service, by David Greenfield

- Vancouver Magazine - Wireless Wars

In terms of my own writing and articles, I had a guest blog post on Microsoft, a feature insight about Aastra on UC Strategies, and a series of Ask The Expert writeups on TechTarget (registration required, but it just takes a minute):

- Microsoft Communications Sector behind3screens portal - BroadSoft Connections 2009 Recap

- UC Strategies - UC Expert Views - Aastra: More Than Meets the Eye

- TechTarget Ask the UC Expert - What are the operational costs associated with VoIP after implementation?

- TechTarget Ask the UC Expert - What are the soft savings of VoIP?

- TechTarget Ask the UC Expert - What type of company structure will maximize VoIP ROI?

Finally, I was on BNN TV again, talking about the state of wireless telephony in Canada:

- Telus Trumps Rogers in Ad Spat (link is temporary - if you can't access it, I have a file copy here)

Switching hats, I was my regular busy self contributing to the Smart Grid portal, which is closely tied to my main activity right now around getting the Smart Grid Summit program finalized. For all the latest on that front, you'll need to spend some time on the portal. And if you like what you see, I hope you're making plans to join us in Miami Beach about six weeks from now!

Quiet, but busy

Just a quick note to say I haven't been blogging this week as I need to be very focused on the Smart Grid Summit right now. It's been an intense few days, but we're seeing the results, and we'll have some nice announcements coming soon. As things settle down there, I'll get back to regular posting, hopefully by tomorrow.

Smart Grid Summit, Miami - Call for Papers

Seems like our inaugural Smart Grid Summit was just yesterday, but we're already in planning mode for the sequel, which takes place in Miami, January 20-22, 2010.

I've been remiss about getting the word out for speakers here, so I'm telling you right now that we do have a Call for Papers out there, and you're welcome to submit ideas for presentations or topics. For basic guidance, here's a range of topics we're thinking about:

- Industry Standards and Interoperability
- Emerging Smart Home Applications
- Demand Response
- Home Energy Management
- Utility Success Stories
- Grid Security, Privacy and Resilience
- Regulatory Issues
- Wireless Broadband Opportunities in the Smart Home
- Wireless/WiMAX Opportunities for Utilities
- Smart Grid Startup Showcase
- VC/Investor Perspectives
- Emerging Business Models for Utilities
- Monetizing the Grid
- VC/Investor Perspectives
- Emerging Business Models for Utilities
- The Green Grid
- The Clean Grid
- Best Practices – Global Perspectives
- What Utilities Can Learn from Telcos
- What Utilities Can Learn from Software Providers
- Broadband Stimulus Strategies
- Smart Grid Crystal Ball Outlook
- Smart Grid Startup Showcase
- A Smart Grid for Distributed Generation
- Electric Cars and the Grid
- Energy Storage and the Grid
- Social Networking and Energy Awareness

We won't be able to do all of these, but at least you'll get an idea of what we have in mind. You can access the basic submission form and more details here and by all means, drop me a line if you have any questions.

Smart Grid Reprise/300,000+ Visitors and Counting

I have two quick updates to pass on about our Smart Grid venture, and then I'll move on to other things.

First, for those who missed the Summit and want to hear more, my recap article was just posted to the portal today. Comments/suggestions are welcome!

Second, today TMC posted a piece to the portal summarizing our traffic for August. We had over 319,000 page views and just under 82,000 unique visitors. That's over 100 unique visitors every hour for every day of the month. I'm not an expert on SEO marketing, but that's pretty good traffic for our first month of operation. Now that the Summit has passed, we'll be further ramping up our content and expanding our reach using both conventional and viral channels. If we play our cards right, those numbers should continue to grow, and we'll have a real, live portal on our hands. For those of you who want to take advantage of this traffic, we'd love to have you on board as a sponsor, and our partners at TMC are ready to take your calls!

