Stop it, you're killing me

This place (VON) is overwhelming.

Wandering around the floor, I stopped in for a nice chat with the folks at GIPS. In passing they remarked that their licensing agreement with GTalk was signed only about three weeks before the client was launched. Match that pace of innovation, telcos.

Then I had a private demo from a new company of something which blew my head right off - but they're not ready to go public with it yet - shame.

Now in a session with Blake Irving of Windows Live Messenger. Lots of nice stats here: 205m Messenger users, 26m concurrent users (whoa baby!), 800m voice minutes in January, but video minutes in January were 1.1bn minutes, though only 9% of Messenger users use video. We also got a demo of Live Contacts (7m users currently), in which Mr. Irving video-called a friend directly from Outlook to arrange a golf date in Washington DC. They viewed the course from an aerial photo (Microsoft has hired loads of planes to shoot aerial views of US cities), pulled up the contact details from a websearch and made a click-to-call to book a round. Unfortunately, the call didn't seem to complete, at least not that we could hear (he remarked that the termination was provided by Verizon, which made me laugh given the Net Neutrality issues...).

UPDATE: Shhhh...