No Telecom Recession. Yet.

I was lucky enough to go to VoiceCon last week. Not lucky that it was in Orlando but rather lucky to be part of it (...without doing booth duty). And lucky to feel the energy on the inside of the building, a breather from all the economic doomsday talk in the morning papers.

Energy. That is the best word I can find to describe what is quickly becoming 'the' enterprise telecom show. And energy is not often a word we use these days to describe a big, rambling trade show. But this one was full of it, every day. The floor itself was bustling from morning to night, helped in great part by the high-tech, expansive booths put on by many leading vendors. And the keynote sessions bristled with well over two thousand people, especially the one with Al Gore.

So what was different from other shows gone by, I wondered on my long trek home. A few things worth mentioning:

- Microsoft was there in no small way and this time it felt for real, instead of surreal. The first time I saw them last year, I was still in shock from their entry into the telecom space. Now, with their many partnerships including the Aspect announcement, they are part of our fabric;

- IBM joined the party this year with a Billion dollar injection along with plug-in relationships with the likes of Shoretel. Suffice to say that other incumbents are 'motivated to innovate by these two giants;

- Video: Another 'for real' moment. Video was everywhere (or at least it felt that way). The market leaders - Tandberg and Polycom - made themselves known and the incumbent telephony guys like Nortel, Avaya and Siemens all had video corners in their booths, even if not their strength. They clearly felt it would be conspicuous by its absence had they left it out.

- Buyers: Vendors I visited with all said the same thing - there are buyers in the house - a refrain not often heard at these events. Perhaps UC - and IP - have matured enough where people are coming to buy rather than window shop.

So could it be, a recession without telecom as a poster child? Wouldn't that be nice. Let's check in at VoiceCon in August to find out.

Do I need to 'see' my voice mail?

I love telecom products. Whenever a friend needs a new phone, wants to get rid of a home line or just plain - very rarely - wants to talk telco, they call me. They know they can get an answer or opinion of some kind. That is if I am not already on the phone.

But there is one trend I have, up until now, put off. Visual voice mail. Rarely I have seen a technology take off like this one or at least get such ubiquitous coverage. Well done SpinVox, I must say. Particularly for a foreign company.

Yet while I hear and read about it all the time, I have yet to meet one person who uses it. Why, I wonder. Are they just marketing wizards - including buying Rich Tehrani's blog and the 'Visual Voice mail Channel' at TMCNet. (BTW - who needs a Visual Voicemail channel?). Or does the voice mail just not end up that visual?

My sense is that it actually works pretty well and that transcription as whole has a superb future. Think an about an automated application that can decipher which Google key words are being used in a phone call...

Maybe the time has come for me try it. As it is, I get far more email/texts that voice mail, but I can see how I will one day be so lazy that I won't want to have to listen to messages!

Voice mail to text. And to think I used to have beg people just to buy voice mail in the first place. I do love telecom.

London Calling. 12 million times.

I am the first to admit that I know not enough about the telephony market in the UK except for maybe the fact that they always seem to have cooler mobile phones than we do. I've has some tell me that they barely use auto-attendants, while others claim they are ahead of us in many ways. But I have sensed in the past the BT is adequately innovative - being a telco and all - and this week I heard their name mentioned a few times in the hallways at Ecomm. Seems they had more than a little to do with RingCentral's latest money news.

Earlier this week, I got a Google Alert (more people should use these) that RingCentral has raised $12 million. For once, I thought Google had failed me. After all, that was old news. RingCentral announced a $12m raise back in September - why is Google only picking this up now, I wondered.

Low and behold, Google still works. RingCentral rang up yet another $12m on the heels of their new OEM deal with BT. Being one that loves 'doing deals' I must say this one impresses me. Talk about getting access to new markets. The raging success that virtual PBX's are in this country will now test foreign waters. Will the average English person be as impressed by a small business that suddenly sounds big? Lets hope so for those that have placed a $24m bet in less than 6 months.

Find me. If you can.

I now know why the term 'find-me/follow-me' meant so little to the friends I used it with 3-4 years back. At the time, it seemed like such an intuitive term - in itself somewhat of an anomaly in technology. Afterall, 'find me' or 'follow-me', what's not to get. And as a telecom person, I had heard the term for so long myself that I just figured people knew it. Not so. Call forwarding seemed to work, but for me, didn't really do the package justice.

Fast forward to now where everyone is being found or followed. The proliferation of personal, web-based telephony applications like GrandCentral, Ifbyphone and GotVMail have certainly helped. Or at least done what their predecessors - over-featured key systems - perhaps couldn't.

Forward even faster and like we see so often, as soon as the masses start to 'get' something, we change the game. The beauty of Find Me apps is that when properly managed, they do just that. They take the finding and following out of the equation for the caller. But there's a hitch. The call receiver has to program and then intermittently manage the application. Garbage in, garbage out. Don't tell your assistant where you'll be at five, they probably won't find you. Neither will your phone.

Enter presence-based find me solutions. These come in a few flavors. There are those where you can log in and out so the application knows which 'rules' to follow. And now there's 'touch' based presence. Haven't typed on your Mac (or PC) in a while, your phone will figure you're away and your find me rules will kick in. Fonality introduced this feature this week and others have it. Just don't expect your friends to understand it for a while....