The purpose of this CXTech Week 37 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.
You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email or by my Substack. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.
Covered this week:
- 10 Year TADSummit Reunion
- A Busy Week for TADHack: Sri Lanka, DSF (Hedera), Colombia
- TADSummit Podcast 3
- Metacert in live traffic trial
- Ethereum’s Co-Founder Account Hacked in Sim Swap Attack
- Asterisk is no longer part of Debian LTS
- North America will fall to the world’s third-largest geographic region for streaming homes after Asia, and now Western Europe
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
10 Year TADSummit Reunion
The picture below is from Nov 2013 at the first ever #TADSummit in Bangkok, with Jean Deruelle (then CTO Telestax) in the foreground.
Logistics (maps, address, hotel, etc.)
Content Agenda (grouped by subject)
TADSummit is the thought-leadership event in programmable communications (CPaaS, xPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, etc.) for eleven years. It runs on the 19th and 20th of October in Paris, France and online. Our focus is simple, Innovation and Truth in Telecoms.
We’ll be at Capgemini’s 5G Labs, 147 Quai du Président Roosevelt 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux. The event is on the top floor of the building with a great view of Paris. On the 19th evening, 7PM, we have drinks and snacks with WebRTC Paris at a downtown location.
The week after TADSummit is Network X where we present the TADHack results to the telco world, and TADHack Global is over the weekend (21-22 Oct).
Thank you to Strolid, Stacuity, TelecomsXchange, SIPhub, Unifonic and Jambonz for sponsoring TADSummit. And for our many partners including WebRTC.Ventures, Capgemini Invent, Africa’s Talking, Ideamart, CallerID Reputation, Enabld, Oofty, UIB, and many many more.
TADSummit remains the only place to get a no-BS (it’s in our policies) understanding of what’s working across technology, services, and go to market; and where things are going in programmable telecoms / communications.
At TADSummit you’ll learn about the:
- Latest open source developments, that make programmable communications possible, and sets its future growth path;
- Innovations from developers across the application of programmable communications to Enterprises and Telcos for new revenues;
- Truth in Telecoms. Spam messaging and calling continue to rise impacting the average consumer; accountants and lawyers are stifling the maturing parts of the industry with price hikes, byzantine processes, and unclear fine exposure; large insider corporations pay a tiny fraction of what innovators / developers pay for services. We’re approaching an inflection point for our industry that no other event or ‘book club’ is brave enough to talk about.
TADSummit is fighting for our industry!
A Busy Week for TADHack: Sri Lanka, DSF (Hedera), Colombia
New location sponsor, DLT Science Foundation, who bring an additional $2.5k to the TADHack prize pot. Remember to mash-up the sponsors, this way you win more prizes!
DSF fosters a knowledge-sharing collaborative model between academia, industry, developers and government to advance education, research and innovation of distributed ledger technologies in business and society. We thank UCL and in particular Niall Roche a long-time supporter of TADHack; and Katerina Sanchez-Schilling for making this possible.
The technology is Hedera, a decentralized, open-source, proof-of-stake public ledger that utilizes the leaderless, asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) hashgraph consensus algorithm. It is governed by a collusion-resistant, decentralized council of leading enterprises, universities, and web3 projects from around the world.
To win cash prizes from the global prize pot, you must hack on the global sponsors’ technologies. This year we have:
- Stacuity. Mobile connectivity for IoT, register now as you need their SIMs to hack on their resources;
- Jambonz. Open source voice platform; and
- Radisys. An amazing drag and drop development platform, for loads of resources including communications, speech recognition, natural language processing, and video analysis; and
- STROLID. vCon is the new global standard, a ‘PDF for conversations’ (their resources are coming soon).
Sri Lanka has an amazing country-wide innovation ecosystem thanks to hSenid Mobile Solutions (Pvt) Ltd, Ideamart, and Dialog Axiata PLC.
They are an example to the world on engagement in programmable communications across so many groups from high schoolers, universities, dev groups, entrepreneur groups, women focused groups, across the country.
No sooner had I posted on how amazing TADHack Sri Lanka is with their country-wide innovation ecosystem; we had to close Sri Lanka registrations as they were full with 350 registrations.
Other locations such as Africa (thank you Africa’s Talking) and Colombia (thank you Yeapp) are growing rapidly, we’re well over 600 people registered to solve problems that matter to them using programmable communications. Our first hackathon was in 2014, this is our tenth TADHack. I can not end without mentioning all the people taking part remotely, from the comfort of their home. For some, TADHack is the only hackathon they take part in as they love what we do, thank you.
