CXTech Week 43 2020 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 43 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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Moshe Beauford (UC Today) Reviews TADHack Global 2020

Thanks Moshe for giving TADHack Global a mention in UC Today 🙂

Payanese teenager stands out as an Telecom Application Developer

TADHack Global made it into the local Colombian newspaper 🙂 Thank you for everyone at TADHack Popayan for all your amazing work, including the team at Centro de Desarrollo Tecnológico CreaTIC.

TADSummit EMEA Americas Starts 2nd Nov and runs throughout November

Thank you to all the TADSummit EMEA Americas presenters and our sponsors: Automat Berlin, GoContact, Radisys, and Sangoma for making TADSummit possible.

We’ll kick things off on Monday the 2nd November with an invited keynote from Steven Goodwin on ‘Engaging Developers.’

Here is the full up to date agenda.  We’re still adding presentations to the agenda, the most recent is the open source project Fonoster from Pedro Sanders, an open source alternative to Twilio.

After the success of TADSummit Asia 2020 in May 2020 we decided to run TADSummit EMEA / Americas online to avoid taking any risks while we wait for the COVID-19 vaccine. We may not have the full networking experience and the enjoyment of spending a couple of days together. But we can share the latest thinking to place a collective milestone in the development of programmable communications.

Through November, each day we release a new presentation. It’s the focus of our social media for that day. When you have time through the day, have a look, if the presentation is interesting watch it and please ask the presenter questions either in the weblog comments or directly via email. If it’s not interesting, tomorrow’s could be more relevant. Have a busy week? No worries, catch up on the weekend what you missed. We’re not pretending an online event is the same as in-person, no silly contrived ‘virtual’ experiences. We recognize online needs to fit into your schedule, as when you’re in the (home) office, your business comes first.

Code of conduct framework for the telecom ecosystem

It’s nice to see culture mentioned in the first figure, even though it’s the elephant in the room throughout the rest of the paper. Many of these items have been mentioned over the past two decades as telcos created, disbanded, and recreated innovation groups.

Picking on 2 points:

  1. Funding: show start-ups making money by working with telcos. Until there’s a solid existence proof, nothing will change wrt investment, no matter how many ‘great conversations’ are had.
  2. Innovation Process – please, no more trials, JFDI. Look at MTN South Africa with Momo, Ideamart, and Vimla! with Working Group Two did at TADHack Global the weekend before last. Good ideas are receiving support to get to market in months.

I would summarize the code of conduct as, ‘be human, not corporate.’ and there-in lies the problem of culture. Unenforceable codes of conduct will not change the fortress telcos and their strategic vendors have built for anything that ‘touches’ the network.

Instead, focus on the stuff that doesn’t. If you can get an innovation process working there, incrementally bring that deeper into the network, and let $$ drive change.

We’ll cover telecom service innovation in several presentations and interviews at TADSummit EMEA Americas through November:

Code Chefs – Hungry Web Developer Podcast by Vincent Tang & German Gamboa

Highly recommend this podcast by Vincent and German, TADHack winners.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Lavneesh Arora is now Global Director – Quick commerce, New Verticals at Delivery Hero. Delivery Hero is a global online food ordering and delivery marketplaces, headquartered out of Berlin. I’ve known Lavneesh since his Airtel days.

Avik Datta is now a postgraduate Student at Imperial College London – MSc Sustainable Energy Futures. I think this is part-time as he appears to still be with Liberty Latam. It’s great to see 🙂

The next three all have a common threat of Dialogic:

  • Steve Anderson is now Vice President of Sales at Clearspan Communications
  • Bill Crank is President & CEO (Board of Directors) at Clearspan Communications
  • Chris Boulton is now Chief Technology Officer at Clearspan Communications

Chris Chandler is now Entrepreneur In Residence at Antler. I’ve known Chris since the early 2000s.

Alex Donn is now Marketing at Maslo, empathetic computing. A welcome break for his talents, instead of trying to create a category of mobile edge compute developers 😉

Gabriel Cassim is now for Development lead at Geekulcha

Akhil Gokul is now VP, Head of Core, Cloud & IT, CTO & Business Development office, Customer Unit Verizon at Ericsson. I’ve known Akhil for nearly one decade.

Francisco Camejo is now Salesforce/Vlocity Team Leader at Arcsona. A winner at TADHack Uruguay in 2016.

Christos Papatheodorou is now Manager, VoIP and IMS Network Engineering at OTE Group of Companies (HTO)

Russell Bulmer is now Technical Product Manager at Global Relay. I’ve known Russell since his ShoZu days.

Christopher Tillie is now Chief Executive Officer at BitDATA. Chris attended the first ever TADSummit in Bangkok when he was part of Computer Associates.

 Alex Ciubuc added Co-Founder at DAS Telco (white-label CPaaS platform). I think he’s also BICS.

Allan MacGowan is now as Vice President of Analytics and Marketing at LBM Partner Services. Software development, data analysis and marketing to provide custom solutions for companies in the LBM (lumber and building materials) industry.

Jeremiah Brazeau is now CTO at Twilio, joining from SFDC.

I finally got some TADHack stickers from StickerMule, it was a quick and easy experience. And I got some hot sauce with the stickers, I’ll let you know how that tastes. Here’s a $10 off coupon if you’re looking for branded stickers, fridge magnets, beer coasters, mason jar labels, etc.

Here’s Chris Matthieu’s latest venture: Introducing XRPANET, the world’s first XR (AR+VR) metaverse AKA cyberspace — spatial web — real world web!

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