Phonevite wins Best Consumer Offering at the ITEXPO

With the demise of the VON Show, the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (aka ITEXPO) is now regarded as the biggest and most eminent show in the VoIP industry.    We planned to attend the EXPO this year because we thought that it was time for us to show our true colors, as they say, and let the industry know what we were doing with VoIP on the one-to-many calling front.   Sure, there’s been a lot of innovation since VoIP made it mainstream in the late 90′s, and Kalvin (Co-Founder) and I (John, the other Co-Founder) were part of that early history with Dialpad (the most popular VoIP web service which was eventually acquired by Yahoo!), but we felt that most of the R&D has been going into one-to-one communications (e.g. Skype) and related value-added services, such as VoIP-PBX (e.g. RingCentral) solutions and Unified Messaging Platforms (e.g. GrandCentral, which, by the way, was created by our former colleagues from Dialpad, Craig and Vincent, which then was acquired by Google).      By attending the ITEXPO, our intent was to make a statement to the industry;  That VoIP could be exploited and leveraged for communications to groups, i.e. for one-to-many communications, an area that has not received much attention, both in the public arena or the development community.     

Phonevite Booth at ITEXPO

From the opening day of the exhibit floor, we were pleasantly taken aback to find our bootstrapped booth (we literally only had 2 tables, a few chairs, and a slide projector, all of which we borrowed from a church in LA, and we bought 2×10 yards of white linen, at wholesale price in the LA Garment District, to use as (i) a table cloth and (ii) a projector screen – see first picture above) be overwhelmed with constant traffic (we were exhausted after 2 days of the non-stop Phonevite pitch).     The highlight surprise was when the TMCNet (Organizers of the ITEXPO) Editorial Team came to our booth to present us the Best of Show Award as the Best Consumer Offering (we were the sole winners in this category), which to us was a sign that the Industry was validating our claim that it was high time for VoIP to be taken to other non-traditional frontiers, like one-to-many calling, henceforth called “VoIP Broadcasting”.