A conversation between Pulvermedia's Carl Ford and Craig Gosselin from NewStep Networks about some of the FMC solutions NewStep offers, including of course dual-mode call continuity, but also strong single-mode convergence, and extending the features of the PBX in meaningful ways.

Craig Gosselin, Chief Marketing Officer, NewStep Networks
Craig is responsible for business strategy, offer management, marketing, and communications at NewStep Networks. A leader with 20 years of experience, Craig has successfully led business units, marketing, and sales organizations in corporate, venture capital, and private equity environments. He has worked with leading brands in technology, financial services, and consumer products while also having managed large global operations teams.

Prior to joining NewStep, Craig served as Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Velocita Wireless. Velocita was a Cerberus Capital portfolio company and a leader in wireless data networking with nearly $150M in revenue. The company exceeded EBITDA objectives and was successfully sold to Sprint Nextel in 2006, representing a significant increase in value.

Prior to joining Velocita, Craig served as Vice President of Sales and Channel Marketing at Virgin Mobile USA. He joined the startup company prior to market launch and led the development of the distribution network and Virgin Mobile presence at over 30,000 locations, resulting in 2 million new customers.

Previous to Virgin Mobile, Craig held the position of Senior Vice President at American Express. In this capacity, Craig was a member of the senior management team and guided a 1000 person sales and service organization that also had responsibility for internet service strategy, new account development, and product development.

From 1998 to 2000, Craig was a Managing Director with Deutsche Bank, where he was responsible for creating, building, and leading the worldwide Client Service Organization supporting the Securities Services business. In this role, Craig's organization supported the custody and security transaction needs of asset managers throughout the world. From 1986 to 1998, Craig held multiple leadership roles within AT&T, directing large sales, product management, marketing, and service organizations. In his last assignment at AT&T, Craig led the international consumer long distance business where he had profit and loss responsibility for a $3.5 Billion business unit.

Craig received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a M.B.A. degree from the University of Houston.

The first in a series of two brief conversations between Carl Ford and Todd Keefe, President of For Immediate Release. Todd is trying to help Carl to elucidate from a PR perspective exactly why some of the topics to be discussed at Fall VON are so exciting.

In this podcast: is VoIP over 3g a "Vonage for Wireless"?

Link to part 1 of this series.

The first in a series of two brief conversations between Carl Ford and Todd Keefe, President of For Immediate Release. Todd is trying to help Carl to elucidate from a PR perspective exactly why some of the topics to be discussed at Fall VON are so exciting.

In this podcast: should the conversation be framed ad HMP's vs. DSP's, or simply Why Voice Is Becoming Free?

Link to part 2 of this series.

In a brief conversation with Carl Ford, Mahesh Lalwani, CEO and Founder of Ccube, explains how his service works, and gives some real world examples (from craigslist to a local deli) of how people are using Ccube to connect to each other.

Mahesh Lalwani, Founder & CEO Ccube, is the former founder and CEO of a successful 28-people technology consulting company. Over nine years leading Pacview Mahesh bootstrapped startup activities while handling business development, new customer acquisition, contract negotiation, and built and managed teams.

A successful, results-driven professional with 14 years of experience in Information Technology, Networking, Databases, and Telecommunications in Silicon Valley. He has authored several white papers, and filed for a Patent in Speech, Internet, Database, and Telecommunications processes. Mahesh has his Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from India.

FONAV was founded in January 2006 by Ram Fish and Dilip Kenchammana and was acquired by Trolltech in June 2007.

Since its inception, FONAV has focused its efforts on providing the best unified communications experience for Wi-Fi/WiMAX connected devices. Built with Qtopia, FONAV applications offer consumers a unified live inbox – bringing together voice communication with visual voice messaging, email, instant messaging, and text messaging in a presence-enabled mobile environment. Consumers are able to seamlessly move through each of these modes. The solution moves VoIP beyond just inexpensive voice to inexpensive smart and rich communications.

Trolltech has seen tremendous success in the VoIP market with more than 40 VoIP/WiFi devices in the market today. FONAV’s offerings deepen Trolltech’s product expertise in this arena and widens the product capabilities of emerging consumer connected devices space. For device manufacturers, the combination of FONAV technology with Trolltech’s Qtopia ensures quick time to market and cost efficiencies for creating innovative connected devices and services.

Ram Fish was recently appointed the General Manager of VoIP Products for Trolltech after Trolltech acquired his company, FONAV. Ram led FONAV as its CEO and founder.

His previous roles include Vice President, Software Product Marketing at IXI Mobile (creator of AT&T OGO) and Chief Product Strategist for the Client Group at Openwave Systems. He started his career as a product marketing manager at PCSI, where he worked on the world's first mobile phone with Internet access.

