The purpose of this CXTech Week 2 2024 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:

• A Surreal Start to the Year
• Podcast 22: Truth in Telecoms, Twilio Special, Lawson is Innocent!
• Podcast 23: TADSummit Innovators, Mark Hay, Melrose Labs
• IEEE Spectrum: Preserving Online Privacy and Security
• Political Spam Texts are a Problem
• Tata Communications Shorts Itself
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

A Surreal Start to the Year

Let’s just take stock of how crazy programmable communications / CPaaSAI has become:

• T-Mobile tried to bury the news of their new A2P SMS fines. Fines that appear to have no appeals process.
• Tata Communications sent a New Year’s present of a Cease and Desist, to myself, Bill Peters, Johnny, and another person.
• Elon Musk’s Starlink to offer direct-to-cell service with T-Mobile. To the tune of The Muppets “Pigs in Space” intro do I hear, “SPAM from Space!”
• We released the “Telecom Triopoly” post, part of the Messaging Monopolies series, highlighting the Squeeze on UCaaS.
• Jeff Lawson is removed from Twilio without any explanation, not even a send off.
• The VON Coalition joins the chorus complaining about the TCR.
• Nikki keeps texting me and has decided I should be called John.
• There are crazy rumors flying around at the moment that I will not repeat as the hard facts are just so surreal.

Podcast 22: Truth in Telecoms, Twilio Special, Lawson is Innocent!

Monday 8th Jan was a dark day for the programmable communications industry. Jeff Lawson was removed as CEO and not even given the role as chairman. How could the current Twilio board let this happen? This act is both shocking and shameful. The board are the ones that need to be fired.

The company he founded, that achieved a peak market capitalization of $80B, that was currently exceeding projections is out and the board did not even want him around to help with the transition. The chairman role is specifically for the the ex-CEO to maintain the vision and share his experience. Twilio was moving towards profitability, albeit slowly as they’d invested in $1.6B in the lower margin SMS aggregation business. Its was not pure-play SaaS.

Twilio plays a critical role as a buffer between the Telecom Triopoly, Messaging Monopolies; and all the innovators / developers. If Twilio gets sliced and diced, as seems likely given the Activist infestor’s demands, as Johnny expressed in the podcast, “Innovation dies.” There will be a feeding frenzy across the short sellers: Sinch, Bandwidth, etc. Watch out, you’re next.

Anson, is a short-seller out of Toronto. Check out this Reddit post from last year titled “Anson Funds Desperate For $350 Million Amid DOJ Investigation.” Also read the comments in that article. Anson ended up being fined by the DoJ for short-selling. The violation was Rule 105 of Regulation M under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Rule 105”), which prohibits short selling an equity security during a restricted period.

Bottom-line, what happened to Jeff is wrong. What’s going to happen to Twilio is unacceptable to everyone in the industry. There needs to be an investigation to what is going on, something does not smell right. And what really happened on the $750M investment in Syniverse. As Jim Cramer stated, Lawson is Innocent! We all need to demand action, and not sympathize with Jeff’s abuse.

Podcast 23: TADSummit Innovators, Mark Hay, Melrose Labs

I’ve followed Mark Hay for many years on Linkedin. His posts are always spot-on and no BS. Before Melrose Labs he ran HSL Mobile, an aggregator focused on the UK market. His HSL stories really helped me understand how his business began all the way back in 1999. That first critical first customer that drove the business. Which then expanded to DHL. And how HSL competed against Link Mobility for the renewal of the DHL contract, which eventually led to Link Mobility buying HSL. This is what should happen a CEO builds company, company is sold, CEO builds a new company. Not the mess we see with Twilio. Johnny and Mark share their M&A experiences between the 20-25 min mark.

When I look at STROLID, UIB, Matrix, that initial problem and customer builds a strong customer focused technology business. I remember asking Matrix how they got their first government contract, it was simply one of the government’s IT people liked using the open source Matrix project.

