The purpose of this CXTech Week 42 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 2022 Winners
- TADHack at Network X
- TADSummit Agenda Timings
- BICS launches CPaaS platform
- IP Messaging is Free United Flights
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
TADHack 2022 Winners
This is the 9th year of TADHack, we began in 2014. We’re immensely proud of the many people involved in TADHack and all they’ve achieved. This year 450 hackers took part from around the world, creating 52 Hacks. Radisys scored an impressive 23 hacks, well done!
A significant change is the growth in remote entries. However, for some regions in-person is necessary for local momentum. While for some hackers, hacking from home is easier and enables them to multitask between hacking and all those weekend chores. At TADHack we’ve always supported remote hacking, and it’s great to see its broader and more mature adoption in 2022.
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 $10k prize for the best hack using Radisys!
In the video below you can see all the winners. We announced them on Monday, and by Friday all the prize money had been distributed. And during that time I’d taken a trip to Network X in Amsterdam. In the past decade I’ve seen international payments become so much easier and cheaper. If you use crypto it’s really easy!
TADHack at Network X
We announced the results of TADHack on Monday 17th, then on Wednesday 19th we were presenting to the Network X audience in Amsterdam with Mario Bodemann from Deutsche Telekom’s hubraum who ran TADHack Berlin. Mario had an excellent gift bag, that my son and I completed 🙂
TADSummit Agenda Timings
We’ve just published the agenda timings for TADSummit 2022. It’s a packed agenda and it’s going to be packed in-person as well. I was a little worried when planning TADSummit if anyone would turn up; they most definitely are. This will be 2 intense days of insight and networking that will be well-worth your time.
I was just scanning through this week’s news items, and realized now far away the jabber in press releases is from the current reality and likely future of the market. You will only get that understanding from TADSummit.
Tuesday 8th Nov
8:30 Arrive
9:00 Welcome to Aveiro Portugal. João Camarate, CTO at Broadvoice & GoContact.
9:10 What happened since we last met? Where is the market going? Alan Quayle, independent
9:35 Founding a Startup in Telecoms. The good, the bad and the ugly. João Camarate, CTO at Broadvoice & GoContact.
10:00 AWA – a Telco bootstrapping product development: Challenges with dynamic market consolidation – an 18 month road trip. Marten Schoenherr, CEO Automat Berlin/AWA Network/Founding Partner at TheWorkinGroup.
10:25 Time to ditch the ‘dumb-pipe’ – reinventing the core mobile network, to put developers first. Mike Bromwich, CEO / Co-Founder Stacuity & Tim Dowling, Co-Founder Stacuity
10:50 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.
11:15 Shifting from Voice to Workflow Management. Filipe Leitão, Global Service Provider Channel SE, RingCentral.
11:45 Programmable Testing for Programmable Telcos. Andreas Granig, Founder & CEO at Sipfront
12:10 Lunch
1:00 Welcome to vCon! The next leap forward in the programmable communications industry. Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID
1:25 Open Source Telecom Software Survey Results. Alan Quayle, independent
1:50 How to bring down your own RTC platform. Running DDoS simulations on your own. Sandro Gauci, CEO / Senior Penetration Tester / Chief mischief officer at Enable Security
1:15 DDoS Workshop. Private session facilitated by Sandro Gauci and Alan Quayle.
3:00 CPaaS Conversational Platforms and Conversational Customer Service – The Experience Gap? Ben Waymark, Chief Technology Officer, Webio.
3:25 Master the Audience Experience Multiverse: AX Best Practices and Success Stories. Ken Herron, Chief Growth Officer, UIB (REMOTE)
3:50 Latest Updates and Experiences in Launching Local Language Tools. Karel Bourgois, Founder Voxist, President Le Voice Lab, Exec Director Slatch, Chapter Pilot France AI Hub.
