Where Have I Been?

I've been a little lax in the blogging on this site (and on Marketing Idea Guy blog too). I have been on the conference circuit. Last week was VON plus Channel Partners. VON was a Pulvermedia show until it hit an economic downturn, which resulted in some assets being purchased by Virgo Publishing that owns Xchange and Phone+ magazines. The Skype CEO keynote was the end of VON and the beginning of CP. I wasn't that impressed. I felt like I was getting the VC pitch - all stats about the potential growth in wireless, smartphones, regulation/FCC, apps, and broadband. Nothing on cool stuff that Skype is doing. In fact, when he did talk about Skype, he confused service provider with wireless carrier and agent with wireless carrier. When he says that "Skype is the poster child" I just can't figure out what he means. Here are some of the more interesting facts he gave: Broadband users was 10M in 2001 and now is 66M in the US at the end of 2008. There are 10M still on dial-up (EarthLink, NetZero, IKANO, AOl and a few of you are still fat and happy about that). There are 39.7M without Internet. My guess is that 35M of them do not have a computer of some kind. There are 1B internet users world-wide. There are currently 460 WiMax networks around the world. $49B has been spent on 4G already. FMC (fixed-mobile convergence) won't happen until most phones have Wi-Fi enabled. With unlimited plans, why do you need mobile VoIP? I'm in Atlanta the rest of the week providing sales training and marketing lessons to clients and members of FISPA. You can see some slides for the Social Media presentation On RAD's Radar.