The purpose of this CXTech Week 38 2020 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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Phonism, VoIP device management, announces deal with Ribbon

Congratulations to Steve Lazaridis, co-founder and CEO of Phonism. VoIP device management is one of those underappreciated capabilities. BlueFace had made significant investments in its phone management, using it to differentiate its offer. Similarly, ipcortex had some neat device management technology.

Given Ribbon are making an investment in the joint product, I assume there is some exclusivity for Ribbon. Here are Steve’s thoughts on the announcement.

TADHack Global Developer Resources Webinar, Tuesday 29th September

For everyone who has registered for TADHack Global 2020 we’re running two Developer Resources Webinars on Tuesday 29th September at:

• 8AM ET / 1PM UK / 2PM CET / 5:30 Sri Lanka / 8PM Singapore;
• 10AM PT / 1PM ET / 6PM UK / 7PM CET.

It’s a chance to get an introduction to the sponsors’ resources as well as ask any questions. We’ll record the sessions, so if you can not make either session, you can still catch up on what happened. And you can ask questions in the comments section of this weblog as well.

TADHack Asia Pacific Adds TADHack Sri Lanka

We’re excited Sri Lanka are joining us for TADHack Global 2020. A big thank you to Roshni Fernando and the rest of the hSenid Mobile team for your support.

Route Mobile $80M IPO subscribed 73 times on final bidding day

The market remains quite frothy for anything programmable telecoms / telecom aggregation related, that uses the acronym CPaaS, OTT, and national version of Twilio.

TADHack UK is now Virtual only

With the new social distance restrictions we decided to play safe and make TADHack UK virtual only. Thanks to Simwood and Aplisay for adapting to the situation.

Back in March we ran a virtual only TADHack-mini Orlando with impressive hacks, https://tadhack.com/2020/mini-orlando/.

It’s definitely not the same as hacking physically together, fingers crossed for next year.

We’ll have chat (Element) and video conferencing (Simwood) running over the TADHack weekend, and you can start hacking early to avoid stressing over one weekend.

Hacking from home can be a little challenging as the rest of the family do not consider you to be ‘that busy’, unless you rope them into your team 😉

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Rui Gramacho just left Talkdesk for MessageBird as Director of Engineering. As mentioned in previous newsletters MessageBird has been through a pivot and at least one round of layoffs. I think Rui was brought in to Talkdesk to remove the Twilio dependence once Twilio Flex was launched. And likely to help MessageBird help other businesses do the same.

In related news Pedro Pereira is now Vice President, Global Head of Product & Engineering for UC/CPaaS at Talkdesk. Previously, Pedro was with WIT-Software for 20 years as CTO, becoming the default client for RCS with telcos.

And even more from the Portuguese Programmable Communications mafia: Filipe Leitão added a position as Crew Member at Conta Connosco.

Chris Matthieu has started a new position as ‘re-Founder’ & CEO at Twelephone. I remember Twelephone from 2013.

Ilia Smolin has left Apifonica for a new position as Customer Success Manager at N3

Jean-Luc Nguyen is now Founder at Storylation. Jean-Luc is a previous TADHack winner, and Storylation is a social network where you can’t talk about yourself. Users can only share positive stories about other people they care about. With appropriate controls, for example paid placement of stories, this could be quite interesting. The challenge is always those that game the system, Storylation’s aims are to be commended.

For TADHack Jean-Luc won the Circuit by Unify prize of $1k for CrowdSalers. He created a Circuit module that can be plugged on any marketplace product page to allow customers to interact with other customers and product specialists via text, voice and video chat. Its used many of the Circuit API capabilities including presence, and all created in 24 hours.

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