The purpose of this CXTech Week 41 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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New Vector raises $8.5M to accelerate Matrix/Riot/Modular
Congratulations to the Matrix team, this is excellent news! New Vector (the startup which the Matrix core team formed to fund development in 2017) has raised an additional $8.5M of funding in order to speed up Riot/Matrix development and expand Matrix hosting via Modular.im!
We use Riot/Modular as the messaging platform for TADHack Global, which is running this weekend. Previously we used Slack, but their free service becomes very limited with use, and Slack’s pricing is uneconomic for global hackathons.
The Series-A equity investment round is led by Notion – a fund set up by the founders of MessageLabs. You can read about why MessageLabs invested here. Joining Notion in the round is First Minute – a fund set up by the founders of Lastminute.com (arguably the UK’s most famous original dotcom), and Dawn – one of the largest SaaS tech specialist funds in Europe (famous for backing iZettle, Mimecast, Neo4) and many more). You can read about why Dawn invested here. That’s an impressive line-up of investors 🙂 The previous funding round was in Jan 2017 from Status.
RingCentral Gives Avaya the Gift of Focus
A nice review of the upside of the Avaya and RingCentral partnering from Shai Berger of Fonolo. Shai will be leading a session at TADSummit Americas next week (15-16 Oct) on ‘Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communication’, and presenting on ‘The Race to Control the Customer Service Messaging Channel.’ One of TADSummit’s policies is no BS, so the discussions will be frank and to the point 😉
Congratulation to EMnify with a Series A Round 20 Million Euro
Way back in 2015 Martin Giess, Co-Founder, EMnify presented at TADSummit on “Be a Virtual Mobile Network for your M2M/IoT Devices.” Its never been easier to act as an MVNO and take control over mobile connectivity. Management and provisioning of SIM cards and mobile network resources is easy through APIs. They showed a demo of provisioning, SMS, data session control, and even voice. I even have one of the SIMs they were handing out on my desk 🙂
TADHACK WEEK – SPECIAL FEATURE – TADHack brings the world together to solve technology, business and industrial problems proposed by sponsors
Thank you to Don Witt who is running a TADHACK WEEK special feature on Telecom Reseller Channel Daily News. You can also listen to the Simwood interview here.
TADHack Live Streams
Even though you may not be able to take part in TADHack Global 2019 this weekend, you can still feel part of the action by watching the live streams.
TADHack Global Welcome and Sponsors’ Resources
And with this playlist you get to see my welcome and learn about the global sponsors resources everyone will be hacking on from Simwood, Telesign, and VoIP Innovations.
Running Order For TADSummit Americas 2019 (15-16 Oct) At IIT Chicago – The CXTech Event
TADSummit Americas 2019 is on the 15-16 Oct, it the CXTech event. It runs in parallel with the IIT RTC Conference. We stream the event live, just go the TADSummit Americas or TADSummit YouTube Channel to watch the live streams.
This is the first time we’ve run TADSummit in North America. We’ve just passed 200 registrations, which is great!
Over the weekend before TADSummit Americas, we’ll have TADHack Global, the largest telecom-focused hackathon with over 1000 registrants in 2019. You’ll be able to watch the action live from all the locations around the world at TADHack Global or the TADHack YouTube Channel. And on Monday we’ll be announcing the TADHack Global 2019 winners and reviewing the TADHack Location winners at around noon Central Time.
Thank you to TeleSign and Mio for sponsoring TADSummit Americas!
Telestax Partners with Zain Jordan to Deliver CPaaS to Their Nearly 50 Million Active Individual and Business Customers
It’s nice to see Telestax building out the CPaaS enabler business. At TADSummit Americas I’ll be sizing out this market for both telcos and their suppliers.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulation to Daisuke Tsunoda who is now Director, Strategic Partnerships at KDDI Corporation.
TADHack Chicago is running at the Kaplan Institute, one of the 23 Buildings You Shouldn’t Miss in Chicago according to ArchDaily.