TADSummit Podcast 3
We’re building awareness, TADSummit Podcast 1 video had 215 views, TADSummit TADSummit Podcast 2 has 500 views, but we still have a long ways to go. As Appledore Research pointed out on their podcast, TADS is not that well known across the telco industry, it’s certainly not for my want of trying!
We’re building awareness, TADSummit Podcast 1 video has at the time of writing 220+ views. TADSummit Podcast 2 video has 500+ views, but we still have a long way to go in raising broader industry awareness. As Appledore Research pointed out on their podcast, TADS is not that well known across the telecoms industry. It’s certainly not for my want of trying
However, a few have shared privately they are being asked by their organizations not to comment or like our posts! The first Linkedin post on the TCR trilogy has 10k impressions, while the TADSummit reunion has a respectable 1200 impressions and both have a similar number of likes and comments. Please get the message out, encourage people to like, comment and repost, thank you. We need an industry-wide discussion on the important issues being raised.
TADSummit Innovators, we focus on WebRTC Ventures and their CEO Arin Sime. This is a great review of the WebRTC.Ventures, they are in my opinion the top integrator for your WebRTC projects, with an impressive track record. WebRTC.Ventures have supported TADSummit and TADHack over the years.
Truth_In_Telecoms with Johnny Tarone
Johnny and I review the motivation in creating the TADSummit Podcast segment Truth in Telecoms, drop a few hints on what’s to come, and discuss the skewed playing field most innovators now face in programmable telecoms (xPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, etc.)
Metacert in live traffic trial
Sender ID Verification may reduce spam, but it’s ineffective against phishing messages.
Paul Walsh, CEO of Metacert, recently informed two regulators in the UK and Ireland of this fact. Part of the problem is regulators not understanding the difference between A2P SMS (eg Uber pickups and UPS postal text alerts via Twilio), and P2P SMS (person to person via SIM Banks and handsets). Phishing is by definition highly targeted, a campaign may only be a few hundred SMS, rather than millions with spam SMS.
SMS can be the safest and therefore, best channel for brands and businesses to engage their customers, offering heightened trust, impressive conversion rates, and augmented revenues for every telecommunications based SMS vendor. However, currently telling customers not to click on links in SMS creates the opposite perception across customers.
Metacert is currently testing with one operator, their Proof of Concept (PoC) is live. The effectiveness of Metacert’s solution against SMS Phishing can be gauged in just five minutes: it’s clear-cut.
Ethereum’s Co-Founder Account Hacked in SIM Swap Attack
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X (fka Twitter) account was hacked, resulting in a crypto scam that stole $690,000 worth of cryptocurrency. The attack was executed through a SIM swap, where attackers socially engineered T-Mobile to take over his phone number, giving them access to his account. This incident sheds light on the vulnerability of mitigating frauds on two-factor authentication.
Asterisk is no longer part of Debian LTS
Asterisk is no longer part of Debian LTS. It won’t be packaged for Debian Bookworm. Lack of maintainers, problems with the PJSIP library seems to be the issue. Debian Asterisk packages have been behind with security patches before, so they do need more contributors.
North America will fall to the world’s third-largest geographic region for streaming homes after Asia, and now Western Europe
The number of households taking at least one subscription OTT service in Western Europe is set to surpass North America next year, with the UK and Germany driving much of this growth.
According to the latest research from Ampere Analysis, North America (US plus Canada) will fall to the world’s third-largest geographic region for streaming homes after Asia, and now Western Europe.
Over 10 years ago I did a report on TV Delivery Evolution. Back then North America dominated the streaming market. Its heartwarming to see the global expansion as it also means the expansion of global content with all the diversity it brings.
We’re currently watching a Korean comedy ‘Behind Your Touch‘, yes it includes butt touching. It is funny, and unusual for a Korean comedy the romance is secondary to the comedy. Many K-shows lean too heavily on romance.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Dharmesh Tiwari is now Senior Technical Support Analyst at CSG.
Ahmed Sokar is now Co-Founder & and Marcom Director at Well Studio. We connected while Ahmed was with Unifonic.
Shira Levine is now Director, Product Marketing at SES Satellites.
Rudy Augsburger is now CEO & Co-founder at Omega Krypto.
Adam Symons is now Product Lead [Contract] at Elsewhen. I’ve known Adam since he was working on Bluevia in 2009!
You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email or by my Substack.