The purpose of this CXTech Week 43 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:
- TADHack Winners
- TADSummit Keynotes
- TADHack and Network X
- TADHack Global 2023 Crowns Sri Lankan Team ‘IntendAble’ as Third Global Champion
- Ericsson sees no ‘meaningful’ network API sales till 2025
- The Future of Conversational AI for Organisations
- The telecom industry looks rotten to the core
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
TADHack Winners
TADHack Global ran over last weekend. 550 hackers around the world took part, with over 1200 registrations, 43 finalist Hacks submitted from 15 countries. This was our 10th TADHack, and I’m proud of everyone involved and the quality of the hacks keeps getting better. Some of the themes from the hacks included food security and healthcare for children. Critically, TADHack enables local solutions to be created to solve those problems.
Radisys Winners
Winner 1st ($1000) – Emergency.kad
Winner 2nd ($500) – Chanjo
Winner 3rd ($500) – IntendAble
Honorable Mentions: TutorIA
Honorable Mentions: APNOEA TREATMENT ADHERENCE
Stacuity Winners
Winner 1st ($800) – APNOEA TREATMENT ADHERE
Winner 2nd ($600) – LightSign
Winner joint 3rd ($300) – Dreamages
Winner joint 3rd ($300) – Properseed
Jambonz Winners
Winner 1st ($1000) – Interactive Smart Home
Winner joint 2nd ($500) – Agrisight AI
Winner joint 2nd ($500) – OneCenter
STROLID Winner
Winner ($1000) – Matt Williams
TADHack Belgrade
Winner 1st ($3000) – SurveyValidator
Winner 2nd ($2000) – Fintel
Winner 3rd ($1000) – Toller
TADHack Sri Lanka
Winner 1st – IntendAble
Winner 2nd – Zyndicate
Winner 3rd – Apollo’s Archer
Congratulations to everyone who took part, well done!
TADSummit Keynotes
TADSummit ran on the Thursday and Friday of last week. Thank you to the sponsors Strolid, Stacuity, Unifonic, SIPhub, Jambonz, and TelecomsXchange, as well as the many partners making TADSummit possible. In my ‘Welcome to TADSummit’, I got down to the meat of why people attend TADSummit, it’s our no-BS policy. The book clubs with silly $100B CPaaS claims and ignoring the immediate challenges facing the market with price hikes and campaign charges are nothing but a further tax on the industry.
At Network X I was surprised how misled many people are on APIs, no-code tools, developer needs, that API standards for service exposure are not a thing on the web, except in special situations. Even Ericsson was pulling back on when Network APIs will start generating cash.
While the legacy aggregation business has its challenges, the programmable communications / telecoms business is exceptionally bright. The implications from the TADSummit keynotes for the industry are massive. The importance of the keynote analysis is to help everyone understand the ‘so what’ of all the excellent keynotes.
The crux of the problem is Twilio. In 2021 the carriers became rather jealous of Twilio’s inflated stock price, thanks in part to effective media manipulation (cough Mad Money cough). Its taken 2 years but the carriers have arranged the US messaging monopolies to take a heavy toll on the A2P industry with 0.5c per SMS and numerous other changes, yet the old-boys network are exempt from them.
The Unifonic keynote set out a template for the programmable communications industry. To accelerate the sales cycle pre-built suites are created across channels, engagement, verification, and intelligence. I really like the roadmap Karim shared, CPaaS is so 2010s, the focus is on engagement, personalization and industry focus.
Stacuity delivered on the plan they set out in 2022. They enable the mobile network to be treated like an extension of the enterprise network. The reason WiFi in the enterprise is so successful is it’s not a silo, it’s an extension of the enterprise’s corporate network. Stacuity is enabling the same approach for their global mobile network of SIMs. This will accelerate IoT into mainstream enterprises, breaking free of the current silos.
TCXC has delivered the Techco vision for wholesale, building on many open source projects to deliver a source free platform. That either the Telco can operate or TCXC can operate on behalf of the telco.
