CXTech Week 39 2022 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 39 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:

  • TADHack is Only 2 Weeks Away!
  • TADHack Memories: When TADHack 2017 ran over 2 consecutive weekends!
  • Radisys Keynote added to the TADSummit Agenda
  • RingCentral Sponsors TADSummit 2022
  • Monnai Raises $3.15 Million Seed Round
  • Optus rejects claims of sloppy security
  • T-Mobile US makes bold eSIM push
  • OpenSIPS Summit 2022. Results from the Open Source Telecom Software Survey
  • September Edition of the RTCSec Newsletter
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADHack is Only 2 Weeks Away!

Thank you to everyone who has already registered for TADHack. If you have not yet registered, please do so before registration closes. Sri Lanka registration has just closed.

Check out the TADHack Guide if you have any questions. There are TADHack location prizes (up to $1k per location) as well as lots of local sponsor prizes (check out TADHack France for all their prizes), global prizes (1k per sponsor), a special accessibility and inclusion prize ($1k), and an additional global sponsor prize of $5k from Radisys!

For 2022 we have 3 excellent global sponsors, in addition to many local sponsors:

  • STROLID is leading the creation of vCon, a standard for virtual conversations. Like vCard or iCal, this will become the way the web shares conversation. This is an important standard for all developers, and you’ll learn about it before anyone else at TADHack. We all have tens if not hundreds of conversations every day. Yet most are lost because there is no standard way to store and share them.
  • Jambonz is an open source CPaaS, think Twilio for free. For TADHack they are partnering with Cognigy, a leader in conversation automation. Cognigy has integrated jambonz into its Voice Gateway product, and between Cognigy’s low code platform and Jambonz you’ll be able to easily create powerful voice bots.  See https://www.cognigy.com/about for more details on the Cognigy platform.
  • Radisys’ Engage Digital Platform has an excellent drag and drop development platform,  as well as offering APIs and SDKs. They exposes lots of resources across communications, speech recognition, natural language processing, and video analysis. They want to help you bring your hacks to market. Your hack from TADHack could become your side hustle, and perhaps even your main business. And this news is hot off the press: there’s an additional $5k prize for the best hack using Radisys!

TADHack Memories: When TADHack 2017 ran over 2 consecutive weekends!

Back in 2017 TADHack was massive – 3300 registration, and locations on the first weekend (23 – 24 Sept) in: Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Islamabad its satellite Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Kyiv, The Hague, Lagos, St Petersburg, Chicago, and Buenos Aires.

Here are some of the pictures from TADHack KL it really was massive.

Radisys Keynote added to the TADSummit Agenda

Advancing Cloud Communications Well Beyond the Basics – Leveraging AI and ML in all aspects of programmable communications applications and media analytics

Adnan Saleem, CTO – Software and Cloud Solutions at Radisys Corporation

  • Programmable cloud communications to date, though well adopted, providing predominantly only basic calling and messaging services
  • Advancements in AI and ML technologies enable a broad range of new rich and immersive digital engagement experiences, including AR/MR/XR and spatial codecs
  • AI/ML driven virtual assistants with speech and interactive computer generated video technology and computer vision capabilities are complex and compute intensive
  • Video and speech analytics from live media streams with NLU and computer vision technologies enable a wide range of new applications in numerous verticals
  • Radisys Engage Digital platform streamlines and accelerates the creation and deployment of these sophisticated applications with low-code to no-code based APIs/SDKs and Visual Design Tools

RingCentral Sponsors TADSummit 2022

Big News from TADSummit 2022 this week! We’ve added RingCentral as a sponsor. Keynote description coming soon.

This is excellent recognition of our 10 years of thought-leadership in programmable communications. And will be a great keynote will help you understand why I keep using the term programmable communications, not UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS.

Monnai Raises $3.15 Million Seed Round 

Congratulations to Pierre, Ravish, and all the Monnai team.

Monnai, a global infrastructure provider for consumer insights. It raised $3.15 million seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson and 9Yards Capital. Access to consumer data is critical for verifying identity, determining risk, and stopping fraud.

This new round of funding marks the company’s 1-year anniversary and follows an initial pre-seed raised at the end of 2021 from 500 Global, Emphasis Ventures (EMVC) and Ginkgo Ventures who also participated in this round, bringing the total raised so far to more than $4 million.

