IP Expo 2009 was held last week in Earl's Court. Its London's annual exhibition for those to find out the latest and greatest on voice, data and video convergence on IP networks.

One of the keynote speakers was Tristan Degenhardt, Director for Product Marketing at Switchvox at Digium. She co-founded Switchvox, which was then acquired in late 2007 by Digium, the Asterisk company, to serve the rapidly growing SMB market for VoIP phone systems.

Her talk was on "web aware" unified communications systems and integrating web 2.0 and IP Telephony.

The essence of her message was exploiting applications available on the internet for your own business benefit and within your own organisation's communication system.

For example Switchvox can be configured so that whenever you receive a call, Google Maps automatically pops up to let you know where the call is coming from, and if they are known to you, you can have their flickr picture pop-up immediately so you can see who you're talking to.

Tristan mentioned Foehn a number of times throughout her speech, as an enabler to unlock the potential of web 2.0 applications. She specifically quoted Foehn's recent project at the Symbian Foundation where Skype is now integrated into the company’s PBX. All very cool web 2.0 stuff and a much smaller phone bill!