Alec Saunders SquawkBox

As we wind up to the beginning of VON, Andy is putting out a call for women to participate.  He singles out Christine Herron, and notes that there are a total of 12 women on the participants list.  Christine writes periodically about the same issue.  I am not sure why there aren’t more women in the technology industry.  Certainly there were many at Microsoft, and in every role in the company, but Microsoft is an anomaly. 

RIM (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced on Friday that it had acquired San Jose based Ascendent. Terms were not disclosed, but Ascendent has raised $20 million in venture financing, previously. I guess we’ll have to wait for the RIM financials to see the price.

For RIM, it’s a great move.  Essentially, Ascendent transforms the Blackberry into a mobile desk phone, with the capability to forward, transfer, conference etc calls.     Ascendent also has some more advanced PBX features for time of day routing, and so on, which start to step into the area of relevance enhanced communications that iotum is focused on.  If you find the Ascendent website confusing, you can read some great background in this interview with Ascendent CEO Deborah Miller from the Wall Street Transcript. 

This is the next logical step in the fixed-mobile convergence world.  Several players, like Bridgeport and Newstep are focused on convergence at the media level.  Others, like Orative, Ascendent and SIPQuest are focused on convergence at the application level.  With this acquisition, RIM has made the first move to delivering the next generation mobile business phone.  Will Microsoft respond? 

Investors in SIPQuest and Orative should be happy.   This transaction has proven that there’s a market for these products.  Investors in Good, and Visto, though, have just learned that they’re too late to the party.  The basis of competition is moving beyond email. 

This Red Herring article has some additional detail at the end.

It seems as if Ottawa is really ripe for a Barcamp.  Over the last couple of days I’ve had coffee with several people, just out of the blue, talking about the mashup between Web 2.0 and communications.  There’s been a lot of interest in the Barcamp concept.  It also looks as if raising the small amount of funding we need for this project is going to be easy as well. 

Stay tuned.  And if you’re interested in volunteering some time to organize, or participate in the event itself, head over to the Barcamp Ottawa Wiki and sign up.