Dang... I could have been sharing the VON panel/conversation with Scoble, Arrington, Steve Rubel and more...
February 22, 2007
Sometimes the choices you have to make turn out to be a bit bittersweet. For the past several years, I've routinely attended the Spring VON show in San Jose, CA. It's a great show for someone in the CTO space to see what's happening on the bleeding edge of telephony/communication... especially with regard to the carrier/service-provider space. The thing I always like about VON is that there's always these companies off in the little 10x10 booths doing really wacky things. And there there's the big open source presence as well.
Well, since (VON founder) Jeff Pulver is an avid blogger, there's always been a blogger presence at the show and for the last couple of shows I've been a member of the "blogger panel" where a bunch of us, usually led by Andy or Alec, engage in a conversation about our views on where the industry is going. It's always been a good bit of fun - and we've often had a "VoIP blogger dinner" that's been equally fun.
This year looked to be no different. I was invited to be part of the blogger panel and had, in fact, accepted. Then, other events intervened. Mitel has a conference for our resellers in Cairo, Egypt, the same week and I need to attend for some presentations there as well as some side meetings. I'm very much looking forward to it because I love doing the type of presentations I'll be doing... and I've interacted with some of our staff and VARs there, but never met them. (A side benefit is admittedly that I should get to see the pyramids, something I've always wanted to do since I was a wee little kid reading National Geographic.)
But then I read Jeff's post this morning... linking over to Robert Scoble's post... turns out that Robert and Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) will be doing a joint presentation at the "Video On the Net" conference... and then joining the blogger panel, where Steve Rubel will also be present. Dang... talk about "social media rock star" line-ups! Would have been a great amount of fun to be part of that conversation....
Ah, well... perhaps another time... I'll send virtual greetings from Cairo... :-)
Meanwhile, if you are thinking at all of going to Spring VON (or live in the Bay area), here's another great reason to go. Kudos to Jeff for putting the panel together... it should definitely be a great session! (And I'm sure as moderator, Andy will make it interesting!)
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