The purpose of this CXTech Week 36 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list, I also publish this on my weblog. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.
Congrats to Voyant Acquiring Acrobits
Acrobits’ portfolio includes mobile communication softphones for smartphones, WebRTC clients for browsers, and software development kits (SDKs) for developers. Acrobits has tens of millions of softphone endpoints deployed across a broad customer base in the EU, the United States and more than 70 other countries. Acrobits’ software ecosystem provides mobile solutions enabling voice, text and video communication to global enterprises, service providers, MVNOs and software developers.
It’s an interesting technology buy, as it can immediately help both their UC and CPaaS businesses. And moves Voyant into a global CXTech enabler position. It will be interesting to hear from Howard Avner of Voyant at TADSummit Americas.
FCC moves toward June 2020 auction of CBRS spectrum
The new proposed date for when the licensed portion of the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) band goes up for auction is June 25, 2020. “10-4 Rubber Duck, we got ourselves a convoy,” queue CW McCall song Convoy…
Dean Bubley will be keynoting at TADSummit Americas on “BYOSpectrum – Why private cellular is a game-changer” which will cover what this can mean to CXTech.
The Countdown to Enterprise Connect 2020 has begun, and TADHack-mini Orlando 2020 will be there
TADHack-mini Orlando takes place the weekend before Enterprise Connect, the largest event in enterprise communications and collaboration, where thousands of people from around the world meet. TADHack-mini Orlando is well-established and respected pre-event to EC, now in its 4th year; and TADHack is in its 7th year. We have the greatest diversity of any hackathon with both coders and non-coders taking part.
TADHack is a chance to promote and show your platforms and technologies to the EC20 audience in a practical, efficient and insightful way. We dominate the social media stream over the weekend before the event as people travel to Enterprise Connect. We have a session at enterprise connect to present the results of the hackathon to the attendees. TADHack is live streamed, the hacks are recorded and blogged about so all the results are available for off-line viewing immediately after TADHack and throughout enterprise connect. The TADHack winners have access to the conference, enabling them to promote the sponsors through their many conversations on how they won.
TADHack enables a broad-base of developers to use its sponsors’ platforms to solve problems across people’s work, home and community lives. This is unique with TADHack, the people involved come from many industries, telecoms is not their primary focus, though we do get a few telecoms geeks hacking. Every year this diverse mix of people and technologies creates impressive collateral for the TADHack sponsors.
TADHack is a series of hackathons that take place around the world, throughout the year. From the massive TADHack Global with over 1000 people taking part, to ‘minis’ associated with larger events, where 50-70 people take part. You can see the results of previous TADHack-mini Orlandos here: https://tadhack.com/2019/mini-orlando/, https://tadhack.com/2018/mini-orlando/, https://tadhack.com/2017/mini-orlando/.
TADHack-mini Orlando 2020, 28/29 March in 2020, will continue the success of previous years. And we’re adding a theme, a focus, for the hackathon on intelligent agents / assistants (also known as bots) using conversational interfaces. The purpose of the theme is to help draw more interest from the Enterprise Connect audience as they see a popular topic being used in practical and unique ways. And provide valuable training and experience for developers taking part in TADHack in the emerging hot-topic of intelligent agents / assistants (also known as bots) using conversational interfaces.
The platforms involved do not need to have public APIs, they can simply have an instance of their platform running for people to implement their solutions on. To win prizes at TADHack requires the hacks to be built on the sponsors’ technologies. But we also allow showcases of intelligent agents / assistants using conversational interfaces. That is companies that want to be part of TADHack but are not ready to sponsor, can showcase their platform in a 5 minute pitch. We’ve done this since the inception of TADHack in 2014, allowing both hacks and showcases, to demonstrate the power and potential of technologies.
Nir Simionovich (CEO of Cloudonix) is running a NYC Meetup on Democratizing Communications Infrastructure on Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Nice review of the 3 Problems Still Facing Voice Services by Alexey Aylarov, CEO and Co-founder of Voximplant
To recap Alexey’s article, here is where things stand for voice services and its infamous problems:
- Mass spam calls made with the help of bots. Regulators and technology companies are addressing spam calls, but robocalling will stay with us for a time to come.
- Quality of transmitted signal at interconnect. So far, the solution seems to be a mass implementation of 5G and global usage of VoIP. However, this won’t happen at once.
- Poor quality of communication during teleconferences. This problem is gradually being solved by improving AI that can process the signal in real-time.
And how I solve 2 of them:
- Android catches most of them, and today I only answer calls that are scheduled, unless its family or the school. Text me first if you want to schedule ASAP.
- This one is tough, it’s a long road.
- Use the collab app. In many emerging markets fixed broadband is good enough even mobile broadband is these days. I’ve had HD voice conference calls between US, Brasil, Sri Lanka, KL, and China. All using the app, all HD, it was great!
Nice review of API Best Practices from the Mio Team, who are sponsoring TADSummit Americas
Wazo Sponsors Astricon
I’ll be presenting at Astricon, on “Show me the ‘UCing Money.” You can see the schedule here.
Wazo also have a new logo for the platform project.
BTW Wazo is sponsoring TADSummit EMEA.
How do you know AI is at Peak BS?
When a couple of billionaires have a rather embarrassing discussion about it.
Full debate (quite tedious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lUEnMaiAU
Some snippets of Elon going WTF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw
AI does not exist, it will, but today it does not. I replace the word AI with software to avoid getting frustrated reading most website copy and many people’s titles. Some use machine learning instead of AI, which is still a bit of a stretch as the machine is not learning. It’s simply statistics, if input is (complex matrix using notation I barely remember from university) then likely output is (another simple or complex matrix). And in-between is a big chunk of code that takes the ‘big data’ and condenses it down into smaller chunk of data and an algorithm. Data Scientists were suppose to do this several years ago, but after dealing with dirty data for many years gave-up, renamed themselves AI Scientists, and can now blame the machine rather than themselves.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Jason Rutherford is back at Oracle as SVP and GM of the Communications Applications Global Business Unit, after a stint with Kore.
Jens Voigt is now Head of Marketing and Product Management of CME Platform at Tech Mahindra. Previously he was with Dynacommerce, and before that Redknee coming in from the NSN BSS division acquisition.
Brian Peebles is now Senior Manager Technology Development at Verizon. Previously he was Chief Architect / AVP Mobile Broadband Services at Tata Communications. Before that he was CTO at Dialogic.