The purpose of this CXTech Week 44 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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Twilio Q3 revenue $448.0, up 52%
The pandemic is definitely working in Twilio’s favor. One of the trends I’ve seen is the growth in their channels. They announced this quarter Deloitte Digital joined the Twilio Build program as a premier Global Systems Integrator. This is mostly for FLEX, but it does pull through many of their other products.
Astricon 2020
The 2020 virtual event, AstriCon (Plan 9), was held on October 21st – October 22nd. I greatly enjoyed the Target presentation on reviewing how they migrated thousands of Cisco end-points to Asterisk with no site visits.
This year Asticon ran a Spanish track. Local language support was highlighted in this year’s open source survey, I’ll be presenting the survey results at TADSummit EMEA Americas. Well done in growing the Spanish-speaking open source telecom software community.
Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”
It’s one of those headlines that are statements of the bleeding obvious. I enjoy my OnePlus 6, and have no plans for an upgrade anytime soon. Its camera is better than the latest iPhone 12 in my opinion, has a headphone jack, and came with a dash charger for fast charging. You can pick up a OnePlus 6 for $200-250 these days. Latest iPhone 12s range between $800-$950.
Just like laptops, the OS and most apps are not driving the need to upgrade so often. Telcos continue to throw money at customers looking to upgrade and lock themselves into a 2.5 year contacts (30 months not 24 months). $800 in bill discounts when trading in an iPhone 8 with AT&T. It’s a cycle that is beginning to run out of steam.
I bought the OnePlus 6 because my Nexus 5X had stopped working, a hardware issue with the processor. Nexus 5X is available for $120 today, but I wouldn’t recommend them because of several hardware issues. It will likely be some hardware failure on my current phone that pushes me to see what Google or OnePlus have available. Just like my current Macbook pro from 2013 that I’m using to write this weblog; its hardware failure, not painfully slow performance, that now forces the majority of consumers to upgrade.
TADSummit EMEA Americas Starts 2nd Nov
TADSummit EMEA Americas kicks off on Monday 2nd Nov, with an invited keynote, Engaging Developers, from Steven Goodwin.
On the 3rd Nov, we have a world-class panel discussion on Serverless and RTC. Check out the panelists opinions on serverless and RTC before the panel.
The panelists include: João Camarate Silva (founder CEO GoContact), Simon Woodhead (founder CEO Simwood), Tim Panton (founder CTO Pi.pe), Jason Berryman (Freelance Google Cloud Architect), Sebastian Schumann (Deutsche Telekom), and Marten Schoenherr (founder CEO Automat Berlin).
A BIG THANK YOU to the TADSummit EMEA Americas sponsors: Sangoma, GoContact, Automat Berlin GmbH, and Radisys Corporation.
Unifonic Webinar, The Customer Engagement Revolution
On Wednesday 7th October I gave a Unifonic webinar / interview with Jonathan Labin, International President of Unifonic.
I’ve known Unifonic for many years, we’re hoping at some point in the future to have a TADHack Global KSA / UAE location run by Unifonic.
Unifonic are a regional CPaaS provider, focused on the Middle East. They provide the local support and market understanding necessary for customer success in CPaaS. Ignore the Bay Area hype, focus on a partner that understands your market and business, it’s not a one size fits all in programmable communications.
After my introduction in this Unifonic webinar I provided some definitions to cut through the marketing hype. We focused on some programmable communications (CPaaS) use cases, discussed the future of programmable communications, with some specific recommendations focused on immediate action.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulation to Andreas Granig, who is now founder & CEO at Sipfront – Better SIP Testing.
Well done Vincent Puglia for starting a new position as Sales Engineer, Cloud at Haivision. Vincent was one of the first TADHack Global winners back in 2014.
I’ve known Sami Mäkeläinen for many years. He was asking for book recommendations on Linkedin. With any book, there’s a story behind the motivation to read it, as it’s a significant investment of time. I enjoyed the Norsemen TV show on Netflix, we use several of the insults from the show at home 🙂 Some of the everyday Viking life in the show made me realize I needed to update my understanding of its history. Also the show “The Last Kingdom” showed my understanding of that time period was a bit (understatement) stale. Then I saw “Children of Ash and Elm” by Neil Price, distinguished professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala Uni. I’m learning, and it’s a great way to catch-up with the latest understanding of Viking history.
I was catching up on my reading this week, and discovered a great article in the IEEE Spectrum about a 1975 digital camera prototype by Steven Sasson from Kodak. Its resolution was 100 by 100 pixels and used a Fairchild (now part of ON Semiconductor) CCD. The storage was cassette tape! Hacking is a window into the future, in this case by 20+ years.
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