The purpose of this CXTech Week 28 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:
- Where’s Intel?
- An Early Phone Scam
- Interview with Nenad Vučinić, General Manager of Telesign Belgrade
- Mashing up Microsoft and Ayoba
- Seven big tech companies say they’re platform gatekeepers under EU law
- Network as Code from Nokia
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Where’s Intel?
This is a great summary of Intel’s situation from Digits to Dollars, and the complexity it faces in solving 4 big problems. If Intel can catch-up, then this will be an MBA case study taught for decades to come.
My view is the outcome will be less clear cut. The timing of the CHIPS Act will help Intel, and definitely Ohio. But this requires so many things to successfully click sequentially. It feels like that scene in movies where the safecracker has 3 more tumblers to solve, and the police are already in the building.
TSMC has been firing on all cylinders for so long, it could mess up. Or China could decide it’s time to invade Taiwan after Russia does something crazy in the Ukraine. The past decade has taught us to expect the unexpected. But back to Intel:
- Manufacturing process chatch-up: the mantra Intel uses is “five nodes in four years,” announced in 2021. Five nodes comprise the Intel 7 process already in production; the Intel 4 process to be used for the Meteor Lake chips; an enhanced version called Intel 3; and then Intel 20A and Intel 18A nodes. Essentially catch up with the competition. There’s doubt they’ll achieve all of this, however, the $52B CHIPS Act ensures Intel has investment dollars to spare, just not time.
- AMD catch-up: AMD’s latest portfolio is strong across CPUs, GPUs and accelerators; and innovation. AMD’s chiplet architecture and associated packaging is well-liked. AMD argues that their products today are more performative and offer a better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than Intel, and that lead will only advance while Intel gets its manufacturing house in order, which is unlikely until late 2024 at the earliest, more likely mid 2025.
- Foundry Volume catch-up: TSMC is 60% of the market, Samsung 16% and Intel is just starting on 3rd party foundry services. TSMC’s rate of learning is massive compared to Intel’s. If Intel include all their internal foundry services then they can claim #2 spot. But the learning is not the same.
- All 3 of the above must be delivered successfully, AND we have Intel’s culture to contend with, it’s quite internally focused. I make fun of the things said by telcos and their vendors in demonstrating they drink their own kool-aid in preference to looking over the fence to the learning from the programmable telecoms industry. The classic, oft-quoted, mistake Intel made from being internally focused was thinking mobile CPUs would not generate enough volume to invest in them; which was definitely good for ARM.
That last bullet is something we should all take to heart, just because your the biggest in your pond; the context of that pond can change rapidly. Look at Twitter’s new competitor Threads. Even though the launch was obvious as talent left Twitter en-masse, its rapid success was not (109 million sign-ups at the time of writing). I’ll not use Threads because of what Facebook did to its users in the past, hence why the rapid success surprised me, I guess some people have short memories.
An Early Phone Scam
A great article from Guillaume Bourcy on one of the first phone scams in December 1924, where a historic incident unfolded in Vilagarcía de Arousa. Check out the article.
Phone and SMS scams are 95% social engineering and 5% technology. Like SMS phishing, SMS is only 5% of the problem, it’s the other 95% of the problem that needs to be solved. Hence why extending an SMS Firewall, meant to control A2P revenue leakage and SMS spamming will not solve the SMS phishing problem.
Interview with Nenad Vučinić, General Manager of Telesign Belgrade
I often refer to Telesign as a Serbian company 😉 Telesign have been in Belgrade since 2012 and has grown to 370+ employees. Belgrade is an ideal location because it has a highly educated, motivated, and multilingual workforce, many of whom have deep technology and telecommunications industry knowledge.
I have several good friend based in Belgrade, we’ve run a TADHack Belgrade in 2019. I can attest to their language skills as I heard a Serbian person speak perfect Beijing Mandarin, its the equivalent of received pronunciation (RP) in English, it sounds well-educated and quite posh.
In the interview Nenad reviews Telesign’s work in fraud detection. Customer onboarding is a critical use case. Today, one in four newly created accounts are fake. Businesses need to detect potential risk as quickly as possible, while adding minimal friction. Telesign’s intelligent solutions are trained to detect fraudulent phone numbers and recommend when to block risky new users. Leading internet and social media companies like Mamba, one of the world’s largest online dating sites, use Telesign to prevent fraud.