Monnai currently has customers in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America, with plans to expand into North America later this year. The expansion into North America surprised me as its a mature competitive market. I assume its North American customers with operations in Asia and LATAM.

Optus rejects claims of sloppy security

This one had many Australians I know tweeting in disbelief that a large corporation could be so tone deaf.

Sami Mäkeläinen’s quote if spot on, “Somebody please teach Optus not just cybersecurity, but crisis comms. This is just embarrassing. “

Mark White referred to all the security hurdles he jumped through as an Optus supplier, that clearly they did not hold themselves to.

It’s one of the characteristics of the telecom industry, set the course and sail the course regardless of what reality brings. RCS is another example, 15 years later, the plan is: sail the course. Even though leaders in programmable communications like Twilio do not support RCS and consider WhatsApp delivering far better value to consumers.

T-Mobile US makes bold eSIM push

T-Mobile US is using eSIM in a novel approach to poach new customers by letting them test its network services for free while it convinces them to abandon their existing supplier and sign up for a T-Mobile US subscription.

As a result of the move, anyone in the US who is not yet a customer will be able to move over to T-Mobile US with an ‘Easy Switch’ feature that has been integrated into its T-Mobile app. The option has been made available to those who have an unlocked eSIM-compatible smartphone – initially this addresses the iOS community but will soon be extended to cover users with Android devices as well.

At TADSummit 8/9 Nov we have several excellent presentation on eSIM.

eSIM Reality.

Fredric Liljeström, Co-founder and CEO, 10T Tech

  • What is eSIM and what it is not
  • Current eSIM adoption
  • Challenges to eSIM adoption
  • Technical and Operational challenges
    • Consumer
    • M2M and IoT
  • There is a very bright future!

How a Multi-IMSI architecture makes global cellular IoT deployments manageable

Tobias Goebel, Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Twilio

  • Fragmented landscape of IoT connectivity
  • Challenges of cross-border cellular connectivity
  • Pros and cons of the different SIM deployment architectures that exist today
  • How Multi-IMSI SIM profiles on eSIMs simplify interregional and international deployments

eSIM as Root of Trust for IoT security

João Casal, Head of R&D at Truphone

  • ARCADIAN-IoT: Research with eSIM as key element of a novel IoT security framework
  • SIM: Proven secure element
  • Leveraging cellular network authentication for zero-touch authentication of IoT devices in third-party services
  • The eSIM ecosystem role in new security mechanisms for IoT
  • IoT connectivity and IoT security: 2 faces of the same coin

OpenSIPS Summit 2022. Results from the Open Source Telecom Software Survey

This week I had a 6:55AM ET presentation for the OpenSIPS Summit, covering some of the Open Source Telecom Software Survey. We covered: DDoS, Security, STIR/SHAKEN, IPv6, broader open source usage, impact of the recession and #nvestment plans, accelerators, RTC device lifecycle management, and vCon.

September Edition of the RTCSec Newsletter

I was not aware until I read Sandro’s newsletter of the Microsoft Teams Direct Routing vulnerability.

When configured according to the official documentation, SBCs end up allowing inbound calls without any actual authentication. The author specifically looked at the AudioCodes SBCs since they are some of the most commonly used products when integrating with MS Teams.

The interaction between the Microsoft SIP proxies and the SBC is done using SIP over TLS. The recommended configuration, according to the documentation.

When an attacker sends a specially crafted SIP message that fulfills these criteria, the SBC will treat it as a SIP message that is coming from MS Teams, even if it is not actually the case. The author provides a SIPp scenario file and example command to reproduce this issue in the article.

References:

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Elisja van Niekerk is now Systems Delivery & Modernisation Manager at Deloitte Asia Pacific. Elisja built TADHack South Africa into what it is today 🙂

Diane Meyers is now Principal Analyst at Metrigy

Tiến Nguyễn Khắc is now Front End Lead at Talisman. A winner at TADHack Aukland, during TADHack 2017. You can see Tien in the TADHack Memory above 🙂

Chan Kin Hung is now Founder at GraceHealth

Uwe Lührig is now CEO & Founder at symedics GmbH

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