The purpose of this CXTech Week 24 2022 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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Covered this week:
- Open Source Telecom Software Survey – please spare 5 mins to complete the survey
- Now its Web5, not Web 3, according to Jack Dorsey
- Telnyx quietly announces Telnyx Storage
- Pakistan E-Commerce Startup Dastgyr Raises Record $37 Million Series A
- Congratulations to Webio Raising $4M
- TelcoSwitch Receives Investment from Queen’s Park Equity (QPE) for MBO and further M&A
- Telesmart.io resells BICS DIDs
- LinkedIn is on a downward spiral
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Open Source Telecom Software Survey – please spare 5 mins to complete the survey
It’s only been one week, yet we’re half way there to our target of responses. Thank you to the 41 people who have completed the survey so far. It will only take 5 mins and you’ll get early access to the results.
Here are the surveys from 2021, 2020 and 2019, with the results from 2021, 2020 and 2019. Thank you for your continued support.
This year we’ve focused on general questions across DDoS, Security, STIR/SHAKEN, and some market ones. The project specific surveys change slightly year to year, so we’re taking a break this year.
Here’s the link to the Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2022.
If any question is not relevant or you have no opinion, skip it. Thank you for taking the time to answer the questions.
Now its Web5, not Web 3, according to Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey announced at Consensus 2022 that TBD, the Bitcoin arm of Block (Square), is working on a new vision for the internet. That is working on web5 to replace web3 to focus on decentralized applications and allowing users to own their own data. Sound like what Status, a TADHack sponsor, and Protocol Labs, multi-year TADSummit presenter, have been doing for quite a few years.
It is fair to point out Web3’s progress has been slower than anticipated. Part of the problem in pointing out “the centralization of Web2 is bad and we want to give back power to the people” is the Web2 folks do not see the incentive for supporting Web3.
What happened to Web4? It was skipped as Web5 is an amalgamation of web2 and web3. From my perspective, the decentralized web is still a work in progress. Here’s a great resource to get up to speed. The challenge is finding the use cases based on the decentralized web that grab user adoption and at least alignment with the existing Web2 dominant companies.
Telnyx quietly announces Telnyx Storage
A distributed cloud object storage with low latency was quietly announced by Telnyx. Low cost, low latency, and S3-compatible APIs for easy migration.
The reason I mention this is it could be one of those decentralized web applications that start to break Web3 through into mainstream for enterprise adoption. Also with my vCon hat on, I can see how vCon’s created using Telnyx CPaaS can be mashed up with Telnyx storage and other conversation processing services, e.g. ASR, sentiment, etc.
Pakistan E-Commerce Startup Dastgyr Raises Record $37 Million Series A
“Wait a minute, why are you talking about Pakistani e-commerce start-ups?”
It’s about Khairil Abdullah, now CEO at Veon Ventures, previously CEO of Axiata Digital where he helped fund ADA (advertising) and Aspirasi (insurance). I did a piece about Keep an Eye on Malaysia that included Aspirasi. He has a track record of success in telco-funded innovation.
Veon is in Pakistan, Jazz, the telco will likely be kept at arms-length from Dastgyr. The timing is interesting as Indian e-commerce companies have not expanded successfully in Pakistan. Its predominantly cash-based. Perhaps the timing it right for a local e-commerce company to start to change that.
Below is Khairil’s keynote from TADSummit 2014.
Congratulations to Webio Raising $4M
Last year they raised 500k from Finch Capital, covered in CXTech Week 23 2021, as part of a €1.5m in pre-series A funding
Now they’ve raised $4m. Webio is a specialist in conversational intelligence in collections and payments. The series A funding round was led by Finch Capital.
Companies like FICO have a well established Collections and Recovery business, combined with their decision management and scoring enable reminders on payments, and depending on the industry vertical processes to help avoid missing multiple payments. However, it’s relatively static.
