Did the World Need 12 VONs? By the end of day April 2, the offices of Pulvermedia will have shut, completing a process begun March 28 when most employees were let go. Voice Over IP expert Jeff Pulver turned his company into a multifaceted empire involving Voice on the Net (VON) conferences around the globe and the popular VON magazine, but at the end of the day, Pulvermedia couldn't bring enough ROI to please investors.	Loring Wirbel Communications Editor
Obituaries of various types have been plentiful throughout the VoIP blogger community, some praising Pulver as a victim of rapacious suits, and some blaming him for his own troubles. I thought Jeff Pulver was an interesting guy if you took him with a grain of salt, but two lessons seem self-evident from this fiasco: When you cede control of your organization to operational types (necessary when you receive outside money for expansion), the vision of the founder is diluted, and often destroyed. And if you attempt to build a business on conferences and events alone, particularly when the financial model requires a franchised event at least once a month, you will fall victim to saturation. I worked with Peter Meade and other editors on the DSLcon conferences in the late 1990s, and it was evident by the new millenium that the show had over-expanded, when DSLcons were planned for secondary European and Latin American cities. VON was falling into the same trap. Even if you choose a fairly decent-sized market niche in which to develop conferences, you are setting yourself up for failure if you try to plan for more than two or three conferences a year. New Media is tough in print, tough online, tough in conferences and events, and tough in analysis. It is possible to come up with a winning mix that exploits all areas, but the saga of Pulvermedia shows that there is no easy or self-evident path to profitability these days. Posted by Loring Wirbel on Apr 1, 2008 11:02 AM in Communications

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