CXTech Week 18 2024 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 18 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.

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.

  • Preview of TADSummit & TADHack Global 2024: The Conscience of Our Industry
  • Syniverse’s non-sanctioned 10 DLC SMS path
  • Podcast 66: Truth in AI, Brian West, SignalWire
  • Podcast 65: TADSummit Innovators, Noah Rafalko, TNID Part 2
  • Podcast 64: TADSummit Innovators, TADHack Winners Team Jazz using SignalWire
  • FCC Fines AT&T. Verizon, T-Mobile for location data sharing
  • Podcast 57: TADSummit Innovators, Vladimir Beloborodov, Panasonic Automotive North America
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Preview of TADSummit & TADHack Global 2024:
The Conscience of Our Industry

Come join the most honest event in telecoms / communication / Industry4.0 / AI / Identity.

TADSummit has become the industry’s conscience, exposing the reality of what is happening on spam/robocalling/fraud/ and more though investigative journalism and analysis; with the objective of leveling the playing field for innovators, and bringing back the focus on customers.

Innovation: Quoting William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” TADSummit Innovators will show the future of Telecoms / Communications today.

We plan a Global Hackathon (TADHack) the weekend before an in-person event (TADSummit) in NYC. If you want to sponsor, partner, anonymously donate – get in touch. There has never been such a gathering of innovators and investors in programmable communications / telecoms.

Syniverse’s non-sanctioned 10 DLC SMS path

Syniverse is informing customers that, “Effective December 1, 2024, the Syniverse non-sanctioned path utilized by 10 DLC SMS and MMS traffic destined for US Mobile Network Operators will be decommissioned.” See note below.

1) In our messaging monopolies post we included this non-sanctioned path in our calculations, “penny for spam” as sanctioned is charged 0.5c. Some people pushed back that TCR is the only path for 10DLC, it is not, as proven with this note from Syniverse. https://lnkd.in/eyR_iY3G

2) Note the decommission date, after the elections. This path is likely used for political texting, avoiding oversight. And I bet charged at more than 1c per message. Rumor is up to 6c per message for high volume ‘get out the vote campaigns.’ Yet more old-boy backroom SMS deals. This is yet another example of why SMS needs urgent regulation. It is far from neutral.

3) There are many other paths for SMS including email to SMS, SIM boxes, and the leaky bucket that are some aggregators’ networks. Decommissioning this path will not stop spam, and without regulation it’s hard to trust decommissioning will happen, rather becoming part of yet another backroom deal.

“Dear Syniverse Customer,

Effective December 1, 2024, the Syniverse non-sanctioned path utilized by 10 DLC SMS and MMS traffic destined for US Mobile Network Operators will be decommissioned.

To avoid any disruption to service, all 10 DLC Traffic will need to meet the following requirements:

Register all Brands and messaging use cases (campaigns) with The Campaign Registry (TCR)

Once a campaign is approved, update the 10 Digit Long Code in the Override Service Registry (OSR) with appropriate attributed such as Context = “A2P” and attaching the Campaign ID to the long code

Please reach out to your Syniverse account representative with any questions.”

Podcast 66: Truth in AI, Brian West, SignalWire

This is a new channel on the TADSummit Podcast, Truth in AI. After the impressive hacks created on SWAIG, SignalWire AI Gateway, thanks to the excellent tooling and resources created by Brian West. He was the perfect first guest. I strongly recommend you review the SWAIG Best Practices.

Here are some of the hacks created on SWAIG:

Johnny is a big fan of SignalWire, having early mover advantage with SWAIG. We highlighted the shift to AI last year in Podcast 9: CPaaSAI. We’ve recently seen GMS positioning as an AI Communications company, rather than SMS aggregator.

The hype in CPaaS (CPast) during the pandemic was a $70B grift on the stock market. And we’re currently witnessing a $1T grift in AI. That’s why Johnny wants the byline for this session, ‘Geek and The Street’.

Brian has highlighted on Linkedin the faked bot demos. On 8th May he’s giving a LiveWire session on a Simple AI Agent to help you answer your phone for your small business 24/7. SWAIG is a turnkey solution across voice, LLM, and all the scaffolding necessary for integrations with services like Google Calendar, AND guidance on how to successfully prompt.

