Topic: Telephony

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.

If you're looking for a Linux initiative that is truly open source, where you can download the source, contribute without censorship, and drive the project, check out Moblin.org. The Moblin project was conceived in order to drive innovation on the new breed of Internet-enabled mobile devices, to foster community participation, and to avoid locking into a proprietary platform. Dirk Hohndel, the helmsman, woos open source developers to take this platform to its next level by participating in the community.

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columnist and open source advocate Doc Searls examines how we talk about the Internet and how we can move past the outdated language and concepts of the telecom industry.

The market for Internet and mobile use is growing at a rapid pace in India, which makes it ripe for solutions aimed at its unique population. Rajesh Jain is at the forefront of this growth, seeking out ways to reach as many users as possible. In this presentation he outlines how his companies address cost and complexity issues in Internet usage, and how mobile data is being used to reach more subscribers than ever.

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.

Just as the PC subsumed the typewriter, Peter Sisson predicts the inevitable integration of the phone and PC. He describes a PC phone integration model for the small office, home office huge market. The model is simple and requires only a PC, a phone, and a hosted service, allowing the customer to do local search dialing online using keywords such as coffee shop or plumber.

While some believe that the Web 2.0 wave is winding down, in this panel discussion from the 2008 Emerging Communications Conference, there are clear signs that Web 2.0 is spreading and reaching new markets and users. As it spreads, it is moving into new industries and encompassing more applications. In this session, Jon Arnold, a leading VoIP blogger, moderates a diverse panel of experts on the evolution of Web 2.0 into voice and mobile voice mashups.

Mark Jacobstein discusses a solution that brings together VoIP and mobile like peanut butter and chocolate. Mobile voice does not mean running VoIP over the cellular data channel. Instead Jacobstein reveals how the iSkoot solution uses the voice-optimized, circuit-switched network for delivery of voice communication to a mobile device, bringing IP telephony to mobile. He describes the huge success of the "3 Skypephone", powered by iSkoot, in a handful of countries so far.