Emerging Communications

Voice is the most natural, comfortable form of communication, but most customer interaction is done through text. In this presentation from the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference, Peter Diedrich of Mobivox describes their new voice CRM platform that improves customer satisfaction and retention by including sales messages into typical customer interactions.

Anyone who has developed applications for mobile phones knows that dealing with the phone companies takes much longer than writing the software. In this presentation from the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference, Jamie Siminoff announces the launch of GRID.com, a service made to replace the tedious one-off negotiations over services with a frictionless, pay-as-you-go model.

Entrepreneur and evangelist Malcolm Matson traces the evolution of today's captive network access model and describes the nature of an intriguing alternative: the open public local access network. Matson posits a simple, but profound question: will our conversations be truly ours, or will they be subject to the governance of a monopolistic access provider whose interests may not align with our own?

Language is the way we understand things. In his 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) presentation in San Francisco, widely-read blogger, columnist and open source advocate Doc Searls examines how we talk about the Internet and how we can move past the outdated language and concepts of the telecom industry.

Today's human-computer interaction paradigms are not enough; they are clunky and not very efficient. We should instead follow Mother Nature and approach it in a more 'neural-like' way to make the human-computer interaction experience as smooth and natural as possible. Robert Nevin believes he has the right tool for the job at hand and introduces his take on this exciting field.

Economic activity is now driven by creativity. More value is created by communities than by companies, but much of this value is not monetized. In this talk from the 2008 Emerging Communications Conference, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation discusses the balance between openness and proprietary in a world ruled by community participation.

Nathan Eagle describes the research he has been conducting with mobile phones beginning with his PhD program at MIT and since. The work has included analyzing data coming from mobile devices in order to model and predict social behavior. For the past two years Eagle has been teaching mobile phone programming in computer science programs in Africa. He presents his case for the mobile phone industry paying more attention to the huge market in the developing world.

Adrian Cockcroft has coined the term 'Millicomputer' to cover any computing device that uses less than a watt of power; small enough to fit in your pocket, cool enough not to burn your leg. In this presentation, he takes us on a tour of the amazing technologies that already exist and gives us a glimpse of where this rapidly developing area of technology might take us next.

Simonie Wilson, a senior speech scientist working at Intervoice, shares her thoughts about, and experiences in the field of VUI's (Voice User Interfaces). Today's VUI's aren't really that good, and people know this; or do they? Simonie, an expert in the field, would like us to believe something else; that the majority of the systems in use today are merely patchworks; that there are, in fact, much better technologies just waiting to be put to use to provide people with satisfactory interfaces.

Jim Van Meggelen gives a talk about Asterisk, the world's leading open source PBX telephony engine and telephony applications toolkit, as well as the tough challenges of running a telecom business and how one can deliver telephony infrastructure to small companies. He shares with us his insights into the telecom industry, its current state, and where he wants it to go in the future.