July 23rd, 2007
Pulver: send me your IP ideas and you might get seeded
Internet telephony visionary and entrepreneur Jeff Pulver writes that last Friday, he attended and spoke at IPTComm 2007, an event organized by Henning Schulzrinne and Greg Bond.
He was invited to be part of a panel called: “Where are the VoIP Services?”
On his blog, Jeff strongly infers that he became a little bored by more of the same proposals for voicmail or cal forwarding apps.
“What I was looking for was something different. Something cool,” Jeff writes. Something that truly helped to redefine communications. But I didn’t hear about anything remotely interesting.”
It was then that Jeff spoke his mind to the panel:
So, I answered the question by suggesting to my fellow panelists and to the delegates in attendance that “they had no guts. “
That they failed in talking advantage of the IP based platform presented to them to deliver innovative services and instead chose to take the easy way out and simply use their platform to replicate the same services that TDM based systems gave us.
That they decided to build equipment for the telcos where the money was and in the process sacrificed empowering the communications revolution and our ability to deliver services never before possible without the advent of IP.
That’s not all. One thing I’ve gotten to know about Jeff Pulver (I used to work for one of his companies and have met him numerous times) is that when he gets worked up like as he described above, he does something about it. Jeff speaks his mind, and often his wallet will follow.
So in that same post, Jeff offers this challenge:
So here is a homework assignment for would be communication industry Entrepreneurs: Think about presence and voice and instant messaging, take a look at the APIs of twitter and Facebook and pitch me on the service that you want to create. Those who get my attention might end up with the early-early seed capital needed to turn their dream into a reality.
We can also have a preliminary discussion here. What IP-related presence, voice and instant messaging ideas would you like to see that aren’t available yet?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