Another use case is toll fraud/IRSF, which can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single attack—all it takes is an unprotected form or phone line. Companies utilize Telesign to detect voice and message traffic abnormalities and block fraudulent traffic and robocalls
Mashing up Microsoft and Ayoba
As I welcome people to TADHack, one of the things I always remind people to do is to mash up the sponsors 🙂 It’s a way for producing great impact and innovation is by “mashing up” ingredients from disparate sources. Think start-ups and large Enterprises, industry verticals, nationalities, languages and backgrounds. Think salted caramel.
Ayoba has been at TADHack partner for many years. In this post Yusuf described the mashup between recently launched Microsoft Learn Micro-App on MTN’s ayoba smart app ( https://lnkd.in/eNWyN_sE ) , which will deliver free skilling content to Small Business owners, Start-ups and Developers.
By providing free skilling content to Small Business owners, Start-ups and Developers, this collaboration provides a great opportunity for those businesses to gain the knowledge and skills they need to succeed, on top of a digital channel that provides access to millions of users and potential customers.
Seven big tech companies say they’re platform gatekeepers under EU law
Tech companies behind search engines, social networking services, and operating systems with millions of users will face the Digital Market Act’s new rules in the EU soon.
Seven companies have officially acknowledged they meet the criteria: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Microsoft, and Samsung.
According to Thierry Bretton (EU commissioner):
- They will no longer be able to lock in users in their ecosystem.
- They will no longer be able to decide which apps you need to have pre-installed on your devices; which app store you have to use.
- They will not be able to “self-preference”: exploiting the advantage of being the gatekeeper by treating their own products and services more favorably.
- Their messaging apps will have to interoperate with others.
Let’s see what happens, Matrix could be in high demand very soon 😉 Meta did not launch Threads in the EU because of this.
Breaking the rules would put companies at risk of a fine of up to 10 percent of its total worldwide turnover, 20 percent for repeat offenders, and repeat failures could lead the commission to “open a market investigation and, if necessary, impose behavioural or structural remedies.”
Apple said the new law “will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users,” has reportedly planned to allow third-party app stores in iOS 17, though with possible restrictions such as only allowing them in Europe or mandating security requirements.
It reminds me of the early 2000s when apps would aggregate across Yahoo, AOL, and MSN IM, work for a couple of months, then get blocked by one or more of the IM platforms. I think this will get lost in lots of implementation and interop details and lawyer discussions. The Act itself is a bit fuzzy on some definitions, and what is a digital market anyway? Are they referring to internet or online services? BTW Microsoft Teams looks pretty closed to me 😉
Network as Code from Nokia
Nokia are promoting Network as Code. If they’d followed the TADSummit blog, CXTech newsletters, attended TADSummit they’d have learned from a vast repository of knowledge and experience in this domain.
Here’s a great session from Liang Dong, Epsilon on NaaS from 2021, and from Megaport in 2020. All the way back in 2018, Sylvain from Wazo gave a great presentation on Instructure as Code.
None of the above are based on standardized global APIs, or carrier collaboration, or ecosystems, or demonstrating the cognitive dissonance of developers wanting something they can not yet understand. Yet developers in 2000 with packetcable multimedia did not see the point on network QoS, and when it was trialed in the field customers did not see the point.
Telcos must stop drinking their own kool-aid and look over the fence to programmable communications / telecoms, where TADSummit has been leading the thinking for over a decade. Everything is online, just go to blog.tadsummit.com.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Fatma Topal is now Senior Business Process Management Consultant at SOCAR Türkiye (Princeps Legem LLC). We first met when she worked for Türk Telekom.
Emanuela Cariolagian is now Director of Media Relations at Fresenius Medical Care!
Tony Rose is now Human Assistant to DJ Squircle 🎧💠🧿 at DAOGEN.ai. I first met Tony when we were chatting about self-sovereign identity. SSI has had a bit of a downer because of the negativity around blockchain. But interesting applications are moving towards mainstream, so we’ll see much more of SSI in the coming years.
Will Chia is now VP of Marketing at Styra. I’ve known Will since he joined Twilio.
Antonis Tsakiridis is now lead full stack software engineer at indexer.xyz. I’ve known Antonis throughout his time at Telestax. I’m really happy for so many of the old Telestax team now in excellent new roles since Mavenir closed down their CPaaS team. Though I am a little sad that such a world-class programmable communications team no longer exists.
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