Over the years, I have offered strategic consulting for select companies and colleagues and I have gotten pretty good at sharing vision and perspective from the 39,000 ft level.

My focus has been on the effects of the Internet on an industry sector and what happens next. My past strategic consulting work has connected me with senior executives (including those at Fortune 500 companies) from around the world who are involved in the media, communications, and entertainment sectors.

The pulver.com Strategic Consulting Group represents a team of people whom I’ve worked with over the years. We are offering strategic consulting services to companies and clients seeking to better understand the disruptive elements of the Internet on their organizations.

If you would like to learn more, please send email to : jeff@pulver.com and/or send a text message to +1.516.312.3227.

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Tags: voip, Social Media, Internet TV, Strategic Consulting, Consulting, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To learn more about the amazing work of Yves, “Fusion Man” Rossy, visit: www.jet-man.com.

Tags: Yves Rossy, Rocket Man, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite what I read last week, Facebook has still not increased my ability to have more than 5,001 friends.

I do hope the TechCrunch story: Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit was true.

I don’t look forward to the alternative of having to continue to remove friends in order to add new ones.

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Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Michael Arrington,Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The next edition of the Jeff Pulver Show, my LIVE (unscripted) Internet TV Talk show on pulverTV will be airing on Thursday May 15th at 2PM EDT / 1800 GMT.

You can catch the show on both UStream and BlogTV.

If you would like to be an in-studio guest on a future next show, please drop me an email or send me a message on Facebook.

Archives of past shows are available at: pulver.tv.

Friends of pulverTV can now join the pulverTV group on Facebook.

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Tags: Internet TV, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, pulverTV, Andrew Lipson, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Tuesday, May 13th I will be in New York City and hosting another edition of Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in NYC from 8-10AM. Readers of my blog are invited to join me.

To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook.

Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a "Personal Social Networking Toolkit."

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, NYC, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are aware of any early stage Hi-Tech Israeli start-ups that I should be aware of, please feel free to contact me.

I will be in Tel Aviv next week and I will be meeting with a number of early-stage startups during my trip.

Tags: Tel Aviv, startup, Israel, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since July 2007, when I attended and spoke at IPTComm 2007, an event organized by Henning Schulzrinne and Greg Bond on a panel called: “Where are the VoIP Services?”, I have been looking for an answer to this question.

These days a number of people in the VoIP Industry are selling and launching what can be distilled down to be simple variations on Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail. Sometimes this comes in the form of a platform pitch which include APIs and a call for developers to use the platform to enable such services. But in any case, this does not empower the kinds of innovative services I would have expected to see. Not in 2008.

Yes, “Voice” remains the killer application in this sector. And “voice” and voice related services may be the only killer application in this sector. Only time will tell.

And while this is all true, what I continue to look for was looking for is something different. Something cool. Something that can truly help to redefine communications.

I am looking for people who have the guts to take advantage of IP based platforms to deliver innovative services. What I continue to see are people who instead chose to take the easy way out and simply use their platform to replicate the same services that TDM based systems gave us. That they decided to build equipment for the telcos where the money was and in the process sacrificed empowering the communications revolution and our ability to deliver services never before possible without the advent of IP.

As time goes on, one thing that is clear to me is that there is still a great opportunity to disrupt the communications industry, if for no other reason, than because of the amount of business processes in place at incumbent Telcos before a new service is deployed. In fact, in the time it takes for the financial analysts at Verizon work out the operating budgets for doing a voice over ATM rollout and the time engineering spends trying to justify the “risks” for deploying an IP Voice solution, the seeds of a communications revolution could planted and sown. All it takes are like minded people who want to change the way we communicate and the guts to take on the status-quo. And what is better than the present time to reboot and restart the Internet Communications revolution?

So here is my offer for Entrepreneurs who are looking at the Communications 2.0 space: Think about presence and voice and instant messaging, take a look at the APIs of twitter and Facebook and pitch me on the service that you want to create. Those who get my attention might end up with the early-early seed capital needed to turn their dream into a reality.

Tags: voip, Henning Schulzrinne, Greg Bond, twitter, Facebook, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Happy Mother's Day to everyone who is celebrating Mother's Day today.

I wonder how many Mother's Day phone calls will originate from someone's desktop computer and/or laptop. "More than last year" would be my answer as well, but it would be great if one could properly estimate the numbers and track the growth year after year.

I wonder how many Moms will be receiving messages via social media networks for the first time in 2008.

