The purpose of this CXTech Week 10 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:
- YouTube keeps disapproving TADSummit Campaigns for Shocking Content and Political Advertising
- Twilio, 800SMS, and Messaging in General
- MEF Royally Screws Up
- Podcast 39: TADSummit Innovators, Ameed Jamous, OpenTextShield
- TADHack Open in 2 weeks
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
YouTube keeps disapproving TADSummit Campaigns for Shocking Content and Political Advertising
We continue to be muzzled online. One well known industry organization instructs its members and employees not to like or comment on our posts. YouTube customer support is shocked at what is happening to the TADSummit Channel. We’ve had about 8 disapprovals, for Shocking Content (Robert Vis interview received the email below) and Political Advertising.
Clearly there are dirty tricks being played. We’ve had disapprovals lifted only for another disapproval be applied before the campaign could begin. We’ve had political advertising and shocking content disapprovals applied to the same video. We’ve discovered the videos with “Truth in Telecoms” in the title are being targeted, “TADSummit Innovators” appear to be left alone. So the next title will be [Redacted].
If you know someone at YouTube who can help please let them know about our muzzling case, thanks.
Twilio, 800SMS, and Messaging in General
I was talking with a school district that has not been able to message its parents for close to 3 weeks, with no indication on when this will be resolved. They moved from 10DLC to 800SMS in the hope of avoiding TCR’s random decisions. Now they’re using email and calling, like they did in the naughties.
From what I understand a new team in Twilio has taken over running the 800SMS registry from the old Zipwhip team, and wants to show that things can be run worse than TCR.
Eric Troutman has also written about this on all the arbitrary blocking taking place across messaging in general.
Specific to 800SMS it appears Twilio closes down all of a CSP’s traffic, rather than the specific customer, and is not making it straight-forward for a CSP to turn their traffic back on. Registration at the brand level is now much more important, but that takes time as the goalposts have recently moved.
I asked about this one month ago in the “Are you having problems with your #800SMS campaigns in the US?” Things appear to be getting worse. The upshot of all this messing around is businesses will likely move onto the 800SMS monopoly, Twilio. As all they see is their CSP failing to deliver service.
Capitalism without competition is exploitation. This is what’s happening in the US messaging market.
MEF Royally Screws Up
The MEF kicked Puja Amin (aka Queenie) off a panel on International Women’s Day. Eric Troutman was unhappy to say the least, as you can read in the linked post.
This MEF action is totally unacceptable, but unfortunately true to form. Mobile Ecosystem Forum today represents monopolies squeezing cash from US businesses, see the Messaging Monopolies on how egregious the situation has become in the US.
Below is a MEF slide from 2008, when they called themselves the Mobile Entertainment Forum, and represented pornographers. I remember back then the largest mobile event, 3GSM held in Cannes, had section dedicated to adult entertainment.
SoQ – Save our Queenie!
Podcast 39: TADSummit Innovators, Ameed Jamous, OpenTextShield
Back in September Ameed introduced us to himself and TelecomsXChange on Podcast 4. This episode is diving into his AI projects, OpenTextShield and the TelecomsXChange ChatGPT interface.
OpenTextShield is an open source project that detects spam and phishing. Its free under an MIT license. Every carrier and aggregator should be implementing this now to protect their customers.
Seriously, anyone can deploy it today on their SMSC or other messaging platforms. The project has experimented with 2 text classification tools BERT (Google) and FastText (Meta). Along with OpenAI (which is too slow, with response times of 30 seconds). BERT is prefered given its accuracy and performance.
Ameed ran through some demos showing the different tools and their performance. He’s implementing OpenTextShield on TelecomsXChange SMSC, so all his customers have this as an option to protect their customers from spam and phishing. And provide the options around customer experience, e.g. block delivery, deliver with a warning and URLs disabled or removed, etc.
On the TelecomsXChange ChatGPT interface, Ameeds showed searching for rates, numbers, making calls and sending SMS etc. It showed how APIs will diminish and be replaced with prompts as the way businesses consume SaaS. And how telcos can similarly offer such interfaces to their business customers.
If you take one thing from this Podcast is implement OpenTextShield on your platform now to protect you customers and employees from spam and phishing.
TADHack Open in 2 weeks
Here are some important links:
TADS Slack – general questions
STROLID Slack – help with STROLID’s resources
SignalWire Slack – help with SignalWire’s resources
Sponsor’s resources. You can low code your hack, just editing a JSON file. Remember to sign up to their resources and start playing with their tools now.
Register for TADHack Open. This is so I know the numbers and can keep you updated on everything TADHack. For the Enterprise Connect attendees and Cloud Communications Alliance members, there’s really no need to be scared, low code is easy, please sign-up.
Here is the link for advice on submitting your hack remotely.
We will live stream on the TADHack YouTube channel at the kick off on Saturday at around 10:30, and on Sunday around 2PM when we review all the pitches.
Good luck, we hope you have fun. By the way, the TADHack Open banner arrived 🙂
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Kenneth Hardat Telco Strategy Lead at BICS.
Mui Hoon is now Co-Founder at Esse.Digital. We met when in Singapore when Mui was CEO of NETS, a payments services group
Miguel Noronha is now Chief Sales Officer at inConcert. We connected when he was with GoContact.
Anton Chernenko Commercial Lead/Business Developer at Aalto University. We first met when he was with callstats.io.
Nikola Milosevic is now Project Manager at HORISEN
Veysel PETEKKAYA is now Business Unit Manager (GM) at Energon Turkey (ASTERIONBATT). We connected when TADSummit ran in Istanbul.
Jonathon Shepeard is now an Evangelist at Swarm AI / A-Commerce.
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