The purpose of this CXTech Week 11 2023 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:
- TADSummit Special, 21-23 March
- TADHack Open is Next Weekend, 25-26 March
- Congratulations to the monnai team raising $6.5M
- The Power of Company Culture: text-em-all
- What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
- Sandro Gauci at Nullcon
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
TADSummit Special, 21-23 March
We were unable to get every presentation we wanted into TADSummit 2022 in November. TADSummit Special will share 3 insightful presentations. We plan to run them March 21-23, one per day, live (and recorded), starting at 11AM ET, 8AM PT, 4PM CET (daylight saving mess). Register for TADSummit Special here to receive the URL for the live session.
Tuesday 21st March. The EU Cyber Resilience act – what does it mean for IP communications?
Olle Johansson, Experienced consultant in network security and real time communication – PKI, webrtc, SIP , XMPP. Kamailio and Asterisk expert.
Sandro Gauci, CEO / Senior Penetration Tester / Chief mischief officer at Enable Security
Wednesday 22nd March. Silent Authentication: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!
Eric Nadalin, CTO, co-founder tru.ID, and Gentleman Farmer
Thursday 23rd March. Why many conversational AI providers are ditching commercial platforms and moving to open source — and why you should too!
Dave Horton, Creator of drachtio.org, the open source framework for SIP Server applications
TADHack Open is Next Weekend, 25-26 March
Next weekend is TADHack Open. https://tadhack.com/2023/
The Radisys resources are live https://www.engagedigital.ai/tadhack. They can also be reached from the TADHack Open page, https://tadhack.com/2023/.
There’s lots of training videos to watch, and the Sign-up to access all the Radisys resources, https://www.engagedigital.ai/tadhack. Accounts will be active from the 21st March.
Plus: sign up to TADS Slack to chat with Radisys and everyone at TADHack Open, link is on the TADHack Open site.
Plus: Mariana from WebRTC.Ventures can help you with ideation, user experience, and creating a world-class pitch for your hack. Here is the Calendly link to set up some time with Mariana. She’s based on US East coast time, and will be available from Monday 20th March through to Sunday 26th March.
Plus: Winners get to present at Enterprise Connect on Tuesday 28th March, and have fun at the Expo!!!
Congratulations to the monnai team raising $6.5M
Congratulations to the whole Monnai team 🙂 Financial firms need access to structured, 360 data on their customers for decisioning. Currently, consumer data is disparate, fragmented and unstructured. Monnai gives financial firms access to 350+ data points and proprietary insights on customers via a single API.
In 18 months since founding, Monnai has 25+ enterprise customers, across 4 geographies with data coverage on 5+bn customers.
Monnai has just raised $6.5mm led by Tiger Global Management with participation from existing investors.
The Power of Company Culture: text-em-all
I’ve known text-em-all for many years. I have one of their stainless steel water jugs 🙂
This is an inspiring story of Jonny’s (Jonathan Melton) journey from transition from account management to product management, and his learning through that journey.
Jonny’s quote below on corporate politics resonated with me. This paragraph is a bit of a sidebar stimulated by the quote. I see today whole industries beset by politics. Take for example the silliness at MWC on fair-share and OneAPI 2.0, discussed in CXTech Week 9 2023. During my time in big corporate, I’d see adept corporate politicians driving projects to destruction. The project was good, important, strategic. But it did not help that politician’s assent through the corporate ladder as the thinking was at odds with their narrative. At the top of telcos and the GSMA are politicians. In this post-truth world, there is no longer cognitive dissonance, just keep repeating the lie until enough people in the target organization think it’s true.
But enough of my sidebar, back to Jonathan’s story. It’s a beautiful heartfelt life experience. I’d summarize it as, if you do not ask, you will not get. Though experiencing multiple company cultures can be important for some people to discover their calling, where their work becomes part of their happiness in life.
I found myself having to come to grips with this new concept of having to climb the corporate ladder. Call me spoiled, but I’d never had to play politics before or network to earn new responsibilities, promotions, or raises and bonuses.
Jonathan Melton
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
An excellent article that gets into enough detail to help you understand the current state of the art in ChatGPT. Remember, ChatGPT and AI in general is just software. When you get the AI-washing that is plaguing pitches at the moment, replace AI to software, to realize how think its being laid on. This article gives you some ideas and numbers to probe into what is really being claimed by all the AI-washing.
A couple of quotes I like in particular are, training is still an art, and the ease with which ChatGPT simulates human communications shows their are some laws behind it. One of my concerns is the use of ChatGPT for sophisticated phishing. We are going to need to soup-up our security products and processes fast.
Particularly over the past decade, there’ve been many advances in the art of training neural nets. And, yes, it is basically an art. Sometimes—especially in retrospect—one can see at least a glimmer of a “scientific explanation” for something that’s being done. But mostly things have been discovered by trial and error, adding ideas and tricks that have progressively built a significant lore about how to work with neural nets.
Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
The success of ChatGPT is, I think, giving us evidence of a fundamental and important piece of science: it’s suggesting that we can expect there to be major new “laws of language”—and effectively “laws of thought”—out there to discover. In ChatGPT—built as it is as a neural net—those laws are at best implicit. But if we could somehow make the laws explicit, there’s the potential to do the kinds of things ChatGPT does in vastly more direct, efficient—and transparent—ways.
Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
Sandro Gauci at Nullcon
Sandro highlighted Vera Mens‘s presentation from Nullcon about the fun they had with an Intercom system from Akuvox. Vulnerabilities ensued that involved typical default password issues, to web application vulnerabilities to attacks over VoIP (SIP)!
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Marina Percevic is Global ABM Strategist at Luxoft. Previously with MITTO.
Sonali Karnik is now Director of Product Marketing at tekVizion.
Roberto Paradinha is now a Software Engineering Manager at GoContact / Broadvoice.
Todd Wallace is now Senior Vice President at America’s Group.
Today I had a breakfast meeting with an old friend in Jersey City. As I arrived at his hotel, I took this picture of lower Manhattan. I also have a breakfast recommendation from that meeting. If you’re in Jersey City, Sam AM has a great menu, service, coffee, and is so much better value than eating at a hotel.
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