I spent yesterday on the exhibit floor at VON. The voice over internet conference. Man is this industry messy! Fun.

What makes for a vibrant and profitable conference is an industry with well recognized problems and a lack of consensus about how and/or who is going to resolve those problems.

These guys don’t know what the natural size of a phone service provider is. They don’t know how call clearing works. They don’t know how 911 service functions. They haven’t agreed on how to encode sound. Their hardware platforms lack developer networks. It just goes on and on. They all know these problems exist so there is a conflict at varying degrees of heat going around each one of them. And then the entire tangle is embedded in the mess that is this generation of evolution of the Internet and is new robber barons. What a zoo!

I didn’t plan to go back, but it’s too much fun at the fair.

Pulver should be able to make money on this franchise for at least a few more years.