CXTech Week 50 2021 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 50 2021 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:

  • TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE: The Results
  • BICS buys 3m Digital Networks
  • Digits to Dollars: Apple Car
  • Slice of TADSummit: Open Source
  • Slide of TADSummit: Programmable Communications
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE: The Results

TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE ran on 11-12th December. It’s a hybrid hackathon (in-person and remote) about using Avaya’s and its partners’ resources (Subspace, Telnyx, Toolwire, Red Hat, and Google) to solve problems that matter to you. You can see all the resources here.

Here are some of the photos from the hackthon, the videos (including prize giving and an update the latest on Avaya Spaces developments), and this weblog summarizes the event and the winners of the $15k prize money, plus lots of other goodies including great food (check-out the photos).

Despite the prolonged pandemic; the rise of a new variant resulting in new travel and gathering restrictions in some countries; and to my surprise holiday party season impacting teams 😉 We still had over 200 registrations, thank you to everyone who registered from around the world.

I really liked Telepaper by Jared M Ashcraft and David Sikes. It augments the distance learning and collaboration experience by allowing users to seamlessly write notes to each other in real time with tablet and stylus. It uses Avaya Spaces, Subspace, and Red Hat resources.

Metashop by Genesis Barrios is a 3D interactive Web Store using Avaya OneCloud Orchestration and Avaya Spaces. It is a compelling example of Avaya’s relevance to the emerging metaverse.

IoT hacks are always fun and Bender by TeamZero (Ebtesam Al Haque, Muntaser Syed, Javier Carrion, Derrick Wilson-Duncan, Chris Woodle) is an AI powered robotic bartender. Using Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Avaya OneCloud Orchestration, Google Dialogflow, Subspace, and Red Hat.

BICS buys 3m Digital Networks

Following Twilio’s acquisition of ValueFirst, covered in CXTech Week 12 2021. BICS is buying into the Indian business messaging market with 3m Digital Networks (MOB Texting).

Its being positioned as broadening BICS aggregation business in CPaaS. I thought that was the purpose of TeleSign. Likely TeleSign is being readied for a separate sale focused on its identity authentication business, though its traditional SMS business remains strong.

Digits to Dollars: Apple Car

Digits to Dollars is always a good read. And they have an interesting series on the Apple Car. The framing of the success of the iPhone I disagree with a little.

My view is Apple added mobility to the state of the art music players (iPod Touch) with a partially functional ‘mini-laptop’ as email and web browsing were just about viable.

So rather than they took a $200 item (existing mobile phones) and made it $600 with the Apple brand. They took an iPod Touch ($3-400), and made it mobile with the iPhone ($600). Which didn’t seem unreasonable given it was partially replacing some of the laptop functions ($1k+), e.g. that quick email check without having to fire up the laptop.

Now with the Apple Car, it’s a very different market situation. Tesla has already set a premium for a relatively unreliable electric car. Prices range between a Model 3 – $45,190, Model S – $96,190, Model Y – $58,190, and Model X – $106,190. All more than I’ve ever paid for a car. Perhaps Apple can be the reliable version of Tesla? Perhaps we’ll see different ownership models, which has been talked about with Teslas for quite some time. While the odds seem a little long for Apple Car success, when a company has that much cash, of course it should have a go.

When I look at all the plastic parts in luxury brand cars these days, after 3 years it makes sense to move on to avoid the emerging maintenance burden. Car ownership in some segments of the market is already a form of expensive rental. My car is about 10 years, I own not lease, and I have no plans to change that car until a reasonable (price and reliability) electric car becomes available given possible legislation. I wonder how many other people are watching and waiting, rather than buying at the moment?

Slice of TADSummit: Open Source

Through December we review themes from TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021. The Open Source presentations include:

Thank you to our sponsors AWA Networks, Automat Berlin, STROLID, GoContact, Broadvoice, Telnyx, and Radisys for making TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021 possible.

Slice of TADSummit: Programmable Comms

We reviewed the presentations focused on programmable communications at TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021. The presentations include:

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Abhijeet Singh is moving on from 2.25 years at TeleSign, and 3.25 years at BICS before that. He’s been a great supporter of TADSummit.

Jose Valles (ran Bluevia many years ago) is now President EMEA at Sitecore

Luka Milosevic is now Software Engineer at Nutanix. TADHack winner in 2019.

Magdalena Domagalik is now Manager Project Management Networking & Communications at KPN.

Philip Stanfield is now Strategic Client Director at eGain

Ben Levy is now Senior Vice President Of Engineering at Vidyo. Ben was part of TADSummit at APEX Communications, which was bought by Dialogic, which was bought by Enghouse, and he’s now part of Vidyo (a TADHack sponsor) that was also bought by Enghouse.

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