IT Expo/Smart Grid Takeaways

Between the IT Expo and our Smart Grid Summit; along with jet lag, email catchup, Labor Day and back-to-school, blogging has been limited lately. I don't blog from my BlackBerry, but I'm back at my desk now, and trying to get back in gear.

I'd venture to say that anyone who attended TMC's events last week came home happy, myself included. I'm not going to rehash the daily blog/TMC recaps, but will quickly summarize a few takeaways and highlights that stood out for me.

First was our Smart Grid Summit. By all accounts, we feel this was a successful launch - the room was full, it stayed full throughout the day, the panels were lively, the speakers were great, the audience was engaged, and I think the sponsors were pleased. I posted about it briefly last week, and we're already in planning mode for an expanded Summit at the Miami Expo in January.

For some objective analysis, here's a nice wrapup piece by noted IT/tech writer, David Greenfield, which ran on the Ziff Davis Smarter Technologies portal. And if you follow David on Twitter, you'll know he was tweeting throughout the whole day. Thanks Dave! And of course, a big thank you to all the people at TMC who worked hard to make the event happen, and to have faith to partner with us with such a short timeline.

I'll be posting more Summit highlights as they come, including the video interviews both Shidan and myself did with various speakers. Here are some photos of the sessions - Demand Response, and Security...




Tuesday was all Smart Grid, but for the rest of the Expo, I was wearing my JAA analyst hat. I moderated two sessions - one on SMB IP telephony, and one about bringing voice and Web 2.0 together. Both panels were well attended, and the speakers were very good. One of the speakers (seated, far right in first photo) just sent me a video clip that an audience member (Suzanne Bowen - thanks!) made of his presentation - Kevin Corson of HBN Inc. Hah! You never know when/where things like this will turn up - here's the YouTube link.





One quick shout-out to add for another speaker - Bill Bumbernick of Alteva (speaking in first photo). Here's something cool. I've been a fan of Alteva for a while, and they're part of a competition called Shine A Light, co-sponsored by American Express and NBC. The idea is to spotlight promising businesses, and the top 3 submissions share in some nice cash prizes and marketing support. It's a pretty neat idea, and nominations are open until September 13. If you want to support our space, I'd urge you to check Alteva out for yourself, and if you like what you see, you can endorse them here.

Quickly, a few other highlights and items of note from last week...

- Terry Matthews gave a great keynote on entrepreneurship - pretty inspiring, not just for attendees, but TMC and conferences in general. Hopefully we're on the right track here with Smart Grid.

- the show floor was solidly busy from what I saw - it's always tough to balance time between the exhibitors and speakers, but it worked out pretty well on both ends

- Carl and Scott's 4GWE event looked quite good from what I saw. They were running sessions in 2 rooms, including the M2M tracks, which had some nice overlap with our content. I liked the fact that they were videotaping the sessions - we'll consider that for the next summit.

- Some familiar companies came away with Best of Show recognition, namely Voxox (Telecentris), TelcoBridges, Airespring, Interactive Intelligence, Ooma, Intelepeer, 8x8, AudioCodes, BrightCom and ShoreTel. Overall, many of these companies point to continued vitality in voice applications, along with the growing trend toward collaboration. On the voice front, media/VoIP gateways are becoming more intelligent to support today's applications, as demonstrated last week by TelcoBridges, AudioCodes and Dialogic. In terms of collaboration,some of this is about UC, but some is just using one or two tools to be more productive working with others. I'll be writing more about these themes soon, as I'm working with some up and coming companies doing interesting things here.

- Finally, many of these thoughts were shared by Andy Abramson, and I'll steer you to his podcast wrapup of the Expo here. It's a nice change from regular blog posts, and Andy probably saw much more of the Expo than me. No mention of Andy and the Expo would be complete without a big thank-you for hosting yet another great industry dinner last week. This was the biggest gathering I've seen yet - almost 40 people - and it was especially nice to have Terry Matthews join us. If you enjoyed seeing his keynote, he was even better in tight company, and he has a great sense of humor. Great job, Andy and Comunicano crew!

