Last year I heard many people (Thomas Howe, Martin Geddes, and Brough Turner to name just a few) talking very positively about a new conference, eComm (Emerging Communications Conference), it attracted 300 people and 80 speakers from 15 countries. eComm brings together people leading the change in telecoms from both inside the industry and out. This conference provides a unique forum for anyone working on open innovation / third party applications, community and communications, open networks / handsets, communication enabled business processes, convergence of media / entertainment / telecom, service innovation, and cloud computing/telephony. For me, its simply a unique forum where all parties involved in open innovation / developer communities can get together and openly share their learning.
Just a few of the topics I’m looking forward to at the conference are:
- Learn from both sides of the fence on developer communities such as Android, Facebook, BT, Salesforce.com, Google, Broadsoft, etc;
- Find out the latest from JP Rangaswami on his BT/Ribbit plans, and from Martin Geddes (now head of strategy in BT) on why he joined BT;
- Shai Berger’s (CEO Fonolo) presentation on Fonolo’s success, here’s a Fonolo weblog article from last year; and
- Irv Shapiro’s (CEO IfbyPhone) presentation on Cloud Telephony.
On Tuesday at the conference afternoon I’ll be giving a session entitled ‘The Business Case for Opening the Network‘
Over the past year we’ve seen many operators launching open development initiatives, e.g. Verizon, O2, and Vodafone; as well as operators deploy gateways in their network to expose capabilities, e.g. Three in Australia and Telus in Canada. But are these activities just ‘window dressing,’ to keep investors content and analysts and the media quiet? Or is there a solid business case and rationale behind them? This session brings together work undertaken with many operators around the world in building their open innovation business cases, to frankly and independently present a ‘typical’ case.