He received his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and his MBA from Yale University.

His blog is at pelp.wordpress.com.

As is the usual in Carl Ford's podcasts, this conversation with Per Björklund from Efftel covers a lot of ground, from Sweden's place in the high-tech world, to mainstream acceptance/adoption/understanding of VoIP services, to the ever-decreasing price of phone calls and the resulting focus on flexibility and features rather than simple dialtone for Efftel.

Per Björklund founded Efftel in 2004 together with Håkan Lund. Efftel (www.efftel.com/english.htm) is a rapidly growing service provider and operator delivering complete and extremely flexible VoIP solutions to small and medium enterprises in Northern Europe. Prior to founding Efftel, Per had over 13 years senior telecoms and venture capital experience from e.g., Telia and Telenor. Already in 1997 he initiated and managed Telia Light AB, Telia’s pioneering VoIP spear head company publicly launched at VoN 1998 in San José. He then as the VP Products had the P/L responsibility for Telia/Telenor’s 4 Bn EUR consumer services portfolio. After 9 years at Telia, he was a Director and co-owner of the Nordic VC Startupfactory for three years and then spent a year on the build-up of Sweden’s fastest growing and 4th largest mobile operator Telenor/djuice as the Product Portfolio Director.

Per holds an MSEE from the Royal Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics. He has contributed as a speaker to several VoN conferences from 1998 and onwards. In his spare time, Per chairs the VoIP Section of the 27.000 member Swedish Computer Society, that was proud having Jeff Pulver as their guest speaker a month ago.

Catch up with Per and others from the Efftel team at Von Europe Spring.

Thomson’s NIS is leader in offering softswitch solutions (Cirpack) and IPTV service platforms (Smartvision) enabling telecom operators to deploy broadband telephony, IPCentrex, 4Play and Fixed-Mobile Convergence with a migration path to IMS/TISPAN architecture. Thomson’s Smartvision services platforms enable operators to offer interactive video services over fixed and mobile networks.

Both are closely integrated with Thomson’s STB, phones, modems and gateways. Thomson owns over 100 telco, broadcaster and internet service provider customers in 35 countries.

Thomson will be exhibiting in booth #201 at VON Europe Spring 2007.

Fabien Maisl is Director of Marketing and Partnerships for Thomson’s Network Intelligence Solutions, the company’s business unit developing VoIP softswitches, IPTV middleware and IMS core-network platforms. Fabien brings over 15 years of international experience in positioning and launching innovative products in the telecom market.

In prior position, he was Product Marketing Manager with CS Telecom, Director of Marketing with Netopia Europe and Product Marketing Manager with Apple Europe. Fabien holds a master degree in networks engineering from the French National Institute of Telecommunications.

Carl Ford spoke to Tomer Treves from deltathree about the new joip service, and the new phone from Panasonic that will bring joip into homes around the world.

For more on joip and deltathree, visit them at booth #212 at VON Europe Spring in Stockholm next month.

Tomer Treves, Consumer Group Managing Director, deltathree, Inc.
Tomer Treves joined deltathree (NASDAQ: DDDC) in 2004 and currently serves as Consumer Group Managing Director. Mr. Treves leads the team that handles business development, sales and marketing for deltathree’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) products and services directed for consumers and businesses. Mr. Treves is in charge of iConnectHere, a state of the art Global Internet Phone Service, and joip, the newly formed consumer group that powers Panasonic's GLOBARANGE hybrid phone. Mr. Treves’s business development expertise combined with his experience in legal counseling, specializing in international transactions, he has helped propel deltathree to a top tier global VoIP corporation.

Mr. Treves’s knowledge and experience in various hi-tech industries has enabled him to present at conferences around the world on issues such as migrating to VoIP, the future of telecommunications, consumer VoIP marketing, launching VoIP solutions and other facets of telephony. His distinctive dedication and success in advancing company growth spans his extensive career. Prior to deltathree, Mr. Treves played pivotal roles in providing legal consultation and business development for several leading law offices in Israel.

Mr. Treves graduated with honors from Tel Aviv University Buchman Faculty of Law with a Masters of Law, LL.M. He also holds a Bachelor of Law (with honors), LL.B from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Mahadev Kolluru is the Director of Application Engineering and Customer Marketing at VeriSilicon, whose booth was right next to our podcasting booth on the floor at VON, and who were wonderful neighbors. Carl Ford and Mahadev speak in this podcast about VeriSilicon's "ZSP" DSP product line, and about the future of IP from the perspective of a silicon solutions company.

Kevin Nethercott, President and COO of LignUp talks to Carl Ford about CodeLign, LignUp's new developer environment and community using Amazon's EC2 platform. Kevin predicts that in as little as 5-10 minutes, users can be creating applications and terminating phone calls.

