My friend Larry Lisser, with whom we've helped exit Mobivox to Sabse and have collaborated on a few other startups together directly and indirectly (Momentum Telecom, IfByPhone and Fonolo) had a big idea a bit more than a year ago when he came up with the concept of Startup Camp Telephony, that would be run inside the always well attended IT Expo in Miami Beach every winter. It spawned StartUp Camp Comms Edition last fall at IT Expo West in Los Angeles and demonstrated that new ideas are clearly alive and well. With the help of sharp minded sponsors, like Twilio, and speakers who have done the startup thing successfully a few times to kick things off, like Jeff Bonforte and Jamie Siminoff StartUp Camp is one of those ideas that falls into the "why didn't we think of that" mindset. Kinda like the iPhone app store, if you were the Product Manager for Windows Mobile prior to the iPhone being introduced.
This winter's event in February features another multi-exit venture veteran as keynote, Craig Walker, co-founder of GrandCentral, now Google Voice, who has sold companies to both Yahoo and Google, along with Google Ventures, Wesley Chan, who was the guy who brought in Grand Central and many of Google's key acquisitions over the years.
So like any great idea, someone had to come along and put on something similar but in a different light. The folks at Enterprise Connect saw a good idea and turned to Enterprise and Unified Communications maven Dave Michels to pull together something along the same lines, but more for established companies that have a new idea, vs. the startups, so Innovation Showcase was born and will be held in Orlando from February 28th through March 3 during the trade show and conference that's aimed at the "big boys" of IT.
So with events like this, one thing is certain. VoIP sure isn't dead.
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