Jeff Pulver


Jeff Pulver is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his work as founder and chief executive of pulver.com and co-founder of Free World Dialup, Vonage, VON Coalition, MoNage, Blockchain Token Association and Zula. Pulver has been called a Voice over Internet Protocol pioneer, and has written extensively on VoIP telephony, and the need to develop an alternative to government regulation of its applications layer.

Biography

Jeff Pulver grew up in a Jewish family in Kings Point, New York, and was graduated from Great Neck North High School in 1980. While working at a Long Island accounting firm, Pulver founded Spreadsheet Solutions Corp. to market add-ins for Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel.
A licensed amateur radio operator since the age of 12, Pulver holds the call sign WA2BOT, and credits the hobby with sparking his interest in internet technology, saying, "it was amateur radio that unlocked connection to voice over IP”.
He became interested in Internet telephony in 1995, when he was as a systems administrator at Cantor Fitzgerald. Pulver founded a company called Min-X.com in 1998 to offer Voice over IP services; he recruited Jeffrey A. Citron to join, who helped raise $12 million in funding, including $1 million of his own money, and took over as CEO. The company changed its name to Vonage in 2001. Pulver left the Vonage in 2002 to start another VOIP venture called Free World Dialup. In that company, Pulver invented the CellSocket, a device to make and receive cellular voice calls via a standard phone, and was listed as a BusinessWeek Tech Guru in 2003. Pulver is the chief writer of what is referred to as the Pulver Order, which was adopted in 2004 by the Federal Communications Commission as the first FCC ruling regarding Internet Protocol communications. The order ruled that computer-to-computer VoIP is not a telecommunications service. He coined the term purple minutes to describe value-added IP network traffic. Considered one of the leading experts in the field of streaming audio and video technologies, Pulver has been called a pioneer in VoIP telephony. He was profiled in 2006 by The Wall Street Journal, discussing his visions about both voice and video communications via the Internet.
In 1995 he coined the term VON to stand for Voice/Video on the Net and continues today to contribute words to both the telecom and social media vernacular. In 1996 he founded the VON Coalition which helped keep VoIP unregulated in America for 9 years. From 1997 to 2008 he produced and hosted the VON Conferences. VON conferences in the US and Europe helped create and coalesce ecosystems around VoIP, online communications.
He has also been named as "a leading thought-leader on the Real-Time Web", and refers to himself as “a habitual entrepreneur who likes to start Internet communications companies.”
Pulver organizes a conference series focusing on Twitter activities and strategy called 140 Characters Conference that is held in various locations around the world. He has also hosted events that bring people to the Caicos islands to "see the night sky, learn about astronomy and talk about the future". Pulver is also an investor in startup companies. Pulver resides in Great Neck, New York. He also spent time in Remsenburg, New York.
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.

Works