What's interesting, according to Kevin, is the coming of age of the Voice Mashup, thanks to the huge number of people that are developing and playing around in this space.

Simon McIver, Director of Marketing Acquisition at Covad and Andy Abramson of the well-read blog VoIP Watch stopped in the podcast booth to talk to Carl Ford about the art of marketing and education in this space, be it for VoIP or for broadband.

Simon also speaks to where Covad is heading in the future, with regard to applications, and Andy touches on the current "wow"s out there.

Another one of the folks we caught up with at VON was Adam P. Stein, VP of Marketing at Mu Security. In this podcast he and Carl Ford talk about Mu Security's solution, which Adam describes as a "hacker in a box."

Mu Security helps Triple-play product developers and their service provider customers measure security, product resiliency or service availability methodically to ensure maximum network uptime. Using the Mu-4000 analyzer proactively increases both the service availability and security quality of any IP-based product.

This is the second podcast from VON with Bill Miller from Digium. In this part of the interview, Carl and Bill talk about the evolving Asterisk Pavilion at VON and the recently announced Digium/Asterisk World to be colocated with Fall VON 2007. Very exciting things are afoot!

Part 1 of the interview is here.

Digium.com
Askerisk.org
AsteriskNOW.org

Bill Miller, VP of Product Management & Marketing at Digium found a few minutes in his busy show schedule to chat with Carl Ford in the Pulvermedia Podcasting Network booth. In this first of two podcasts, Bill talks about where Digium is heading in light of their recent management changes, and reflects on the growth of Asterisk and the numerous facets of the Digium ecosystem.

Part 2 of the interview is here.

Digium.com
Askerisk.org
AsteriskNOW.org

Christian Testman, COO of Paradial, begins this conversation with Carl Ford by describing the firewall and NAT traversal Paradial provides with a plumbing metaphor, which served pretty well to illustrate the concept, and had the added bonus, if you take the metaphor further, of stressing the importance of such a service. You wouldn't want to live in a house without plumbing.

Visit Paradial at VON in booth #542.

Geoffrey Corfield from Calgary's Calltoolbox Inc. stopped by the podcast booth today to fill us in about the wide swath of VoIP-related solutions they have to offer. From call centers to web provisioning systems, Calltoolbox seems to have something to offer to just about anyone.

You've got one last day to check out Calltoolbox at booth #1649 here at Spring VON 2007 in San Jose!

TechnoCo was founded by pioneers of the voice over Internet (VoIP) industry. Their previous company, Ozemail Interline, was the first in the world to provide Internet telephony (VoIP) to the public on a global basis. In fact, The Honourable Paul Keating (ex Prime Minister of Australia) released the OzEmail Interline VoIP services at a media event in Australia on the 16th January 1997.

Identifying a need and opportunity to empower small and medium developers who require specialised hardware platforms in order to bring their software products to market, Howard and Spielrein created "TechnoCo".

TechnoCo's first product is Vdex, a telephony platform that provides the necessary electronics to run the popular Asterisk PBX open-source software. Vdex is a highly sophisticated, hybrid telephony platform integrating multiple microprocessors and multiple digital signalling processors with numerous industry-standard voice codecs and telephone line interfaces.

Please visit technoCo on the web at technoco.biz, at VON at booth #751.

Check out part 1 and part 2.

Check out part 1 here.

Welcome to our first podcast from the floor of SPRING VON 2007! In this podcast, Mike McClenathan and Carl Ford talk about the opening Plenary Session, in which Jeff Pulver removed the "IP" from "IP Communications," and informed the members of the VON Community that they are now, themselves, the incumbents.

Welcome to VON!

This is a longer, less concise version of the conversation posted a little earlier today between Carl Ford and Keith Pigue from CGI. Please visit them at VON in booth #1637.

After an illness-induced week off, we're back this week with a vengeance here at Carl's Corner. Sit back and enjoy...and if you feel the need to skip around, below you'll find a guide (of sorts).

0:00 - Carl and Mikey on global warming, the fascinating Mexican marketplace (VON Mexico), a brief look at some stocks (Rich Erb will return soon to save us from ourselves here), SIP Trunking, possibilities for next phase of integration with Skype, and some mildly incoherent philosophizing about photographs.

15:02 - Carl's conference call about the recent IMS Forum Plugfest with Michael Khalilian and Manuel Vexler from the IMS Forum, and Lincoln Lavoie from the UNH Interoperability Lab.

Welcome back, ladies and gents. Please, everybody, take your seats. We have a lot to get through.

0:00 - Catharine Trebnik, analyst with FTN Midwest Securities. Catharine will be moderating a session on Purple Apps at VON.