And I would like to know how many of the communication sessions will include a video element. Specially I'd like to know how many more people are using Video on Skype and/or decided to take advantage of iChat in the US and Canada on May 11, 2008. And while we are at it, I wonder how many people sent a video message to Mom asynchronously using Facebook today.

Tags: voip, Mother's Day, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This show provided a recap of recent breakfasts in both Washington DC and Chicago and a discussion of Life 3.0. Both Amit Shafrir and Geo Geller were my in-studio guests.

Special “shout outs” to a number of people including: @PurpleCar, @AnnOhio, Kfir Pravda, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuke, Dave Troy, Ann Benard and to everyone who joined us in the chat room. This show was produced by Andy “Tricaster” Lipson. You can follow the chat room chat by clicking here.

If you would like to be an in-studio guest on a future next show, please drop me an email or send me a message on Facebook.

Archives of past shows are available at: pulver.tv.

Friends of pulverTV can now join the pulverTV group on Facebook.

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Tags: Internet TV, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, Life 3.0, pulverTV, Andrew Lipson, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

TechCrunch: Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit

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During the past year as I became consumed by Facebook, Facebook has become my portal for business communication. An increasing number of my business conversations have been taking place inside of Facebook. A cornerstone of this strategy has been my ability to continue to add new contacts as they join the Facebook community.

On March 14, 2008 my strategy of using Facebook for business became challenged when I first reached the 5,001 friends limit. And while I thought it was cool to be at 5,001 friends, that feeling lasted only a few minutes when someone told me they tried to add me as a friend and they got a message that in effect “Jeff has too many friends.” (Humm...How could any ever really have too many friends?)

Back in March I reached out to my contacts at Facebook for help since I was told by Mark Zuckerberg back in November that “5,000 was only a number” and I was lead to believe it was easy to get past this limit.

And then I received the following message from Facebook:

“So it turns out that we're not able to increase your friend limit past 5,000 :( We won't always have this limit, but it is that way for technical reasons now.

One of the goals with launching Facebook Pages was to address this type of need for people who have a large fan base, such as politicians, celebrities...and you! We figure most people don't have more than 5,000 real friends, so Pages is an alternative option for people and businesses who use the site for commercial purposes. This could be an option for you until we address the Profile Page friend limit. There is a mechanism that helps convert a Profile to a Page. Let me know if you want to do that.”

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Since the middle of March, when I had the time, I spent time reviewing my friends and removed some so I could make room for new contacts. This continues to be an ackward and time consuming process. And to date, I haven’t been able to find the time to remove more than 400-500 people. At the moment I have 422 outstanding friend requests and I’m not able to add anyone new until I start removing people again and this is something I just don’t want to be doing.

I’m glad I resisted the offer to convert my profile into a Facebook page since I would have given up some of the personal nature of my profile. I just hope that the 5,000 person limit is removed sooner rather than later.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Michael Arrington,Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chicago’s NBC5 Street Team attended the breakfast I hosted this week at Duffy’s Tavern in Chicago. I enjoyed meeting both Blagica Bottigliero and LeeAnn Trotter and catching up with both of them. LeeAnn interviewed a number of the people who attended the breakfast and her segment covering the breakfast will be airing in the near future.

Friends can follow Chicago’s NBC5 Street Team on twitter over at - http://www.twitter.com/nbc5street.

Blagica Bottigliero: From Facebook to ‘Real Life’

“LeeAnn and I attended ‘Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and Friends’...Using Facebook and word-of-mouth as the means to invite people, Jeff gets likeminded folks together to eat breakfast, chat, and tag one another. Did I say tag? Yup.

Jeff uses social media methods to communicate in ‘real life’. Each of us wore a main sticker with our ‘tag line’ (mine was Mixing Business with Activism). From there, we met fellow breakfast goers, networked and wrote on their ‘wall’.

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Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Chicago, Blagica Bottigliero, NBC5, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Wednesday, May 21st I will be in Tel Aviv and hosting my third Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in Tel Aviv from 0900-1100. Readers of my blog are invited to join me.

To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. If you are not on Facebook and would like to RSVP, please send email to: jeffp@pulver.com.

Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a "Personal Social Networking Toolkit."

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Chicago, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The next edition of the Jeff Pulver Show, my LIVE (unscripted) Internet TV Talk show on pulverTV will be airing on Thursday May 8th at 2PM EDT / 1800 GMT. During the show I will be talking about a few things including both Iron Man and “Life 3.0.”