For HSL, one of the IT guys liked the solution HSL had put in place for mobile alerting. In the early days technology led sales are a good thing. Yes, there is always Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm to cross. But after that first customer, leverage that account as much as possible, to win what could become the lighthouse account to build the business around.

Today Melrose Labs is focused on filling the gaps in RCS between Apple, Google’s version of RCS, all the RBM implementations, and the current MaaP specification. Mark frankly shared being circumspect about RCS for many years. But after the Apple announcement interest skyrocketed, and there are lots of gaps that Melrose Labs will plug, taking a standards compliant approach.

IEEE Spectrum: Preserving Online Privacy and Security

I’m finding more and more articles in the IEEE Spectrum are relevant to my work. This is a nice review of an architecture of using proxy servers can solve the problem of keeping our data safe given many cloud based services simply don’t, can’t, and won’t.

Their message is simple: It is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into our own hands. The article refers to decoupling, read it as distributed or decentralized. They use Zoom as an example.

There are multiple threats to the security of a Zoom call. A Zoom employee could go rogue and snoop on calls. Zoom could spy on calls of other companies or harvest and sell user data to data brokers. It could use your personal data to train its AI models. And even if Zoom and all its employees are completely trustworthy, the risk of Zoom getting breached is omnipresent. Whatever Zoom can do with your data in motion, a hacker can do to that same data in a breach. Decoupling data in motion could address those threats.

Videoconferencing doesn’t need access to unencrypted video to push bits between your device and others. A properly decoupled video service could secure the who, what, where, and when of your data in motion, beginning with the “what”—the raw content of the call. True end-to-end encryption of video and audio would keep that content private to authorized participants in a call and nobody else. (Zoom does currently offer this option, but using it disables many other features.)

The call to action is great,

We cannot just rely on industry to take care of this. Self-regulation is a time-honored stall tactic: A piecemeal or superficial tech-only approach would likely undermine the will of the public and regulators to take action. We need a belt-and-suspenders strategy, with government policy that mandates decoupling-based best practices, a tech sector that implements this architecture, and public awareness of both the need for and the benefits of this better way forward. 

Political Spam Texts are a Problem

Nikki keeps texting me!

That is the republican politician Nikki Halley. According to the BBC:

“You just don’t look like a Bill,” Ms Haley said she told him. Instead, Ms Haley decided, his middle name was a better fit. “From that point on, I started calling him Michael, and all my friends did the same,” she wrote. “He looks like a Michael.”

What’s scary is Nikki keeps calling me John, rather than Alan.

Nikki is of Indian heritage, and the TCR which is letting her campaign run is owned by the Tata Communications. It could be just a coincidence. But I’m reminded of the Author Emma Bull’s quote, “Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” I see the levers and pulleys, its just I can not believe they would be so blatant.

The Vilanova article goes into more detail on how we’ve ended up in this situation with political texting and some of the silliness pushed through. I think we need a new registry, the Do Not Political Text Registry.

Tata Communications Shorts Itself

Last week we made a 250B INR call on Tata Communications. Check out the red box below, their one year target is 1498.75, they’re shorting themselves.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Frazer Barnett is now Operations Manager at IQ Mobile Network. I’ve known Frazer since his time at Simwood. He had a trip down to South Africa to represent Simwood at TADHack (center left).

Ayoub Cherkaoui is now Senior Product Manager at GoTo. I’ve known him throughout his time in Ericsson, where he led the RCS work. Watching Google take control of RCS through buying Jibe, then Google Messages drive carrier RCS,. And today we’re in an interesting positio where Apple will sort of join the RCS party, but only on iOS not iMessage, and only according the P2P standard. No RBS, they have their own solution.

Curtis Hartmann is now Co-Founder at Positron Networks. I’ve known Curtis since his time in Broadsoft about one decade ago.

 Christos Papantonis is now iOS Developer – Chapter Lead at MORO TECH. Here’s Christos’ hack from TADHack Athens: IoT SMS Monitoring & Controlling.

Jonathan Labin as left Unifonic. I presented with Johnathan at a Unifonic webinar in 2020.

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