10:57 - Carl and Mikey on EMC, Vonage and the rapidly expanding local calling plan,

18:35 - The Market with Rich Erb

24:00 - Gordon Cook, from gordoncook.net and The Cook Report.

We'd love your feedback on this show. Too long? Too short? Too wonderful? Comments are always welcome on this blog, and on Carl's blog.

The 2nd episode of the Carl's Corner podcast. Heaping helpings of rampant speculation, some measured irreverence, and a dash of useful information. You know, the norm. See the syllabus below:

0:00 - Is Google evil? (cont'd)
- Mobile social networking
- The future of advertising?
- Verizon selling off VT, NH, and ME
- iPhone?
15:29 - The Market with Rich Erb
21:18 - Alec Saunders (saunderslog.com, Iotum) on the iPhone and Talk-Now.

We'd love your feedback on this show. Too long? Too short? Too wonderful? Comments are always welcome on this blog, and on Carl's blog.

Carl Ford and Kfir Pravda spent some time together in our studios. Kfir is the VP of Marketing for the IMTC. His email is kpravda -at- gmail -dot- com. This is the latter half of a two part conversation.

Carl Ford and Kfir Pravda spent some time together in our studios. Kfir is the VP of Marketing for the IMTC. His email is kpravda -at- gmail -dot- com. This is part one of a two part conversation.

We're a group of mobile technology experts based in Sweden and Luxembourg. Rebtel is an innovative company focused on bringing you the future of mobile telephony. We’re here to help you make cheaper, better, and easier calls to the world – global calls at local rates. Our ethos is that we won’t promise what we can’t deliver, and that we’ll always deliver what we promise.

Carl Ford spoke with Hjalmar Winbladh, the Chief Executive Officer at Rebtel.

Hjalmar is a highly successful serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Rebtel because he wanted to use his wealth of mobile Internet expertise to start a revolution in international mobile calling.

Prior to co-founding Rebtel, Hjalmar was a strategy consultant and entrepreneur-in-residence at Investor AB, providing counsel for investments in the mobile/fixed convergence arena. Hjalmar’s stint at Investor was his way to ease back into the corporate life after three years spent with his family, including two years sailing across the Pacific and Indian oceans in 2003–2004.

What precipitated Hjalmar’s sabbatical was his seven years of co-founding Sendit AB, a company based on a vision to bring new, disruptive mobile Internet software platform technologies to the projected convergence market between mobility and the Internet. Hjalmar served as president and chief executive officer of Sendit, and successfully took it public before being aquired by Microsoft for $150 million USD. Following the Microsoft acquisition, Hjalmar remained for two years as general manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Business Unit. A highlight during his Microsoft tenure was playing a central role in creating telecom alliances for Microsoft with Ericsson and Vodafone.

www.rebtel.com

M5 is continually innovating to improve our outsourced phone system solution. M5’s core technology partners include Cisco, Verizon, Sun, AboveNet, Sprint, Qwest, Focal Communications and VocalData. M5 has been named to the Pulver 100 list for four consecutive years (2002-2005), VoIP Magazine’s 20 Companies to Watch in 2006, and FierceVoIP's Fierce 15 list in 2005 and has received Frost & Sullivan's 2004 Entrepreneurial Company Award and the 2004 & 2005 VoIP Service Provider Award and Best SMB Provider Award from INTERNET TELEPHONY Magazine. In addition, the strong demand for M5 services has enabled M5’s management team to run the business conservatively, regularly reinvesting profits and maintaining financial stability.

Carl Ford spoke with Daniel Hoffman, President & CEO of M5 Networks.

As President and CEO of M5, one of America's leading Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers for small and midsized businesses, Hoffman has redefined the business phone system market by replacing traditional phone systems and phone company arrangements with an outsourced VOIP solution that businesses truly trust.

Personable, approachable and a true visionary, Hoffman was named one of 18 nationwide winners of the 2006 Best Bosses Award by Winning Workplaces, a nationally known clearinghouse for best practices in workplace excellence and innovative people practices, and FORTUNE Small Business. This national honor recognizes the most dedicated, passionate, innovative, inspirational and driven leaders of small and midsize businesses nationwide for creating tightly knit workplaces and inspiring intensely loyal workers.

Dan will be at Von Enterprise:

Hosted Voice Solutions
Wednesday, December 6, 2006, 2:30pm - 3:30pm
There is a clear trend for many companies to outsource, especially technologies and infrastructure they believe can be more efficiently managed elsewhere.
• What is the best model to determine if outsourcing is the right approach?
• Which technologies lend themselves best to this approach?
• What are the ramifications if outsourcing fails?

www.m5net.com

Listen in to get a good idea of what Graffiti Wall is capable of, and for some light discourse on the future of collaborative media.

Keep your eye on the Pulver Video Vault for more!