I was going to do an industry retrospective on 2008 along with predictions for 2009, but then I looked around at some other bloggers and saw that some really great pieces had already been written. So rather than do my own, let me point you to some great posts:
Jon Arnold wrote VoIP in 2008 - “I’m Not Dead”
Traditional landline VoIP was a good place to start, but in 2009, VoIP will be more about voice services than telephony… more about voice-based or voice-enabled applications that make the voice experience more interesting. In some cases it will be about making calls less expensive, but for the most part it will be about doing new things or old things in new ways.
He goes on to list 10 innovative start-ups and I’m pleased to say that Fonolo was included (actually top of the list, but I’m not going to read anything into that.)
Andy Abramson posted some commentary on Jon’s post here.
Garrett Smith has been putting up an excellent series of posts, asking a standard set of questions to interesting people in the industry. So far, he has posted answers from Nick Galea (3CX), Rafael Fonseca (Cedar Point Communications), Steve Wong (Clearsight Networks), David Schenkel (Objectworld), Dan Hoffman (M5), Peter Diedrich (Mobivox), Mike Oeth (Junction Networks), Irv Shapiro (IfByPhone), Ari Rabban (Phone.com), Alec Saunders (Iotum) and Andy Abramson (Comunicano). I’ve just submitted my answers, so hopefully I’m not too late to be included. You can see the whole series here. [CORRECTION: You can read my interview here.]
Springwise posted “This year’s top 10 telecom & mobile ideas” and I was pleasantly surprised that Fonolo was included. (We’re listed as number 1, but once again I’m not going to read anything into that.)
Finally, Robert Poe wrote an excellent piece titled “The Top 25 VoIP Innovations of 2008“. I’ll take an excerpt from that post as the closing note for my closing post of the year:
The VoIP industry, like most others, felt the impact of the 2008 economic crisis. Promising startups laid off employees. Some even shut down. But VoIP companies had an advantage many others didn’t: their capacity for intense innovation. That ability let them provide products and services that could help struggling businesses of all sorts, and even individuals, save money and work in new and better ways… It’s no surprise, then, that the level of VoIP innovation remained as high this year as in 2007.
I expect no less from 2009! Happy new year everyone!
Disclaimer: Andy and Jon are advisors to Fonolo.
0 Responses to “End-of-year reflections”