von Spring 2007. My first tradeshow since going to the ESRI User Conference back in 1999 (?). It’s Day 2 and the trip has been interesting so far. Paul and I are here to listen, learn, network and even do a little selling. The presentations range from overt sales pitches to actual, useful content. I’ve heard Jeff Pulver, Vinod Khosla and Niklas Zennstrom speak. I’ve seen a couple debates over what FMC really means and WiFi vs WiMAX as a carrier grade infrastructure. I’ve seen some amazing stats:

• Global spend on telecom gear and services is about $1T (not B, T!)
• Nokia sells 1M hand-sets per day
• SMS messaging is a $50B annual business and if you figure out it’s cost to users on a per MB basis, it’s about $750 (ouch!) or roughly 20-25x current wholesale IP prices
• Skype has been downloaded 0.5B times since 2003 by 171M registered users (end ‘06) and they regularly see 9M peak simultaneous users (at Level 3, we threw a party when we got to 1M peak simultaneous users on the managed modem platform… and growth has essentially been flat since then)

I’ve walked the expo floor and talked to a few different exhibitors. We’re here for 4 days and I think that’s going to end up being 1 day longer than really necessary, but nonetheless, a pretty good experience thus far. I have also re-connected with a number of former colleagues from Level 3; some still there, others having moved on to other places like Intrado, Cisco, VoEX, Bandwidth.com, Ditech Networks, Synchronoss, LignUp, PacketExchange, SIPeerior, NGT and Acme Packet.

On my way home from dinner at Il Fornaio with Paul and a current Level 3 exec that will remain unnamed, I bumped into Andy Abramson in the elevator at the Fairmont. I re-introduced myself from a time we met a couple years back when I gave him a NOC tour. I sort of blew my elevator pitch on what I’m up to lately, but in my defense, the elevators are freaking fast at the Fairmont and I only had about 10 seconds.

Anyway, pretty good so far.