Jeff Pulver
Director
Jeff Pulver is an Internet and telecom entrepreneur who has been called the 'father of VoIP'). He has written extensively on VoIP telephony and is also well known for his work being a leading thought-leader on the 'real-time web.'
An habitual entrepreneur who likes to start Internet communications companies, Pulver is founder and chief executive of pulver.com and co-founder of Free World Dialup, Vonage, MONage, Alchemist, and Zula (app).
Starting at age 12 as a licensed amateur radio operator, Pulver credits this first experience with sparking his interest in internet technology, and “unlocking my connection to voice over IP.” He continued his interest in Internet telephony as a systems administrator at Cantor Fitzgerald, and then became co-founder and shareholder in Vonage, a VoIP provider based in Edison, N.J. He invented the CellSocket, a device to make and receive cellular voice calls via a standard phone, and was listed as a Business Week Tech Guru in 2003.
Pulver is the chief author of what’s now called the Pulver Order, which became the first FCC decision regarding IP communications, ruling that VoIP is not a telecommunications service. He was profiled by The Wall Street Journal in 2006, discussing his visions about both voice and video communications via the Internet.
He coined the term VON (Voice/Video on the Net) and founded the VON Coalition, which helped keep VoIP unregulated in the U.S. for many years. For nearly ten years, he produced and hosted VON Conferences in the US and Europe. In 2016, Pulver launched an Internet communication conference series called MONage, “The Future of the Conversational Web, Chatbots and Messaging," with events in Boston and San Jose.