I’ve been wondering.
The Bay Area is well documented as the engine of
innovation for web services, social networking and more. Some might
argue even too well documented. But can the same be said about it for
the telephony arena?
As someone who used to live up North,
Canada once felt like the world’s engine for telecom development.
Companies like Nortel, Mitel and others lead the way. But those were
different times, when the telcos completely dominated the go-to-market
landscape, entrepreneurs were not openly welcomed into the old boys
club, and the word ‘cloud’ only conjured up visions of something in the
sky you didn’t want to see on a summer day.
In the last 10 years
though we have seen a sea of change, perhaps best evidenced by the open
development environments we now have for creating innovative voice
telephony services. Telephony has attracted out-of-the box thinkers who
see huge opportunities to change the way products work, how they’re
packaged, provisioned and distributed. A community has evolved, with
many of its thought leaders congregating in Europe this week for
eComm’s first overseas event.
So is there a geographical hub,
like there is for the Web, where telephony innovation is clustered? As
an exercise, I set out to do a little research to what concentration –
if any – there was of telephony-related entrepreneurs here in my home
base. I kept my filters fairly limited to those in voice or
collaboration services, but was pleasantly surprised by what I
discovered!
20+ Early Stage/Growth Telephony Companies Discovered on First Look
Turns
out there is plenty of telephony going on here. My initial pass turned
up some 20 companies, all of whom can be considered as startups (early
stage or early growth):
Line2, Jajah, 3Jam, Invox, RebeVox, BubbleMotion, Ooma, Ring2, Twilio, VidTel, Promptu, Phonevite, Sabse, Transerra, SipGate, RocketVox, Ditech Networks, TalkFree, Televolution, Ribbit, Vivu
The
companies vary, but voice appears to be a common denominator for most.
They include wholesale platform providers of applications and services;
developers of customer interaction solutions; as well as a variety of
small business services providers. All operate, at some level, in the
cloud. (note: I left out majors like Cisco, Polycom, Skype and Shoretel
by design).
I’ve since set out to learn more about the offerings
of these local startups and about the dynamic entrepreneurs behind them
– many of whom come from non-telephony backgrounds. In follow-on posts,
I hope to profile some of these companies and their leaders.
In
the meantime, is the Bay Area a hub for telephony innovation? Or is the
hub somewhere else? Tell me what you think. And for those in the Bay
Area, please let me know who I missed on the list.