Dave from Jambonz set out in a no-BS way how he’s evolving the programmable voice industry, with his open source CPaaS. He and the follow speaker Bogdan from SIPHub, set out the challenges open source telecom software faces, especially from large corporates that feign incompetence in being able to support the projects. We need to name and shame! I’ll be keeping on SIPlabs and its SIP Engines as it monetized knowledge on top of OpenSIPS.
We wrapped up Thomas from STROLID. Everything is coming together on vCons, the standard, the data sets, and developers able to slice / dice the data and use bots to automate many workflows around customer and employee communications. the big-data vision around conversations is now happening. This is an exciting time for STROLID and vCons, it’s now time to engage enterprises in reaping the benefits of their technology.
TADHack and Network X
On Tuesday 24th Oct I gave a presentation at Network X about the ten years of TADHack, and the most recent results from TADHack Global 2023. The presentation slides are here, and the Winner from TADHack Global 2023 are here.
I review its history, important points for telcos on commitment in creating a country-wide innovation ecosystem. Review the winners from 2023. And highlight just a few of the many people impacted by TADHack. I really do believe that couples that can hack together, stay together.
Thank you to STROLID, Radisys, Jambonz, and Stacuity for sponsoring TADHack. And a special shout out to Yeapp, Africa’s Talking, hSenid Mobile and Telesign for all your hard work in running TADHack locations.
TADHack Global 2023 Crowns Sri Lankan Team ‘IntendAble’ as Third Global Champion
Shout out to Team IntendAble winning at TADHack Sri Lanka AND the Radisys Global prize. The team comprised of Naveen Rajan, Kaveena Nawodani Ekanayake, Suraif Muhammad, K S S De Fonseka, and W D Nipun Chamikara Weerasiri created a mobile application for the audience with Auditory Processing Disorders. Capable of speech recognition and enhancing audio quality and clarity, Identifying the voice and labeling speakers, Providing visual vocabulary assistance, Introducing theraputic sounds to improve brain processes.
Ericsson sees no ‘meaningful’ network API sales till 2025
No surprise here. I’ve covered how Nokia can leapfrog Ericsson’s misstep https://alanquayle.com/2023/08/nokia-leapfrog-ericsson/.
But this misstep impacts far more than Ericsson’s financials. Good and far more cost effective projects are being impacted in carriers, check out this post on “Deutsche Telekom get your act together on programmable telecoms” https://blog.tadsummit.com/2023/09/20/deutsche-telekom-get-your-act-together/.
The Telco ecosystem must break free from the “Telco Echo Chamber” that is causing such missteps. At Network X I got to witness just how far out of step telcos ideas are in engaging developers. I can help you understand what’s going on, all you have to do it chat with me.
The Future of Conversational AI for Organisations
Rob gave an excellent presentation at TADSummit 2023, which I’ll review soon.
Rob’s thesis is: stop thinking of LLMs as computer technology to be given absolute agency, then criticised for being flawed or dangerous. Instead think of it as an intrinsically non-deterministic translation layer which sits between the messy world humans live in and your rules based business model.
Just like with human employees, as long as business rules drive the agent and constrain its actions to align it with all of the detail of your operating principles, this will mostly work very well. It will however occasionally generate problems that need to be remediated. The key will be in adapting the way the algorithm constrains the AI to reduce severity in the first place and prevent repetition in future.
The telecom industry looks rotten to the core
I actually think this article is a little too negative!
There are quite a few problems to deal with. Fixed telcos had their 5G moment a decade ago when 1Gbps internet access did not drive appreciable new revenue. And the mobile industry has hit the same point.
In the US, I think there is a broader anti-trust issue to deal with, as well as a wholesale cleansing of the messaging monopolies and TCR. With an election brewing, and the FCC being such as political entity, I doubt anything will be done unfortunately.
What laid bare for me at Network X was all the misconceptions held by senior executives across the telco ecosystem on programmable telecoms / communications, network exposure, developer communities, and country-wide innovation ecosystems. The telco-echo-chamber is doing a major disservice to the industry.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
No time this week, will restart next week.
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