What’s Up? Part 1 - Our Latest Watch This Space Podcast

Our July podcast was spurred by the recent announcement of Connect from Slack, which draws a clearer line in the sand for those who do or do not use email in the workplace. This may be more about disruption than innovation, but it was the starting point for this episode – The Evolving Collaboration Landscape During Pandemic Times.
I’ve been talking for some time about how our podcast is evolving, and this episode marks our first time using a purpose-built recording platform. The audio quality isn’t quite where we need it to be, but starting next month, you should notice a big improvement. Other pieces are falling into place now, and we’re well on our way to having the podcast upgraded for sharing on public platforms like iTunes, Google Podcast and Stitcher.
As usual, JAA subscribers get to hear our takeaways - right now, in this newsletter. Otherwise, I’ll be posting the podcast publicly on my website in a couple of weeks, so non-subscribers will have to wait a bit.
If you haven’t checked our earlier podcasts, you can do that from the podcast archive on my website. The archive has just been updated, showing both the 2020 podcasts, and a separate archive for previous podcasts.
Current podcasts also feature AI-driven transcripts that complement the audio replay link. This feature comes courtesy of Otter.ai, and I hope you like it. Otter transcribes in real time, and I should also note that this transcription feature only comes with the newsletter. The publicly-shared posts of our podcasts are audio-only, and for some, that will be enough. But really, wouldn’t you rather be a subscriber?

**Latest Watch this Space Podcast & Transcript, July 2020**

The Evolving Collaboration Landscape During Pandemic Times

What’s Up? Part 2 – More Highlights and Insights from June

Conference roundup – last month’s trend of participating in virtual events continued in June, and others are coming onstream for July and beyond. It’s very possible that live events will be off the table entirely for 2020, and most of what I’m hearing is about looking ahead to 2021. Here are the virtual events I took part in during June.
- Cisco Live
- SCTC Canadian Regional Event – speaker
- Jeff Pulver’s #140Conf event – speaker
Otherwise, here are the working highlights for June, and links to some of these can be found in my June blog posts:
- New Insight Report – for Digitcom:
  - Enabling Businesses to Extend Communications Beyond Legacy Telephony – first in a three-part series (download required)
- Webinar – SD WAN Opportunity for CSPs – sponsored by Oracle
- Completed projects – to be published in July:
  - IoT eBook for Enghouse
  - Case study for Zoom
  - Insight Report #2 for Digitcom
  - Insight Report for a UCaaS provider
  - Insight Report for a UCaaS provisioning vendor
- Completed work, other:
  - Judging for UC Awards 2020 – evaluated 35 entries
  - Presentation for Enterprise Connect Virtual – taking place August 3
June writing spotlight – top pick would be my latest No Jitter post – Who Wants to Return to the Office?
Here’s my Writing Roundup post for June – it’s a monthly digest of my thought leadership across various channels, including Tech Target, No Jitter and BC Strategies
Here are the social media highlights for last month. Since these stats change every day, the metrics are just a basic snapshot, but they provide a good sense of reach beyond my blog and newsletter. For my business, I use Twitter and LinkedIn, and here are some approximate tallies for June:
- For LinkedIn – I shared 29 posts, which registered 21,245 views, and those numbers were very similar to May. My top LinkedIn post registered 2,118 views; 7 posts had 1,000+ views, and 20 posts had 500+ views.
- For Twitter - there were 24,800 impressions, 136 profile visits, 34 mentions, and 25 tweets.
- My “top tweet” was as a shout-out for the #140Conf event I was speaking at - it had 1,624 impressions. Overall, 7 tweets had 1,000+ impressions.
I recently added a new tab on my website – My Music. This showcases my fun side, mainly from playing keyboards and guitar with the SIPtones. The stars finally lined up for a long-awaited update here, and a few new photos have been added, along with 10 new video clips from our recent Chicago gig, and a few others from our 2018 gig in Annapolis. Enjoy!

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for July

So far, I’ll be participating in five virtual events this month, and you’ll have to check my blog and social feeds for further details:
- July 9 – ITSPA Summer Series - speaking
- July 14-15 – Google Cloud Next
- July 21 – Oracle Startup Idol
- July 22 – Amazon Alexa Live
- July 30 – UC Awards 2020 – winners announced then
The pipeline for new projects remains busy, including a new white paper, an add-on for another one, a market research project, new posts/writeups for existing series, and guest blog posts to support an eBook that I helped write.

Hey Did You Know?

….That the June 2020 Watch This Space podcast marked our 25th episode!

I doubt anyone has listened to all of them, so that knowledge base pretty much resides with us – myself, and long-time colleague Chris Fine. To date, we’ve done all the episodes together, and while that formula hasn’t changed, we are thinking bigger, and in due time we’ll have guests join us. I’ve actually been getting requests along these lines, and am saving them up in the to-do folder for the podcast.

If you don’t know, almost all the episodes are archived in the Podcasts section of my website, and you can check them out any time. Also, if you’re new to our podcast, we’ve only recently adopted the Watch This Space moniker, with graphics to give it a consistent look and feel. Our earlier episodes were more of a work in progress, but you may still find the content of our conversations relevant.

With that said, I’ll mark the 25-episode milestone with a throwback to our very first podcast, which we recorded onsite at Jeff Pulver’s Monage event (no longer running I’m afraid) in April 2018. So, if you want the I-was-there-when badge of honor, just click on the image below to hear our first take on podcasting. Would love to hear to hear your thoughts, not just on episode #1, but for what you’d like to hear Chris and I talk about on future podcasts.