Eliot Kristan's Blog

This morning at work I checked out slashdot and saw this wild ad for Vonage service. Recently, I’ve seen many Vonage ads surfacing in the tech channels. But this one was wild, some kind of snake / salamander thing with x’d out eyes. I took a screenshot of it to post but I left it on my desktop at work. I’ll put it up tommorow.

Good for Vonage. It’s about time that Verizon and Comcast has some serious competition rooted in some seriously solid competition.

Funny, about two years ago I signed up for a service from the good people at Free World Dialup, which gave me my own telephone number that was based in Washington state. That phone line was hooked up to the net and when anyone called it, the call was forwarded to my computer over IP. I was even provided my own voicemail box that could be configured to send an mp3 of the voicemail to my email box. I had forgotten all about it until a recieved an email that invited me to the VON Fall 2005 Conference and Expo… for free! It’s something like a $1500 ticket. Though I’m sure a bunch of Free World Dialup people got the same email if they had hooked up with FWD on the earlier side. Still pretty cool. Here’s a chunk of the email:

Hi Eliot,

As a member of the Free World Dialup community, you are invited to visit the exhibit floor at the Fall 2005 VON Expo, for free, as our guest. The event will be taking place September 20th to 22nd in Boston.

Details regarding Fall 2005 VON can be found at: http://www.von.com and the complete exhibitor list can be found at: http://pulver.com/von/exhibit.html.

Hope to see you in Boston.

Kind regards,

Scott Kargman
COO and VP Corporate Development
pulver.com Enterprises, Inc.