Smart Grid Summit - Quick Highlights

Just been completely go-go-go here between our Smart Grid Summit yesterday and the IT Expo. Will have more thoughtful comments later - lots to share, but no time here to string my ideas together. Overall, though, we're very happy with how the Summit went - the room was full, the panels were great, and nobody wanted to leave. I think we've passed the first test to build this into a full-scale event at the January show.

For now, I'll just pass on some pictures and a link to some coverage of the Summit by TMC staffers. David Greenfield did extensive coverage throughout the day, and we did some video interviews, and I'll share these once they're posted.


Well, we're in the show business now...



Shidan Gouran, my partner in this new venture, DBA Intelligent Communications Partners



Welcome comments from Rich Tehrani, Shidan and myself




Summit keynote from Kevin Suitor of Redline Communications



Afternoon keynotes - Sir Terry Matthews of Wesley Clover and Don Brown, of Interactive Intelligence

Away to LA Today - IT Expo and Smart Grid Summit

Am flying out this morning to Los Angeles for I expect will be a great week between the IT Expo and the launch of our Smart Grid Summit on Tuesday. As noted earlier, this is the 10th anniversary of TMC's flagship event, and with all the challenges faced by telecom conferences in the past year, the Expo continues to stay fresh and explore new opportunities.

Last year they added a wireless event - 4GWE - which is becoming a conference of its own, and this year they've added a sister event - Machine-2-Machine and ours, the Smart Grid Summit. All of these represent new markets for TMC, and aside from what I'm doing with the Summit, you have to give kudos to Rich Tehrani and his team for evolving the Expo experience and staying on top of the leading trends.

I've done plenty of shout-outs and posts to promote the Smart Grid Summit, and at this point, you'll have to find them on your own - or just go to the Smart Grid portal.

Otherwise, I'd like to steer you to a post from Friday by Andy Abramson, who echoes my comments here, but in more detail and more objectively. If you're still sitting on the fence about coming to LA, I hope Andy's thoughts will get you off it and on your way. You might be thinking I'm attending so I can see Manny and the Dodgers - although it certainly crossed my mind - but the Expo will keep me pretty engaged all week, and I'll have plenty of distractions going on where I'll be. Come on out and see for yourself.

IT Expo/Smart Grid Updates

Been running hard since our vacation to get the Smart Grid Summit program together. I've been so busy with that, it's easy to forget about the bigger picture. TMC's IT Expo is a little more than a week away, and it's their 10th anniversary, which is a pretty nice milestone in the show business. They've recently announced that Sir Terry Matthews is keynoting, and it sure will be busy.

I'll be moderating two panels - one on SMB IP telephony, and one on voice/Web 2.0 - and you can read more about these here.

I'm also part of TMC's Editor Day, and will be doing my share of briefings in their part of the press room.

On the Smart Grid Summit front, there's lots going on. First, our Smart Grid portal has added some new content, including Q&A's I did with the SIP Forum and Redline Communications. We've got many more of these in the works, and over time, we'll be adding podcasts and video interviews in addition to written contributions.

For the summit itself, we've made some recent tweaks to the agenda, and a full update will be published probably tomorrow. I can't share the details quite yet, but our panels are well represented, and we know the sessions will be good. We are lining up a couple of keynote speakers, and these will be announced ASAP. I should add that we have Redline Communications on as a sponsor now, and we have active interest from a few other majors in the works.

The website is open for registrations, and we're attracting media interest as well as inquiries from the social networking communities. All told, we've come a long way in very little time, and we can see already that a great foundation is in place to make this a full scale event in January for the next IT Expo.

I'll keep you posted here, but don't forget to check out the summit itself, and hope to see you there.

