The purpose of this CXTech Week 49 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.
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Telserv acquired by MessageBird
Telserv is a Dutch phone number (DID) provider, mainly fixed and virtual numbers. Through 2018/2019 they’ve fluffed up what they do. They are not a global voice network like BICS, some have misrepresented Telserv on that account.
This avoids MessageBird (a Dutch company) having to pay Voxbone (a Belgian company) so much cash, and will aid filling the gaps between Telserv and Voxbone’s offer. You may laugh that national identities could play a role; just try calling someone from Scotland, Ireland or Wales English 😉
If you need mobile numbers or fixed number with SMS, you’ll still need to deal with telcos / Voxbone. Nexmo made a point of building direct carrier relationships from the get-go for both numbers and accurate delivery / read receipts. Twilio is also building out more direct relationships than relying on aggregators. Voxbone’s main barrier is the time it takes to build out those carrier deals. I remember talking with Rodrigue Ullens, co-founder of Voxbone, on what he had to do to put all those deals in place.
As the programmable telecoms market matures, aggregators tend to get squeezed out when the span of control is small enough, as there’s less room for overlapping costs/profits.
New Amazon AI can transcribe a doctor’s natural speech to text
I’ve known Matt Wood since he first started in Amazon as a technology evangelist. Its great to see his work having such an impact.
Amazon’s newly introduced Amazon Transcribe Medical is an automatic speech recognition technology that understands medical lingo — abbreviations and all — and can transcribe a doctor’s speech to text. The model (not AI nor machine learning) has been trained up on lots of medical data sets.
Two years after Amazon announced the Amazon Transcribe service, a tool that automatically converts speech to text complete with natural formatting and punctuation, the company announced Amazon Transcribe Medical, a similar tool that has been optimized for clinical settings.
Matt Wood, the VP of AI at Amazon Web Services, explained that the purpose of this technology, “is to free up the doctor, so they have more attention going to where it should be directed. And that’s to the patient.”
Global CPaaS Provider, Kaleyra, Inc., Reports Results for the Third Quarter of Fiscal 2019
As they’re now a listed company it was interesting to see the details of their business.
Total revenue of $35.3 million for the third quarter of 2019 was up 49.5% from the third quarter of 2018 and up 14.4% sequentially from the second quarter of 2019.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
There have been quite a few people announcements this week, I’m only covering about half of them here, the filter being I know the people / companies quite well and have worked with them in the past.
Simon Muderack is now Chief Executive Officer and President Hansen Communications (a Hansen Technologies Company) at Hansen Technologies. This follows on from the acquisition of Sigma Systems back in May.
Peter Margaris is now Head of Product Marketing at Skybox Security. I’ve known Pete since his Lightbridge days (mobile carrier BSS).
Lionel Toullier is now Director of Practice – Telecom & Media at Atos IT Solutions and Services, well done!
Tera Hudson is now Sr. Marketing Manager, Corporate and University Partnerships at InStride, a learning service designed to achieve significant social impact through partnerships with universities and employers. I think the US greatly needs this as industry / university links are generally weak compared to Europe in my experience. Previously she was with Telesign,
Sabrina Ratheekan, Digital Product Manager – eCommerce at The Home Depot Canada. She was previously with WSO2.Telco.
Jorgen Skogstad is now Senior Business Value Consultant at ServiceNow. Previously he was with Oracle where he supported TADHack Global in Australia, before that Axiata Group where we worked together.
Alaaddin Alpay is now Head of Technology Projects & Business Development – Turkcell Strategy
Manjit Waters is now Director at Mobile Concepts, I’ve known Manjit since her Telefonica/BT days.
Bill Welch is now Senior Product Manager Edge and Public Cloud at Affirmed Networks.
Nadeem Ladha is now Business Development Director at TMT Analysis
Tobias Reusch is now, Director Sales at Solace.com, I’ve known him from his days at Aepona and Openmind.
Vikram Khandpur is now CPO at Sinch.