The purpose of this CXTech Week 5 2023 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:

• Consultant of Last Resort
• W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization
• Arkose Labs Launches SMS Toll Fraud ROI Calculator
• FOSDEM 2023, 4 & 5 Feb
• January 2023 Edition of the RTCSec Newsletter
• Clickatell Launches Chat 2 Pay with FlySafair for WhatsApp Mobile Payments
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Consultant of Last Resort

The reason for the title, Consultant of Last Resort, is I’m sometimes brought in after a big name consultancy or industry boutique has failed to deliver. A common reason for those failures, in my opinion, is the consultants believe what’s written on the web and lack depth in the domain, both technically and across its history. The web’s memory is short and dominated by marketing spin.

I’m coming to the end of several consulting projects. I thought I’d let everyone know I’m looking for more consulting business 🙂 

This article is a fun and hopefully informative review of some of my work and how I can help.

W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization

The World Wide Web Consortium began 2023 by forming a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves their member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization also preserves the core process and mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web, by developing open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community.

The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to lead the Web to its full potential by creating technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the Web remains open, accessible, and interoperable for everyone around the globe. W3C well-known standards HTML and CSS are the foundational technologies upon which websites are built. They work on ensuring that all foundational Web technologies meet the needs of civil society, in areas such as accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy. W3C also provides the standards that undergird the infrastructure for modern businesses leveraging the Web, in areas such as entertainment, communications, digital publishing, and financial services. That work is created in the open, provided for free and under the groundbreaking W3C Patent Policy.

W3C’s vision for “One Web” brings together thousands of dedicated technologists representing more than 400 Member organizations and dozens of industry sectors. W3C is a public-interest non-profit organization incorporated in the United States of America, led by a Board of Directors and employing a global staff across the globe. For more information see https://www.w3.org/.

While W3C covers lots of the building blocks to keep the Web relevant, with initiatives across graph data, payments and decentralized identifiers. I think the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) that provides standards and support materials to help understand and implement accessibility, is going to have a significant impact across many marginalized groups this decade. Yep, W3C is not fast, but it does get there.

Arkose Labs Launches SMS Toll Fraud ROI Calculator

SMS Toll Fraud, also known as International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), is a type of crime that occurs when attackers hijack voice or SMS one-time passwords for monetary gain. This type of attack not only disrupts business operations and damages a company’s reputation, but also it can result in significant monthly financial losses.

It does require you enter an email, it’s a handy estimation tool. Though the details of the algorithm are not stated, its relatively easy to deduce. Increasingly we’ll see aggregators extend the capabilities of their SMS firewalls to highlight suspicious activities. For example, in CXTech Week 19 2021 we covered Infobip buying Anam.

FOSDEM 2023, 4 & 5 Feb

Since 2000, the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.

FOSDEM is held annually, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.

Some of the sessions I’ll be watching include:

• Become a rockstar using FOSS! by Lorenzo Miniero
• Social audio applications with Janus by Lorenzo Miniero
• I have an idea: build a language that can run backwards by Steven Goodwin
• 7 things I learned about old computers, via emulation by Steven Goodwin
• OpenSIPS 3.3 – Messaging in the IMS and UC ecosystems by Liviu Chircu
• Modernizing Authentication and Authorization in XMPP by Matthew Wild
• Interoperable Chat, Dutch Healthcare and the Digital Services Act by Winfried Tilanus
• W3C RTC Working Group Update by Romain Vailleux
• 4K HDR video with AV1 : A Reality Check by Vibhoothi
• Merging Two Worlds – Broadcast and WebRTC by Dan Jenkins
• And there are many more I’ll dip into to get a sense of the issues.

January 2023 Edition of the RTCSec Newsletter

A packed RTCSec newsletter:

• Our news: The dangers of using the Kamailio exec module and our pentesting schedule
• Our news: Updates to the awesome RTC hacking list
• The Threema weaknesses paper from ETH Zurich
• Presentations of interest from Blackhat and Nullcon Berlin
• Receiving calls on your deskphone from SIPVicious – still happening!
• Various vulnerabilities in Cisco products, Juniper and Chrome’s WebRTC

Clickatell Launches Chat 2 Pay with FlySafair for WhatsApp Mobile Payments

Clickatell, Chat Commerce and mobile messaging, have gone live with its Chat 2 Pay feature with FlySafair , South Africa’s leading low-cost airline. FlySafair is the first airline in the world to deploy Chat 2 Pay with a pay-by-link capability that allows its customers the convenience of effortless mobile payments via FlySafair’s WhatsApp channel.

Chat commerce has been on a slow burn with respect to adoption. Brands and customers have been nervous about using e-commerce over chat, even though the experience is quite smooth. WhatsApp certainly has not made things easy for the aggregators with its API. This deployment will be an interesting one to track.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADSummit and TADHack are side-hustles; fun, no-BS, and help make a difference in people’s lives. A recent highlight for me is Sam Machin becoming Head of Developer Platform and Experience at Stacuity. At TADHack Sam demoed his amazing talent over many years; and TADSummit Nov 2022 connected him with Stacuity.  Congratulations Sam and the Stacuity team.

Amy Meyers is now Staff Platform Engineer at Valimail, antiphishing. I’ve known Amy since her time at Flowroute.

Daisy Tong is now SVP Marketing & Customer Experience at AURA Network Systems. I’ve known Daisy for over a decade, since her time at 4DK.

Satish Kumar is now Founder & CEO at Simsy. I’ve known Satish since his time at Glopore IMS, over 15 years ago.

Marco Lafrentz is now Vice President of Business and Market Development at netnumber Global Data Services. Previously with tyntec.

Brian Schunke is now  Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Sentaca, an IBM Company. I’ve known Brian throughout his time at Synchronoss where they began as iPhone activation software.

Hannes van Rensburg is now Chief Executive Officer at The Internet of Behaviors Company. I’ve known Hannes since Fundamo, and recently he was with Clickatel.

Doug Daniels is now SVP Life Sciences at Softserve. I’ve known Doug through his time at Google.

A fun conversation as we reminisce about Telefonica and the brand BlueVia (previously known as Litmus).

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