VoIP Builds Voice Communities

After the post last week that discussed voice enabled communities, I have been thinking more and more about the topic. I really believe that every website of substance – a site that has a vibrant community will be voice enabled. We will have a new voice-enabled Internet and VoIP will power it.

NASCAR sites will have scheduled debates where people will speak on designated topics. For example there may be a debate on whether Jeff Gordon belongs in the hall of fame. A number of people will want to speak on this subject. Others will listen. The event will be recorded and podcasted for others to listen in-on.

E-tail sites will all have voice capability. Perhaps Ebay will help other companies voice-enable portals as a service.

In the e-commerce space the sellers will pay for the ability to take calls from buyers but it is unclear who will pay for such services on free sites that generate community. For example on TMCnet, we will soon have almost a million unique visitors coming to our site per month. This is a massive audience and we will voice enable TMCnet to allow like-minded sub-communities to talk amongst themselves while allowing others to listen in.

I have trouble believing people will pay for this privilege on TMCnet so I imagine we will give the service away for free. We will likely sell sponsorships around the conversations.

Traditional service providers like Packet8 and Vonage now have a new opportunity to help companies connect their users via voice. This opportunity can also be leveraged by a handful of software companies on the market.

As I mentioned yesterday, we will focus on this concept at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo next month in LA but we will then formalize the topic into a track in our conference sessions for the next Internet Telephony Conference & Expo that is now in the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center.

So far, these are the rough session topics:

1.) How to create a voice enabled community.
2/3.) Double-session PANEL on voice enabled communities.
4.) How to profit from the experience...

We are looking for speakers for these topics. Speakers who apply should have experience in this area and strong ideas about how VoIP will enable the next generation of Internet community building.

As always we are looking for the absolute best speakers who want to objectively educate an audience and furthermore are passionate about teaching conferees how they should go about building voice communities.

If you have interest in speaking on these topics please e-mail Greg Galitzine and CC me.

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Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC and is a die-hard believer in voice communities. He sees chat rooms eventually allowing real live chat meaning voice chat. He sees collaborative voice communities being developed in enterprises of all sizes allowing instantaneous collaboration and communication. He sees a bright future for VoIP and for those people who adopt it into their business strategy.