Telco CPaaS Revisited

I’m seeing a resurgence in telco CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) initiatives. However, I’m seeing mistakes being repeated from the past, important learning points from successful telco CPaaS programs being ignored, and a broader misunderstanding on the role a telco plays with CPaaS in their countries of operation. Hence the focus of this weblog […]

What’s happened to the Mobile Phone Experience?

UPDATE June 27th: My TMO complaint was escalated and the agent, reviewing my case before contacting me, did one simple thing: asked me if moving back to my old plan would solved the problem. My immediate response was ‘Yes!’ I’m moving back to my old plan in July. Across credit card companies, banks, utilities, other […]

What is a CPaaS? TalkingHeadz with Dave Michels and Evan Kirstel

I was fortunate to be invited to take part in a conversation with Dave Michels and Evan Kirstel, TalkingHeadz. The focus was: what is a CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service)? I consider the term CPaaS to be as dumbass as Cloud Communications. They were both created when referring to cloud was ‘essential marketing cool’. And […]

The Enterprise Telecoms Revolution. A Potted History of Programmable Telecoms.

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 […]

Enterprise Application Owners and Developers need to Work Together on APIs

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 […]

Twilio Flex does a Microsoft

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 […]

6 Years on from Cutting the PayTV Cord

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 […]

SMS API Pricing, I just don’t get it

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 […]

From IM to the First Point of Contact with the Internet (FPOCI)

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 […]

What’s Happened to Critical Thinking?

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, […]