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VON under threat? Can internet telephony survive IPT 2.0?

A call from influential Internet Protocol Telephony expert Carl Ford, describing himself as a "pulverite" and wondering why the heck European IPT experts aren't interested in free Webinars about IPT.

Ford tells me he's starting tomorrow with a pre-VON Europe session, on the subject of "P2P SIP will do to VoIP what VoIP has done to the PSTN" - first of several months of webinars with the goal of promoting Jeff Pulver's Stockholm seminar - Spring VON Europe

"But the registrations are coming primarily from the US still!" he complains. "I could explain it a number of ways... but I need help to make sure I am not kidding myself." And he asks: which are the most likely causes:

I wonder whether the time zone thing is actually worse than he thinks? The Web site actually bills it as a 9 AM Webinar, which is daunting. You have to be quite alert to see that it's 9 AM EDT and probably, you don't know what EDT means anyway (it apparently means New York time, summer).

I've suggested to Carl that he thinks of billing it as a "Lunch Time Lecture" for Europeans (also, that he stops referring to GMT, which nobody in Europe uses in summer, not even us Brits, who talk about BST or British Summer Time).

As for the presentation, I dunno... Too American? Maybe, not American enough? Where's the razz ma tazz?

I've never tried doing a blurb for a webinar. But I might be tempted to suggest more "Shock! Horror!" headline excitement. "Pulverites think the unthinkable: was Skype right?" or "Get out of Internet telephony now! - get into Internet telephony 2.0 instead!" - or whatever you think your target audience will wake up in a cold sweat about? I really can't see anybody stopping dead in their tracks for "P2P SIP will do to VoIP what VoIP has done to the PSTN" [yawn]...

Yes, I think it's possibly true that the webinar syndrome is more popular West of the Atlantic. But I'm basing that assessment on precariously little evidence. So I wouldn't suggest treating it as informed opinion.

The time slot is a tricky one. It's bang in the middle of lunch in London, towards the end of lunch in France and Spain and Germany. And further East, of course, it's the time of day when execs get back from lunch with a feeling of "Oh, God, I've got NOTHING done all morning, I better get down to some serious Pretending To Work." Then again, Londoners do often schedule Business Lunch appointments...

Of course, if he wants me to go there, all he has to do is remind me of all the wonderful sailing that you can do around Stockholm in mid summer, when the sun never really sets, and the winds are steady...

Anyway, tomorrow's session features Carl talking to David Bryan of SIPeerior about the concept of building a peer to peer IPT network, but using SIP rather than Skype. Interesting?