The purpose of this CXTech Week 11 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:

• Podcast 40: TADSummit Innovators, Mark Harvey, SEKURA.id
• Podcast 41: [REDACTED], What the MEF?
• TADHack Open in 1 week
• 6 years ago, TADHack Orlando 2018, 10-11 March
• Africa’s Talking on International Women’s Day
• Congratulations to FlexifyMe, Amit Bhayani, and Manjeet Singh
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Podcast 40: TADSummit Innovators, Mark Harvey, SEKURA.id

This was a fun interview, they’re all fun. Principally because they are immensely uplifting, its people solving real problems, no marketing BS. There is no script, people are challenged, see this YouTube short, simply to show they know what they’re talking about. For example, if Henry Calvert from the GSMA came on to talk about Camara and Open gateway, he knows the questions I’ll ask, and I’m sure he’ll have solid answers. The only issue with whether the GSMA and the carriers and the vendors would approve of those answers as being on-message.

Sekura provides real-time mobile authentication, verification and fraud prevention from mobile operators to global banks, fintechs, crypto and consumer brands.

Their focus is mobile identity and achieving the broadest coverage across 75 carriers and 2.5 billion mobile phone customers. They focus on the connection to carriers using Mobile Connect and all the variations and complications that come with that.

Mark positioned what they do as Mobile to Person Matching (MPM), or mobile KYC (know your customer). You’ll also see the term silent authentication is used. It’s a 2FA (2 Factor Authentication), like SMS OTP (One Time Password), just vastly more secure. When a carrier implements Mobile Connect, it confirms the phone number’s SIM is in the possession of the customer. Yes the Camara number verify complicates things, hence why aggregators will continue to be essential for this business.

<Editor’s comment> Mobile connect was initially built for developers, but without having W3C take the lead to build something dev centric. Hence the GSMA built something that requires an aggregator to make it work for enterprises. To the Camara folks, please take note. And to the rest of the industry please as the telcos where the dev portal is for their commercially available Camara APIs.

Sekura has focused on coverage, and managing all the real-world implementation details across coverage, slipping out of date number:carrier mappings, and attempting to smooth pricing variations. Some carriers are still an order of magnitude out on pricing.

We delved into some of the challenges Mobile Connect still faces, for example with MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) numbers, device binding, and how not all carriers have yet implemented Mobile Connect. As Mark mentioned several times, this market will develop slowly.

Identity verification and risk is a large established market with many global players delivering broad industry focused solutions, e.g. Mastercard (Ekata), Experian, Transunion, AsiaVerify, trustingSocial, Id.layr, Okta, LexisNexis, Prove, Telesign, Seon, Socure to name just a few.

Claiming you have a SIM swap API without all the real-world solutions wrap makes it irrelevant to most businesses. Hence why Sekura is an important spoke in the identity verification wheel, as a carrier / telco focus you investment there not on an expensive legacy CPast platform.

Podcast 41: [REDACTED], What the MEF?

As mentioned last week, we’re not using the usual title, because that keeps being disapproved for shocking content or political advertising. Let’s see what happens today. Youtube continues working on this problem to determine what is going on. I have a feeling there’s an insider messing with the TADSummit channel.

This week things became serious for the MEF by kicking Queenie off a MEF panel. The Old-boys (and girls) network came to the MEF’s defense. As Johnny pointed out, attendance at MEF leads to sponsorship, and sponsorship leads to advocacy, and hence attempting to suppress facts.

Follow Eric Troutman on Linkedin to see all his posts around this topic. This short on Eric’s YouTube channel Queenie considers the reason she was kicked off the MEF panel. If you follow TADSummit you’ll know Eric is sharing facts, and we’ve gone into much more detail. Here is Eric’s post on his review of a

comment filed by Latham & Watkins in the record. And I thought, how odd. And when I cracked it open I could have not have been more delighted to see the Campaign Registry defending itself, publicly, before the Commission.

And not very well either…

Source: Eric Troutman, Czar of the TCPA

Let’s remember Americans are being spammed and robocalled, the messaging monopolies and Telecom Triopoly are making money off this. The money the carriers are making from A2P SMS seems to correlate with the dividend payments they are currently making. Correlation or causation? We’ll delve into that in more detail once we finalize the numbers.

The other big news was the vote against TikTok. 170m Americans are glued for an average of 56 minutes a day. The concern is not privacy of Americans, our personal data is available to buy from many sources. It’s the ability of TikTik to influence the US election.

Next in the government’s crosshairs will be the TCR. Check out this article from the Detroit News:

A recent lawsuit from TCR’s co-founder accused the company’s vetting operations of intentionally blocking messages of Arizona Republican Kari Lake’s senatorial campaign to benefit the company’s favored candidate. Per the lawsuit, he alerted TCR to this problem, but the company told its operational head, “…to let it go and not do anything.”

Source: Detroit News

The MEF has told Johnny their members will not acknowledge our work, kicking Queenie of a MEF panel shows how far they will go to suppress facts.

There needs to be accountability, our children and parents are being spammed, robcalled, scammed and subject to inappropriate content. A few crooks are making millions to billions from this abuse. It is the duty of everyone in telecoms to not ignore this, rather support the people leading the charge against the few people suppressing the facts, and hence enabling the crooks.

TADHack Open in 1 week

Here are some important links:

TADHack Open – website, address for those attending in person, timings, registration, etc.

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 edit a JSON file. Remember to sign up to the sponsors 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 ET (US East Coast Time), and on Sunday around 2PM ET when we review all the pitches.

On Monday we will present the results of TADHack to Enterprise Connect. That session can not be live streamed, I’ll report the results on the TADHack Blog.

Good luck, we hope you have fun.

6 years ago, TADHack Orlando 2018, 10-11 March

So much fun and wonderful memories from TADHack Orlando 2018. Several teams built programmable telecoms companies from this hackathon. Here are the photos from the event.

Thank you to Avaya, Flowroute, A BCM One Company , VoIP Innovations, a Sangoma Company, and Telnyx for sponsoring back in 2018.

Check out TADHack Open 2024, tadhack.com, sponsored by Strolid, Signalwire and the Cloud Communications Alliance.

Africa’s Talking on International Women’s Day

Diversity is our strength, and on this #IWD, we would like to celebrate the diverse talents and contributions of our #WomenInTech #Community. Your brilliance and dedication shine bright, and we can’t wait to see what you #BuildWithAT! #WeLoveNerds.

At TADHack we’re proud to count Africa’s Talking as one of our partners.

Congratulations to FlexifyMe, Amit Bhayani, and Manjeet Singh

They swam with Shark Tank India, and won the support of Shark Namita Thapar.

You can read more about their involvement in TADS over the years in CXTech Week 3 2024.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Henri Setiawan Wyatno is now Tribe Leader Agreeculture.id at PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia.

Simon Wilkinson is now Chairman / Investor at Sorted Group.

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