Second Life Success
This is turning into one of the best days I have had in a long time.
I caught on Marc Robin’s blog today that there’s a trial version of the popular online game Second Life where, instead of people chatting to each other using text, they can speak to each other. What vendor is behind it? DiamondWare.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him, I want to tell you about a man named Keith Weiner, the owner of DiamondWare. I met Keith back in 1999, when we worked together commercializing the very first SIP software written by Henning’s students at Columbia. Keith was an audiophile, and had extensive experience in audio drivers for games. I was rewriting the very first SIP softclient, and Keith was delivering the audio. At the time, I was running a small consulting company, and we became fast friends, and have been ever since. If you ever want to meet a man of tremendous character and ability - get to know Keith.
I remember thinking “Wow. This guy is so smart. Too bad he’s so hung up on the whole gaming thing. He could really make some impact if he stuck to the telephony stuff.” Keith, if you were at the ETel show, I would SO buy you a beer.
Blogging From E-Tel
Well, here we are at the ETel show in San Francisco. I must admit, I barely remember when the VON show was like this, back in the day. When I attended my first VON show, ten years ago, it seemed very new and exciting. If you wanted to see really cool technology, and meet the brightest minds in the business, you hung around the VON show. But that seems so long ago now. It sort of reminds me of that commercial for MadTV’s first season : “Remember when Saturday Night Live was funny? Neither do we!”
What joy I had today meeting so many incredibly smart and enthusiastic people. I can honestly say it was was the most intellectually challenging and rewarding show I have been
to in years. For instance, I had the opportunity to hear Sunil Vemuri from QTech and Drew Lanham from Nexidia speak about searching through recorded speech. The demonstrations literally dropped my jaw, and made me believe that there was a imminent future with this technology. I was very happy to hear them speak, and appreciated how they were bringing our world forward.
I’m going to enjoy this one while it lasts.