Smart Grid Summit Press Release Issued

Am working at warp speed this week on the Smart Grid Summit trying to get our roster set, add new content to the portal, and strategize our marketing plans with TMC. Lots going on, and things are coming together nicely.

I just have time to pass on the latest news, which comes in the form of yesterday's press release, which you can read here.

I'd also like to steer you to the latest content, a piece written by my partner, Shidan Gouran, which was just published today. Next up is a Q&A I did with the SIP Forum - look for that by Friday.

Remember When Rock Was Fun?

It's been a very intense week getting the Smart Grid Summit planned and launched. Anyone who thinks conferences are easy to do haven't done this before! It definitely gets easier over time, but we're after a new market and new audience, so most of what we're doing is laying the foundation for something we think has a long road ahead.

It's Friday, and to look on the lighter side, I wanted to de-stress a bit with a post about the Chickenfoot concert the other night. For those who follow these things, Chickenfoot is a very fun, happening hard rock mashup, with 4 veterans playing some great rock music - Joe Satriani, Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Chad Smith. I'm not a huge fan of their legacy bands, but I'm a guitar guy, so Satch is pretty special. More importantly, my younger son is a budding guitar shred-meister, and seeing players like this in person is a real treat. Chickenfoot is just finding their touring legs, and their Toronto show here on Wednesday was fantastic.

All I can say is if you love a good rock show, go see these guys. There's a reason why 80's rock went away, and there's only a little of that in their show - and hopefully they'll winnow that out as their tour progresses. Otherwise, these guys really rock, and just plain have FUN. I don't know about you, but I don't have enough fun any more, and it really takes you back to when all the rock shows were this good and this much fun. Sure makes you miss being a teenager, but I can take turning back the clock for a few hours for something like this.

I'm back to work now, but here's a bit of what we were seeing the other night.

Smart Grid Summit Updates

This has been the busiest week I've had in a long time. The Smart Grid Summit is taking shape on a few fronts, and we're starting to get the word out through both conventional and viral channels.

The event website has launched, so we're open for business. The details there are pretty sparse, but that will change in the next few days as we firm up the sessions and our speakers. We have a number of confirmed speakers, and several more pending - we'll be sharing the latest on that early next week.

What I can tell you for sure is that the summit takes place Tuesday, September 1 as part of TMC's IT Expo, and we have 5 sessions planned. There's an outline of the sessions on the home page of the site. We're not adding any new topics, but will consider sponsorship or speaking inquiries for the scheduled sessions if they're appropriate. Just get in touch with me and we'll see if there's a fit.

Our Smart Grid portal is also coming along nicely, with new content being posted daily. As our conference planning activities even off, you'll see more in-depth content that I'll be driving, along with my ICP partner, Shidan Gouran.

Smart Grid Venture Updates

All new ventures take up tons of time at the beginning, and our new venture is no exception. I posted the basic details about our venture - Intelligent Communications Partners - and ICP's venture with TMC for the Smart Grid Summit on Monday. Since then I have a few updates to pass along...

- the Smart Grid portal is starting to generate quite a bit of traffic, so we know it's getting noticed. Shidan and I will be driving regular content there very soon, and we posted a welcome message to the portal yesterday.

- we've been quite busy contacting prospective speakers for the panels for the Smart Grid Summit. Events usually have more lead time, but the opportunity to launch the conference is now, so we're running on pretty compressed schedule. We're planning to be far enough with the program to have the event website running by Friday, at which point people can register and read more about the program.

- we've had very encouraging feedback so far about the Summit, and believe we're on to something good here. To share the news, Rich Tehrani had a nice post about the event and our venture on his blog yesterday.

I'll keep posting updates here as they come, but as you can probably deduce, for those of you interested in Smart Grid, I'm hoping you'll migrate over to our portal and subscribe to the eNewsletter. Of course, I want you to keep following me here, but for specific Smart Grid content, the portal will be the place to be for everyday news and insights.

Finally, since I have you here, any suggestions for the Smart Grid Summit are welcome.