Webio take this to the next level, with a more dynamic approach of using insights from the individual conversations to steer the process. So keep an eye out for a FICO / Webio announcement in the future 😉
You have a chance to meet Paul Sweeney from Webio at TADSummit 2022 8/9 Nov in Aveiro and online where he will present on:
CPaaS Conversational Platforms and Conversational Customer Service – The Experience Gap”?
Paul Sweeney, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Webio
- CPaaS players are doing the low hanging, simple conversations via their conversational design and plug in’s to the messenger layer, but what are they really hoping to achieve, and should they be aimed at the developer community?
- No-code low-code configurable conversational customer support have done really well by integrating with customer ticketing, and integrating other platforms into their workflows. Kustomer.com was bought for a billion, something is going right there.
- Conversational experiences are becoming part of the digital customer experience. What does this look like and why might this be important for other companies to understand?
Check out the TADSummit agenda, we’ve got loads to add, yet already it’s full of programmable communications thought leadership you’ll not see anywhere else.
TelcoSwitch Receives Investment from Queen’s Park Equity (QPE) for MBO and further M&A
Queen’s Park Equity (“QPE”) recently announced it has supported the MBO of TelcoSwitch.
The investment will enable TelcoSwitch to explore further M&A opportunities, broaden its channel-focused product suite, increase headcount with the objective of exceeding 400,000 active users by the end of 2024.
This follows on from the series of acquisitions completed in the last 18 months, including OneVoice, PBX Hosting and SureVoIP, covered in the CXTech newsletters and this review of 2021.
Telesmart.io resells BICS DIDs
Telesmart.io offer DID inventory management solution across number and messaging services. Their inventory management platform serves resellers, CPaaS/UC providers, and customers directly. They’ve added BICS DIDs to the list of phone number providers.
Linkedin is on a downward spiral
Yesterday I did my first ‘Unfollow’ on Linkedin. Twitter is becoming less busy for business posts, people seem to have moved over to Linkedin and the unfortunate result is there are quite a few non-business related posts.
Some of the LinkedIn comments and squabbling appear more like I’ve see on Twitter. Sales Navigator has also diminished the usefulness of Linkedin Messages, I’m currently being spammed for corporate cleaning services. Linkedin has changed.
Even the website sucks, it can be slow, stall, or crash when posting or messaging. It reminds me of the slow downward spiral of Skype after Microsoft bought it and tried to make it more ‘social’.
Social messaging in general is degrading. I’m not sure what can change the situation. It does feeling like there are start-up opportunities to create services with much better experiences.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Giacomo Vacca is now Senior WebRTC Engineer at SignalWire. Here’s Giacomo writing about his experiences at TADHack Paris 2015.
Mark Castleman is now Managing Director at Ignite for Startups at Intel Corporation. I’ve known Mark since one of his start-ups was the customer of Tropo, an early programmable communications company.
Manish Goyal is now Cloud Native Industry Director at Oracle. We’ve known each other for nearly 15 years, since his Frost and Sullivan days.
Chris Matthieu is now Entrepreneur In Residence at Intel Corporation focusing on Web3 and Metaverse strategies. I can not remember exactly where I first met Chris, was it Teleku or Voxeo or the SMS/Twitter start-up using Tropo’s free service for developers? He’s always innovating in programmable communications.
Ron Elwell is now Group President Data and AI Solutions at Real Chemistry. I first met Ron when I was setting up a partnership to add presence to Octave Communications collaboration platform, where he was CEO. And 20 years later people are still working on add meaningful presence information to collaboration 😉
Joseph Naja is now Data Center Technician at Amazon Web Services (AWS)!
Muthian Ratinasabapati is now Director, Global Head, Professional Services for Global Financial Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS). We first met over 2 decades ago at CTP (Cambridge Technology Partners).
Steven Cohn is now Founder, CEO at Winware.ai. I’ve known Steven since his start-up BuyYourFriendADrink.com that was sold to LivingSocial. It was a programmable communications start-up.
Hannes Van Rensburg has left Clickatell.
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