A year ago September at VON Boston I attended a session, IM The State of Presence, for which the Skype representative was Nitzan Shaer, Director, Mobile Devices, Skype. I recall meeting with Nitzan briefly after the session and mentioned that I thought it was time to move beyond Skype WiFi phones. Shortly afterwards Nitzan left Skype to become Entrepreneur-in-Residence with IDG Ventures Boston.

As mentioned in a post a few days ago, Mobivox obtained a new $11 million financing from various venture capital firms, including founding investor IDG Ventures Boston. Today came the announcement that Nitzan, who actively participated in organizing the financing round, is joining Mobivox as COO.

Saunderslog: Mobivox hires COO.

Does this presage marketing agreements with handset manufacturers? Perhaps. Mobivox is somewhat unique in that it requires no cooperation from handset manufacturers to go to market. Or possibly Mobivox is trying to forge a stronger relationship with Skype as they begin their push into the handset space.

From my interview with CEO Stephane Marceau last week and our discussion of future plans I think Alec is reading too much into this. Simply stated, Mobivox works with every manufacturers' device, landline and mobile; they are going to focus on leveraging their core speech recognition technology to deliver new device independent services.

Tags: Skype, Mobivox, Nitzan Shaer, Stephane Marceau, IDG Ventures Boston