An important piece of advice Brian provided for success in implementing your agent is to treat is like a human with a personality and show, not tell the agent what it needs to do. Wording is critical, ‘never’ can be interpreted as an absolute, not a conditional term.

Most hallucinations are through poor prompts, for example:

A critical issue are guard rails in protecting people when creating bots. This is something Brian and SignalWire takes very seriously in ensuring bots can do not harm. For example, when the prompt states the service is for children many content safeguards are applied. Uploading a voice has similar safeguards to protect from abuse.

This was a fun first Truth in AI podcast. Providing lots of advice and guidance, on building successful AI chatbots, that critically protect people from fraud. Here is the FreeSWITCH video advert mentioned in the podcast. And Brian also mentioned the Animaniac’s song he created using Suno with a sample of his voice.

Podcast 65: TADSummit Innovators, Noah Rafalko, TNID Part 2

This podcast breaks down how TNID works, how it helps everyone in the ecosystem, and its path to adoption.

Noah described his journey from traditional telecoms, through VoIP, landline SMS, to the wild west we find ourselves in with rampant spamming, robocalling, and fraud.

Noah is on a mission to create the plumbing of providing secure paths outside of the wild west, where brands and consumers can have TCPA compliant communication that are verifiable thanks to self sovereign communications / identity.

Noah is setting up a meeting with the FCC to share how TNID can stop SIM swap fraud. The carrier and customer have both claimed their identity (TNID profile) and have an existing relationship. A SIM swap request would need the customer’s approval on their preferred channel. No action is possible without that approval.

Focusing on the plumbing enables the existing ecosystem to innovate on top. You can see Noah’s delight of having Matrix become part of the TNID ecosystem in offering secure communications on your existing phone number.

The core idea is using SSI (Self Sovereign Identity, your TNID profile) as the store of your identity, verified credentials, and beyond that the scope of the TNID profile is up to you, for example opt-ins, access rights, approvals, etc. This is not some vast geeky preference setting exercise, simply going about your day with your existing relationships quickly builds the profile, and blocks bad actors.

Podcast 64: TADSummit Innovators, TADHack Winners Team Jazz using SignalWire

The TADHack Open SignalWire Winner was the hack Jazz Health Assistant from Team Jazz, Jared Ashcraft, David Sikes, John Wilder.

A groundbreaking software application designed to revolutionize diabetes management within families, especially for the elderly. This innovative tool meticulously tracks blood sugar levels, ensuring that any irregularities are promptly reported to family members.

By providing real-time, actionable insights, the application empowers families to proactively manage their loved one’s diabetes with greater precision and understanding. The enhanced visibility and control over health data this tool offers, facilitates a more informed and compassionate caregiving experience, ultimately improving the quality of life for elderly diabetic patients. Yes, they did use ChatGPT for this summary.

Like many of the best hacks, the idea came from a real world problem. John Wilder’s mom shared with Team Jazz her experiences as a nurse with diabetes management. Especially on the importance of regular and real-time monitoring of patients.

The team got up and running within one hour, the fastest they’d achieve throughout their years with TADHack. Brian from SignalWire was able to share a docker image for one of the SWAIG (SignalWire AI Gateway) examples, and from there they fleshed out the hack.

The discussion led by Johnny focused on how to bring this to market. With one of Jared and David’s hacks from 2021, Telepaper built on Avaya, we also had a similar discussion.

Telepaper augments the distance learning and collaboration experience by allowing users to seamlessly write notes to each other in real time with tablet and stylus. Each user would have a tablet, and the notes would appear between tablets in real time. Since the tablets are separate devices, no screen sharing would be necessary, and the face-to-face aspect of communication would not be lost.

Previous hacks that came to market, like Voxist, have relied upon the founding team to push on all sources of funding and support. We’re thinking about how to help the teams, or their idea, make this leap more systematically, as SignalWire continues to support the teams after the hackathon.

At the end of this session Johnny and Brian decided to set up a Truth in AI session, coming later this week. Given the scale of misrepresentation in AI today.

