Introductory Comments Overall, it’s a rather telco-centric view in the Telecommunications Arena paper, which today is far broader than telcos. It’s the internet. Most communications today are over the internet, not the PSTN. Telcos provide access to the internet, i.e. to peering points, they are not the exclusive transport / network within the internet / […]
Calling all UCaaS / CPaaS / CCaaS / enterprise VoIP providers. We need to comment on MLTS (Multi-Line Telephone Systems) NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making) (FCC 18-132) as soon as possible. Firstly, an apology in the lateness of this article. I learnt about FCC 18-132 back in October at the IIT RTC Conference and have […]
There’s been quite a bit of debate stimulated by the weblog “What’s in a name? Finding a better handle for Programmable Telecoms“, the related twitter discussion (see below), and lots of other threads over the past month. What’s in a name? Finding a handle for #ProgrammableTelecomshttps://t.co/O1NBSgvQsq FinTech is an excellent handle for financial service innovators. We need […]
When I first learned of the word FinTech, I thought, “Oh! A group noun for digital banking, finance, insurance, and crypto currencies. A handy moniker for a collection of related services, and at least it avoids using the dumbass term digital.” That handle has stuck and driven broad recognition of the category for investors, press, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]