I got into San Jose last night to attend the VON show here. It was rainy this morning, but is supposed to be clearer later. I'm staying at the Sainte Claire, which is a really cute old style hotel, just across from the Convention Center. It has in-room WiFi and other amenities like sitting rooms with brown leather furniture; pretty cool.
After breakfast on the go at the little Italian eatery here, got my badge and went to the keynote by Jeff Pulver, venture capitalist Vinod Khosia and the master of telecom disruption, Niklas Zennstrom from Skype. All of them seemed to be in agreement that IP Communications is in the process of changing yet again, as the widespread penetration of broadband is now making the addition of features like video as a media type possible and many companies are going out and seeking to innovate in both VoIP and related spaces. Zennstrom showed the broad penetration of new apps for Skype, which has shown remarkable dexterity in the last year or so as a platform for innovation. While the IMS community is talking about new services, the Skype community is making it happen, today. There was also the interesting note that Skype can now be used to send money; this is one of the fruits of the EBay ownership, since Skype has been integrated with Paypal to produce this service, which should be a popular one between countries.
Later in the show (Thursday the 22nd at 1:00), I'm on an pretty hot panel where we'll be looking at IMS vs. Peer to Peer for VoIP. The participants include Jonathan Christensen from Skype, along with Moderator Stephane Teral of Infonetics, Ken Osowski from Pactolus and Frank Salm from Sylantro. Hope to see you there.