And some breaking news, one of team Garuda has received an internship offer. Integrating vCon into a product. More details once everything is signed. Thank you to the TADS community for your support of helping bring new blood into the ecosystem.

FCC Fines AT&T. Verizon, T-Mobile for location data sharing

This is an old problem, from 2012, here’s a ‘Telco Big Data’ conference discussing the opportunities, risks, and the simple fact anonymization of aggregate telco customer data is hard (impossible). So should telcos even try? https://lnkd.in/eBMpgqPu

In 2008-2010 there were lots of exposés. The Swiss parliament had a discussion on the TomTom / Swisscom location deal https://lnkd.in/eajXHt7F. Based on its customers’ data TomTom was helping the Dutch police site speed cameras https://lnkd.in/e-j8BR8W, hence another apology.

The current Federal Communications Commission fine is at a level that is just a “regulatory cost of goods”. Never mind how long it took to come about.

Consider all the data we share with the likes of Google, Meta, via our mobile phones, for ‘free’ stuff. However, on average the US family pays their carrier $200 per month, and the expectation is to protect their family’s privacy.

Remember Project Verify? https://lnkd.in/eWRgbUPR https://lnkd.in/eya3m3cn. So many failed initiatives.

About 8 years ago Payfone and Danal were exposing APIs so you could interrogate telco data https://lnkd.in/eSrV7xmU.

We’re trapped in a cycle of temporary outage, then back to ignoring / forgetting about the problem. Beyond tomorrow, will many people care about the $200M fine to carriers selling your location data?

Podcast 57: TADSummit Innovators, Vladimir Beloborodov, Panasonic Automotive North America

We’ve been so busy with TADSummit Podcasts we have a couple of interviews that have been on the to do list for publishing for too long. The first one is with Vladimir Beloborodov.

We first came in contact through his interest in WebRTC. Back in TADHack Paris 2015 Vladimir showcased his hack Thermal RTC. He linked a thermal camera to his phone using WebRTC, and showed a neat thermal image of the room.

He also did a great hack at TADHack Chicago in 2015 mashing up The Matrix.org Foundation + WebRTC + Robotics. It was a small robot with a telepresence functions controlled over WebRTC data channel peer to peer. Then in 2016 at TADHack Global Vladimir did an accessibility hack, Accessible video colors, using technology to help color-blind people see more colors.

We’ve been sharing insights on voice assistants and generative AI recently.

Last year Vladimir shared a white paper co-written by Amazon Alexa and Panasonic Automative on “Multiple Voice Assistant Dialogs and Arbitration” apart of the Voice Interoperability Initiative Architecture Series Whitepapers. https://lnkd.in/eRZviZYW

Vladimir was just back from Google Cloud Next ’24 here are links to the 2 sessions he highlighted:
* Local government genAI use cases: https://lnkd.in/ejy96GSS.
* Use of genAI in software engineering https://lnkd.in/ee47Sdjt
*In addition here’s a session on New Hampshire Department of Employment Security, is leveraging AI to improve efficiency and accuracy in unemployment benefit decisions, https://lnkd.in/e5K-PU9q

Overall, we’re in a period of rapid technology development, however, realizing the benefits of these technologies will take time and is use case dependent, e.g. accelerating software development requires work across the workflow. While removing a backlog of applications using agents is doable today. For more on Vladimir’s findings from Google Next check out this post. https://lnkd.in/e6Ex5_bC

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Manish Mangal has added responsibility as Chief Technology Officer for the Telecom business at Tech Mahindra. I’ve known Manish for over 15 years, since his time at Sprint.

Simon Nicholson is now Vice President Strategy, Supply Chain and Manufacturing at Oracle. I’ve known Simon since Oracle bought Sun many years ago.

David Saadat is now Senior Customer Success Manager at Adobe. I’ve known David for over one decade, since his time with TeliaSonera.

David Ingersoll is now  Sr Manager, SSP AI Sales North America at NetApp. I’ve known David since his time at Versant.

 Vamshi Sriperumbudur is now SASE Marketing at Palo Alto Networks. I’ve known Vamahi since his time in Apigee.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email or by my Substack.