4:15 Future of WebRTC and Web3 Panel Discussion. Nikki Shum-Harden, ex-VP Marketing Subspace; Jayne Mast, Engineering Manager for DevRel at Daily; Amandine Le Pape, COO & co-founder at Element; Co-founder at The Matrix.org Foundation; Amber Lincoln, VP Customer Success, liveswitch; Tim Panton, Co-founder and CTO at Pi.pe; Arin Sime, CEO/Founder at AgilityFeat and WebRTC.ventures, Co-host of the Scaling Tech Podcast, and host of WebRTC Live
5:00 How to best maximize the conversation data stream for your business? Surbhi Rathore, CEO & Co-Founder, Symbl.ai (REMOTE)
5:25 What Everyone Needs to Know about Protecting the CPaaS Ecosystem from Unlawful Robocalls. Gerry Christensen, VP YouMail. (REMOTE)
5:50 Close freshen up and prepare for dinner
7:00 NETWORKING DINNER
Wednesday 9th Nov
9:00 eSIM Reality. Fredric Liljeström, Co-founder and CEO, 10T Tech (REMOTE)
9:25 M&A in Communications Technology. Mark White, Tech M&A, Investor, Founder, Board Member, Startup Mentor, SVP Corum Group. (REMOTE)
9:50 Are we there yet? DT’s journey with CPaaS as a large Telecom’s grassroots project. Sebastian Schumann, International Network Infrastructure, Deutsche Telekom
10:15 Should Telcos give up on CPaaS? Jesus Cruz Manjavacas, Development Technical Manager at PLAY | GCP Professional Cloud Architect (REMOTE)
10:40 OpenSIPS 3.3 – Messaging in the IMS and UC ecosystems. Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, Founder and Developer at OpenSIPS Project
11:05 Architecting your WebRTC application for scalability, Arin Sime and Alberto González Trastoy.
11:30 eSIM as Root of Trust for IoT security. João Casal, Head of R&D at Truphone.
11:55 Supercharging CPaaS Growth & Margins with Identity and Authentication. Aditya Khurjekar, GM Prove Protocol.
12:20 Lunch
1:00 How a Multi-IMSI architecture makes global cellular IoT deployments manageable. Tobias Goebel, Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Twilio (REMOTE)
1:25 What makes a cellular IoT API great? Tobias Goebel, Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Twilio (REMOTE)
1:50 Great Expectations: The life and times of 5G. Vish (Vishwamitra) Nandlall, VP Technology Strategy & Ecosystems, Dell Technologies. (REMOTE)
2:15 Alex presentation
2:40 Building a sub-second virtual ThunderDome: Considerations for mass scale sub-second production broadcasts. Jerod Venema, CEO and Co-Founder, LiveSwitch (REMOTE)
3:05 “Don’t” ask your developer! Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO, hSenid Mobile Solutions (REMOTE)
3:30 Playing at the intersection of CPaaS and Digital Identity. Kola Layokun, Sr Director of Product Management & Head of CPaaS Engagement, Telesign. (REMOTE)
3:55 CLOSE
BICS launches CPaaS platform
Last year in CXTech Week 12 2021 we covered BICS buying 3m Digital Networks, following Twilio’s acquisition of ValueFirst in India. 3m Digital Networks (MOB Texting) is in the Indian business messaging market, and BICS positioned it as a CPaaS.
This week BICS announced its CPaaS offer based on this acquisition. It’s an interesting time to be investing in a category this is being transformed and substituted.
At TADSummit you’ll learn much on the reality and future of the industry, for example we have RingCentral keynoting on “Shifting from Voice to Workflow Management.” Contact centers similarly are catching up on messaging support. UCaaS and CCaaS are squeezing CPaaS out of opportunities across their customer base. Twilio has never claimed to be a CPaaS, rather programmable communications. Its a leader in SIP trunking, being 99% of a CCaaS, a range of workflow solutions, marketing campaigns across most messaging (not RCS), customer data, etc.
It reminds me of the silliness one decade ago on APIs. An API is just a piece of technology, as is CPaaS. The money is in solving substantive customer problems as a solution, not piecemeal APIs. Entering CPaaS today either means focusing on aggregation (which isn’t really CPaaS, it’s all about volumes), or they’re going to need some compelling communications enabled solutions with partners.
IP Messaging is Free United Flights
On the flight back from Amsterdam I discovered IP messaging is free on United flights, text and pictures, no video. I was using WhatsApp, receiving all my alerts; e.g. the resignation of the UK’s prime minister. <Sigh> Once the UK left the EU and Bozza was its prime minister the die was cast for its long slow decline into a banana republic 🙁 It hurts me to watch its decline, I was born and raised there.
But back to IP messaging. Significantly no SMS, nor RCS were mentioned; rather FB messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp and push messages. I didn’t have time to fully explore what works like Google Messages. I was busy organizing meetings, thanking people, and chatting on WhatsApp once I woke up after a nap and discovered the service. I’ll do more exploration next month on my trip to Aveiro for TADSummit.
However, telcos like T-Mobile do offer in-flight connection on some airlines which included texting. It’s technically possible, if your phone supports WiFi calling, then it should work. It’s another example of how a fragmented industry makes it difficult to communicate what works as a service provider (in this case United).
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Yufei Tao is now Senior Telecom Engineer at Amazon Connect.
Nathan McCourt is now Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he will be working on integrating digital channels into Amazon Connect.
Eddie DeCurtis is now Senior Vice President of Sales – Enterprise Connect at Mavenir.
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