The TMC Labs Innovation Awards honor products that demonstrate raw innovation, unique features, and significant contributions toward improving communications technology. While innovation is frequently a question of firsts, often it is taking an existing idea and improving upon it or looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Challenging established standards, and then introducing different approaches to achieve distinctive results certainly helps to define innovation within this industry.
The TMC Labs Innovation Awards are not granted only to the best-selling products, but instead to those demonstrating raw innovation, uniqueness, and representing a significant contribution to the industry.
In fact, TMC Labs chooses only a few select products that we consider truly innovative. The TMC Labs engineers have extensive knowledge of the communications, Internet telephony, and call center industries from testing products as well as meeting with vendors and attending tradeshows.
TMC Labs does not accept applications from beta products or products under NDA that have not been brought to market. However, newer versions of an existing product may apply for this award, even if the newer version is in "beta."
TMC Labs reserves the right to only analyze the feature-set of the older, existing product to guard against "vaporware" claims in the beta product.
Although TMC Labs may request a demo or test drive of the product, we do not require to actually test or use the product. Since there are too many applicants to test each product individually, we garner our information about the product from this application, checking customer references, looking at the feature-set, as well as examining screenshots for a "feel" for the product. We also utilize other resources such as our knowledge of the industry and our visits to industry-related tradeshows where we often actually see and demo many of the applicants' products.
Winners of the INTERNET TELEPHONY TMC Labs Innovation Award will be published in the July and August 2008 issues of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine.
Early Bird entries save $100! Apply by May 9, 2008, receive the Early Bird special rate of $1,299.
Final deadline May 23, 2008. Entry fee is $1,399.
Note: You may apply to all three magazines (INTERNET TELEPHONY, Customer Interaction Solutions & Unified Communications), however you will need to fill out a separate application.
Additionally, a series of questions in a Word document will need to be filled out and uploaded. You may use the same Word document for all applications.
IMPORTANT!
You MUST first download this document - please
click here, save it locally on your hard drive and complete the application. Later on in the application process you will be asked to attach to this completed application by uploading it in the 'Marketing Collateral Attachment' section.
Unified Communications application:
To view a sample application as a PDF,
click here.
Before clicking 'Apply' make sure you have downloaded the application as explained above under
IMPORTANT!