Richard Sprague WebLog : Event

eComm Notes part 4

sprague — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:55:15 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, here are some notes on other presentations;

Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis): Starts out with a great quote “Don’t assume” because consensus viewpoints are often flawed. (I would say consensus is usually flawed). Interesting examples of 3rd-party paid data and widgets combining benefits for multiple types of citizens looking for information, supplied via APIs delivered by MNOs.
Brough Turner (Founder, AshtonBrooke): 100Mbps broadband ranges from $127 (Amsterdam) to $11 in Stockholm but isn’t even available in important places like New York! His claim is that structural bypass is the solution, not network neutrality.
David Beckemeyer (TelEvolution) proposes a mobile phone sensor-net, a large peer-to-peer stream to send tons of interesting information beyond simply location. Wonder if he’s heard of the MIT SenseAble City ?
Graham Brierton (CTO, VoiceSage): CEBP (Comms Enabled Business Process) and how it makes a business use voice more efficiently.
Todd Landry (NEC Sphere) connecting the dots between people who “run the business” and those who “make phonecalls” with smart software.
Amir Zmora (Radvision): technical discussion of H.264 and video encoding issues for IP Video Communcations.
Jan Linden (VP Engineering at Global IP Solutions) VOIP and Video on iPhone, which he likes for the easy API, but doesn’t like for the lack of VOIP over 3G, lack of background app support, and requirement that app monitor the audio. Note that you can’t do 2-way video on iPhone yet because the app can’t access the camera.
Darrin Mylet (Founder, Spectru-station) hates that fact that 85% of all spectrum in the U.S. is going unused and proposes an interesting way to open access fairly to apps that need them.
Mark Rottegering (T-Mobile). Most people like the mobile industry is maturing, but really it’s merging with other industries. Lots of nice data, including a discussion of consumer willingness to pay per bit. Very interesting strategic discussion.
Shai Berger (Fonolo) is one I remember from last year’s eComm, so it was nice to get an update. They now have 500 companies mapped, with fascinating information about the call trees of various orgs. (Worst is US Department of Veterans Affairs).

…and much more. I’m learning a lot just browsing through the presentations. Organizer Lee Dryburgh says he wants to post the audio to IT Conversations again and I can’t wait to add them to my podcast list.

eComm Notes part 3

sprague — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:57:40 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, I’m browsing through several more presentations. Ordinarily I’d write my thoughts quickly in Twitter and be done with it, but sometimes it’s nice to have the longer flow and easier format of a blog post. Plus I can look back later and find it again.

First stop is Alec Saunder’s presentation, titled “Voice 2.0 Applications in a Mobile World”. Basic idea continues on his Manifesto theme that voice is a baseline and that apps are key. Slide 4 (the “future” of 2005) looks interesting: about the long tail of opportunities in online communities, but the title makes me wonder if he thinks there is now a new future? Unfortunately the following slide is a video (not available in the Slideshare deck), so I couldn’t tell if he meant more. But while I was there, I signed up for the Premium version of his new application, Calliflower. (30 days free – normally $50).

Then I looked at Mobivox’ Peter Diedrich: discussion and demo of CRM over Voice.

Trevor Baca (Jaduka): How to Do Things with Voice is a tough presentation to see without the presenter. It’s mostly photos of objects and situations that have something to do with communication.

Mark Spencer from Digium has a presentation on the Skype+Asterisk beta and the new chan_skype use cases: lets Skype calls integrate with existing Asterisk call queue. Claimed he’s going to start a public beta soon.

Peter Ecclesine from Cisco on White Space. He predicts the rise of database gateways that associate your device location and your contact info. Look at http://showmywhitespace.com to see how much of the new free white space spectrum is available in your area.

…more notes later as I have time.

eComm Notes (Telio)

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:26:14 GMT

My boss, XDH kept mentioning Scandinavia in his Twitter feed from Ecomm, so one of my first stops in my Virtual eComm attendance was the presentation by Alan Duric, CTO at the Norwegian telecom company, Telio ASA.

Telemetry and real time communications will start to merge, thanks to technology like RFID.
He likes mobile storage: points out that churn is much lower when customers get online data storage from their carrier.

I’ll be cranking through the presentations throughout the next few days, writing up my summaries… Looks like a really good show!

eComm 09 virtually

sprague — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:50:19 GMT

Last year’s eComm was a wonderful way to see the latest cool stuff going on in the field of new communications technology and (more importantly) meet the people who are behind it all. The conference site, unfortunately, had poor internet coverage and many of us were unable to blog about it. And if you can’t blog in real time, it loses a lot of the fun. (That’s one reason Twitter is becoming so popular).

This year, my boss is attending, and I’m trying to stay in touch virtually as much as I can. So what do I do? Twitter of course: I’m following a steady stream of updates in real time on the Official eComm 2009 Twitter Channel.

So far, I’ve been intrigued by the Voxeo announcements and their new Tropo service.

Here’s a photo of conference organizer Lee Dryburgh speaking this morning, from Duncan Davidson’s FlickrR stream:

Looking forward to hearing as many more updates as I can squeeze in throughout the conference.