Marketing the future of the telephone: CMO Dean Harris says Vonage's online strategy has been the key to growing from 3,000 to 300,000 customers in just two years. But the booming broadband telephone service has had great success using DR in all media--from TV to radio to the Internet.
"Direct response has to learn to adapt to new media, and online is the perfect DR scenario," says Dean Harris, chief marketing officer for Vonage Holdings Corp., the Edison, N.J.-based parent of Vonage, the leading provider of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), or broadband-based, telephone service. "Audiences and ad...

Baby's first steps: incumbent telcos are finally learning how to move faster than a crawl.
March of next year will mark 128 years since Alexander Graham Bell famously uttered "Watson come here" over what would become the most popular home, office and now mobile accessory in the history of civilization. In the more than a century and a quarter that has passed since Bell's...

Show me the money: broadband carriers focus on plugging revenue leaks. (Revenue).
Do you know where your revenue is going? According to a recent survey released by PricewaterhouseCoopers, broadband service providers don't--and it's starting to worry them enough to do something about it. The survey, distributed to senior executives and financial managers of 19 North American cable and DBS...

VoIP pioneers see their market share erode: big brands begin to flex consumer marketing muscle.
The VoIP industry pioneers such as Vonage, Packet8, Voice Pulse and others are seeing their market share hammered as top brand names such as AT&T, Cablevision and others move forcefully into the consumer telephone space, according to a new research report released by the Yankee Group. The...

Will Cisco and Nortel draw closer? As an epic merger is debated, the facts justify a combined entity.
The key to an enduring relationship is that both the partners should be compatible, or more precisely, willing to be compatible. Whatever drives that willingness is, as they say, totally incidental. It is easy to see why Cisco and Nortel have never crossed paths. There are clear reasons why...

The Powell play: a fractured FCC may put the pieces back together with a new post-election chairman.
Hammered by critics and frustrated by technology developments that outpace its ability to regulate them effectively, the Federal Communications Commission stands at a crossroads, with its future direction largely dependent upon the outcome of the upcoming national election. The federal agency that oversees national telecom regulation has...

In the black : Black Ink Systems introduces 'margin management' to telecom.
New operations support system (OSS) solutions mean that carriers can monitor at all times how their networks are operating, but very few have any way of knowing the same about how profitable they are. Business intelligence systems often allow users to collect and analyze revenue data, but only on...

VoIP technology leapfrogs state and national borders: impact of international numbers could cripple existing carrier revenue streams.
When FCC Chairman Michael Powell announced at the recent VON conference that he would recommend the Commission claim jurisdiction over the regulation of VoIP services, he justified his position by talking specifically about the evils of state regulation. As he put it, "To hold that packets flying across national...

Bold visions of the next-gen service provider: 7 disciplines 7 experts 7 routes to staying alive.
One of the greatest guessing games absorbing the telecom industry can be reduced to a basic question: How does this great industrial, economic, political and technological transformation affect me? We set out to answer that question by talking to executives who we consider to be among the most accomplished...

The allure of fashion.
"If you're a fashion statement, you run the risk of being unfashionable....I hope that instead of being a fashion statement, we move to a point where it's a technology that's understood and that it's ubiquitous across a multiple of things." VoIP proponent Jeff Pulver could have been...