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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]