Category Archives: Conferences

The Great API Con

Happy New Year! I thought I’d kick the year off with the Great API Con, as its resulting in systematic failures of innovation projects that should be seeing far more business success. This article is for API providers not consumers. “Wait! What? Aren’t you an early proponent of APIs? Recommending copying the lead of Web […]

Programmable Telecoms Evolution at IIT RTC Conference and TADHack Chicago Winners

On Wednesday 17th Oct I gave a keynote at the IIT RTC Conference covering Programmable Telecoms Evolution along with the 3 winners from TADHack Chicago. The slides from the session are shown below, and you can see the keynote video here. This link is the live stream, so you’ll have to hunt through it. Just […]

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 […]

What is it that you do?

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 […]

UCaaS is a subset of CPaaS

Its always before Enterprise Connect the confusion on CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) rises. Here are two simple definitions: UCaaS is a PBX in the cloud, its a telecom application (granted a complex one, but a telecom app nonetheless). CPaaS is a telecom application server in the […]

PSTN SPAM and its impact on Enterprise Communications

PSTN SPAM is on the rise in the US. A simple survey of my US-based friends shows those with iPhones, that lack the filtering provided by Android, are suffering multiple calls per day. My Nexus 5X has some nice filtering tools, I’m seeing 3 or 4 per week. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans made […]

Interesting Times in Telecoms

Its interesting times to review quarterly financial performance of a number of telecom companies. Firstly, examining the large established ones focused on telco: Ericsson revenue fell 6% year over year during the third quarter to $5.9 billion Nokia fell 9% year-on-year to around $5.7B in Q3, and said conditions will continue to be difficult into […]

The Rainbow of Programmable Telecoms

Its been a busy summer across preparations for TADHack Global, TADSummit and the day job of helping people around the world build new businesses and services in programmable telecoms. Plus here in the US with the long summer holidays a succession of camps and baby sitters to keep the kids occupied and not watching TV or […]

Restconn 2017

I attended Restconn 2017, this weblog provides quick review and some context on what it means to the industry. I’ve known Ivelin, Jean and Amit since 2004/5; they are the core team behind Mobicents (the open source project now called Restcomm) and they founded Telestax which leads Restcomm. Back in 2004/5 there were lots of open […]

Building an A2P Ecosystem, Line Bot Awards

On Saturday, March 18, the winners of the “LINE BOT AWARDS” were announced. 815 entries were whittled down to just 24 teams who completed for the Grand Prix prize of 10 million yen, about $90,000 USD. At TADHack Global we get about 200 entries over one weekend, its comparing apples and oranges a little as […]