The purpose of this CXTech Week 49 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.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include. I skipped a couple of weeks as things have been a little hectic.

Covered this week:

• Keynote Review TADSummit 2022
• Welcome & What Happened? Review of TADSummit 2022
• TADHack and Enterprise Connect 2023
• CallSign’s Five emerging fraud types in APAC identified for 2023
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Keynote Review TADSummit 2022

Running the event on a tight budget means I’m often dealing with logistics during the event. This year Youtube streaming in Portugal was problematic, the event location had 200 Mbit/s bidirectional, I think it was the local ISP messing with the stream.

With these links you can get to all the TADSummit content directly: Photos, Videos, Slides, Brief Agenda with videos and slides, Full Agenda with videos and slides.

And I can not say this enough, thank you to STROLID, Broadvoice / GoContact, Radisys, RingCentral, Stacuity, and AWA Network / Automat Berlin for sponsoring TADSummit 2022. And thank you to all the presenters and attendees in making the event excellent.

In this article I review the keynotes:

• Welcome to vCon! The next leap forward in the programmable communications industry. Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID. Slides and Video. Simply, vCon should be part of the product roadmap and strategy for any business that supports customer or employee communications.
• Founding a Startup in Telecoms. The good, the bad and the ugly. João Camarate, CTO at Broadvoice & GoContact. Slides and Video. The insight for me was the viability of buying an existing business with customers, and using that as a stepping stone to grow a business faster.
• 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. Slides and Video. This was great to see Marten proving the concept that could revolutionize SMS aggregation. TADSummit is the only event where you get in-depth and practical techno-economic discussions that could disrupt the industry. That is deep tech as well as real businesses discussions.
• 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. Slides and Video. While the established IoT companies focus on making it easy to manage and operate IoT. Stacuity is exploring the next phase of IoT programmability.
• 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. Slides & Video. Radisys had an impressive TADHack, and they shares how they make it easy for developers to use a range of programmable communications tools.
• Shifting from Voice to Workflow Management. Filipe Leitão, Global Service Provider Channel SE, RingCentral. Slides & Video. This is an important shift, communications is table-stakes. The focus is now on solving business problems using programmable communications with partners.
• Future of WebRTC and Web3 Panel Discussion. Nikki Shum-Harden, Jayne Mast, Amandine Le Pape’s replacement was Florian Heese, Amber Lincoln’s replacement was Jerod Venema, Tim Panton, and Arin Sime. Video. It’s a great diverse panel discussion led by Arin on the status of WebRTC and some of the possible future directions of WebRTC.

Welcome & What Happened? TADSummit 2022 Review

I cover only my ‘Welcome and What happened since we last met? Where is the Programmable Comms market going?’ presentation as the article ended up being quite long and a bit soapboxy (warning controversial opinions, though I do not consider them controversial).

If you have a sales kick off in the New Year, I can customize a version of this presentation to provide a fun independent presentation across the programmable communication industry. Without all the controversial social commentary 😉

Some examples of the content include:

• In Q2 2020 Zoom generated 169% year over year revenue growth. Only the previous quarter most people were questioning if 85% was possible. How did Zoom become the default conferencing solution? Freemium, so you could see it was easy to use and just worked, beyond that it was flat monthly / annual fee. Plus they gave it to schools for free, so families started using it. All those nice Web 2.0 principles that the traditional conferencing services had ignored came back to bite them and they could not respond fast enough.
• Hey Sinch and Infobip! Where’s your Revenue? Sinch and Infobip are the dominant SMS aggregators and their combined SMS aggregation revenues are only $2B. That does not make a $100B market according to Insight Partners
• It reminds me of the saying, ‘there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Most of these market reports are rehashed broken analysis. They make money from people buying the report because there’s a big market number, see $100B above. I then go into a rant showing other weak results, where keeping paying clients happy matters more than truth. I recommend people believe their people and customers above analysts.
• The social commentary picture is of Hurricane Ian, according to DeSantis (the governor of Florida) a once in 500 year event, and he’s a potential US presidential candidate. In the past 5 years 2 category 4 (same strength as hurricane Ian) and 1 category 5 hurricanes have hit Florida. In part I blame the America education system with its focus on English language skills, which are great at creating lawyers / politicians, but America has too many of both. I could rant for ages on this one given my first hand experiences of the US education system. I long for national standard exams of my youth of O, A and S levels, which provided incontrovertible proof of a person’s academic abilities. Rather than someone’s opinion.

TADHack and Enterprise Connect 2023

 Enterprise Connect, the conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and customer experience, will have Google and Zoom will deliver keynote presentations. Enterprise Connect 2023 takes place March 27-30, 2023 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL and online.

I’m hoping TADHack will run the weekend before EC23, 25-26 March, and be aligned to some of its themes. More coming soon on those plans.

CallSign’s Five emerging fraud types in APAC identified for 2023

Callsign has predicted for 2023 emerging fraud vectors eroding trust in banks, telecoms, social media, e-commerce platforms and other providers for online transactions

• Dormant account takeovers become mule accounts
• The rise of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) fraud
• Deep fake technology growth – I think this could work in specific scenarios, with the focus on rich individuals. However, multi factor authentication solves most of them.
• Enter player 2 with the dodgy identity in the Metaverse – same is true for any online game.
• New cycle of victims – in APAC there are countries where people are online newbies.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Lots of moves before the end of the year…

Khai Nguyen has launched a new company, Pho From Home. They make frozen pho for direct sales to consumers. My wife was born in Vietnam, so Pho is a big thing. The soup base is critical, but also the fresh veggies. For the Brits raised in the UK during the 70s and 80s with cans of soup like Oxtail, Vietnamese Oxtail soup is excellent, just ignore all the bones 😉

Serena Wales is now Engineering Manager at Figma, previously Twilio, and I’ve known her since she was using Tropo with Textizen / Code for America over 10 years ago.

Tabitha Naylor added a position as Advisory Board Member at Digital Marketing at USF

Yvonne Hawkey is now PR Liaison / Copywriting at PUBLIC PRESSURE

Christian Ladstaetter is now People Lead Technology and Data Enablers at A1 Telekom Austria Group.

Kevin Mitchell is now Vice President, Marketing & Business Development at Alianza.

Stephen Wolak is now Product Management Director eSIM at Giesecke+Devrient

 Sobish Mahajan is now Staff Software Engineer at Extreme Networks. I’ve known Sobish since his time at IIT and was involved in TADHack.

Bas Peters is now CTO at BTC Direct. I’ve know Bas since his time at CM.com.

Ilian Hafouzov is now Vice President of International Sales at 2600Hz. I’ve known Ilian for quite some time, but now Linkedin does not include the data you connected, it’s between 1 and 2 decades. <grumbles about Microsoft’s ability to disappoint>

Ken Jackson is now  AVP Private 5G Sales, Network Services – Enterprise Americas at Tech Mahindra.

Jakub Bielikowski is now Senior Enterprise Architect at Husqvarna Group. I’ve known Jakub through most of his time at Oracle.

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