Before we start, do not worry about all the acronyms in this potted history of Programmable Telecoms, there is an irreverent acronym list at the end of this weblog to help you through them. And yes, this is a long weblog, at 4k words it should take about 20 minutes to read, but its easy […]
Justin Haefner, a serial TADHack-mini Orlando winner, gave an excellent presentation at Enterprise Connect on “Embrace the API Movement”. I found it inspiring as he explained his experiences of implementing APIs within Medtronic, and the important role TADHack plays in his professional development. His key point: Enterprise Application Owners need to understand APIs enough so […]
Microsoft built Windows, a platform that enabled people to create cool stuff, like spreadsheets, word processors, lots of enterprise desktop applications. Microsoft copied the high margin cool stuff built on Windows, and soon their software became the default. This is what we’re seeing with Twilio Flex. BTW, browsers were not high margin, hence the delay […]
We’re in our 6th year of watching only on demand services such as Netflix and Amazon TV, after cutting the PayTV cord. We’re still able to access popular sporting events live like the Super Bowl without a PayTV subscription, which for some weird reason my wife likes to watch. When we were planning to cut […]
The information shown below on SMS API pricing is easily accessible from the companies’ websites. I’ve used all their services. My clients use their services at a range of volumes. I’ve run hackathons where people are innovating on most of these companies, where we experience firsthand the ease of use and flexibility. I have a […]
IM (Instant Messaging) / chat has been around for a long time. Before AIM (AOL Instant Messenger, 1997) and ICQ (Internet Chat Query, 1996), there was the command line function ‘chat’ on unix (early 1980s) which evolved into IRC (Internet Relay Chat,1988); and for the VMS (Virtual Memory System) crowd there was phone (sometime in […]
Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment. If I were to sum up the one skill I think has helped me throughout my career, it would be hard to find a better one than critical thinking. Unfortunately, we live in a world where opinions and facts are treated with equal weight, […]
A common question I’m asked about TADHack and TADSummit is, “What’s the ROI of TADS?” Return on Investment. In other words, how many relevant leads, which we can convert into sales, will TADS deliver. My response if always the same. There is no ROI for TADS, measured in those terms. I’ve had people close down the […]
I’m asked this question surprisingly often, “Alan, what is it that you do?” My stock answer is, “I wander the world helping people.” Which generally results in a wry smile from those who know me; else a questioning or annoyed look from someone who was expecting a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. When I […]
Hackathons are just one of many ways technologists get to the information / communities they need. In this weblog I’m not covering all the online resources and communities such as Github, StackOverflow, etc. GitHub reported last April having almost 20 million users and 57 million repositories, making it the largest host of source code in the […]