You can catch the show on both Utream.tv and BlogTV.

If you would like to be an in-studio guest on a future next show, please drop me an email or send me a message on Facebook.

Archives of past shows are available at: pulver.tv.

Friends of pulverTV can now join the pulverTV group on Facebook.

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Tags: Internet TV, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, Derrick Kwa, pulverTV, Andrew Lipson, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hours after posting my recent blog post about ”The Digital “Me” and Life 3.0, I received an email from my friend Tal Muskal who is a co-founder of Semantinet about a video interview that Robert Scoble had just posted that he did with Tal Keinan the other co-founder of Semantinet.

It was a total coincidence, but it turns out that this video interview provides an interesting vantage point into some of the points of my blog post and shares an alpha look at the way that Semantinet would describe Jeff Pulver from a Life 3.0 perspective. (Turns out that I was the subject of the search that Tal demonstrated during the interview.)

I have been a fan of Tal Muskal and Tal Keinan and their vision since the time I first met them and I am proud to be one of the early investors in the company.

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Tags: Social Media, The Digital Me, Tal Keinan, Tal Muskal, Robert Scoble, Semantinet, Semantic Web, Life 3.0, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

During the past couple of weeks, I have had a number of meetings with people who I met for the first time but who told me in effect that they felt like they knew me because they “read me” online. I wasn’t sure if this meant that they read my blog, visited my home page, watched past episodes of my show on pulverTV, if they found me on Facebook, watched some of my Qik Videos, saw my Flickr photos, if they were following me on twitter, found me on LinkedIn or one of a number of other networking platforms that I have tried out over the years. And when I asked that question, it turned out to be a number of things, but never all of these things and never in the order that I would suggest someone follow if they were trying to get to know me.

And this lead me to thinking about how easy (and hard) it is for people to really get to know us these days. One of the challenges is that from time to time I get busy with things (like hosting breakfasts) and I don’t always invest the time to update my profiles and make an effort to make sure that the information that is available is always the most current. And no one knows how much weight I would put into one platform or another when defining the digital “me”, especially since the weighting would change, depending upon the context of the reason why someone was trying to get to know me.

So just in case there is someone who is trying to better understand The Digital “Me”, this is the way I would approach this:

For a quick background - please read the “About me” section on my Facebook profile, (based on ”The Quick Jeff Pulver Biography”) and spend 3 minutes visiting my home page. Facebook friends have the advantage of being able to get my status updates which by far provides more accurate context for things that are going on in my life than just about anything else. While not all of my status updates carry the same weight, they are a reflection of where I am, what I may be doing and who I may be with and sometimes what I am thinking about.

I would then recommend visiting my blog but this isn’t always a great reflection of what I am up do since at any moment in time there are a variety of things which I may have recently blogged about and it is possible that none of my recent posts provides the context and content that would help someone really get to know me.

Each year there are a number of blog posts that if I made sticky would do a much better job in defining me than the random blog posts that one will find. This is a list of a few sticky blog posts from July 2007 that is a better reflection than a random sampling of blog posts. (Note to self - post some more “Sticky” blog posts.)

Once reading my profile and some blog posts, I would then visit the video archives of The “Jeff Pulver Show” and take a look at: (1, 2 and any random recent show and some my early shows.) Watch one or more of my Qik videos, check out some of my videos posted to YouTube and collectively you will get to know a side of me. Then find me on twitter and you might have a better understanding of the context of some my updates. (There usually is a correlation between my Facebook status messages and related twitter updates.)

Of course this doesn’t highlight anything I might have commented on in other people’s blogs or other conversations that I may be an active part of. So in that case, after doing your “research”, if you had any specific questions, I would recommend just sending me a Facebook message or sending me an email.

So it turns out that getting to know the Digital “me” requires what seems to be quite an effort and is not a real efficient way of getting to someone, especially due to the randomness of the content and the original context of why someone is making an effort to get to some someone.

But this is how I would generically define myself, at least for a moment, at least for today. And collectively this is an area which I am now exploring that I am starting to call “Life 3.0.” As the semantic web continues to evolve, the meta data associated with the ways we defines ourselves will become increasingly valuable.

And I have to ask myself, how do YOU define the Digital YOU? Is there one place on the Internet that properly contains all of the elements that are a proper reflection of who you are and how you want to be understood by others? Just wondering...

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Tags: Social Media, The Digital Me, Semantic Web, Life 3.0, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)