Mon

Sep 12
2005

Nat Torkington

Nat Torkington

ETel: Announcing the Emerging Telephony Conference

Tim's long believed that the Internet is poised to shake up telephony the same way it shook up publishing and printed communications.  On Friday we announced The O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference, our new conference on VoIP, IP Telephony, and the new generation of voice applications.  It'll be held January 24-26 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott.  Applications are what we're focusing on: the open VoIP standards bring a whole team of new players to the voice applications space, companies like TellMe and Voxeo to name two. Mix in the fact that call processing software is going open source (see Asterisk and sipX) and that the latest VXML applications can incorporate web-like dynamic content with the same techniques you use to build CGI scripts, it's clear there's a whole lot of potential for this area.  And given that eBay bought Skype two days after we announced the conference, I think we've got the timing spot on.

ETel, as we're calling it, will introduce business people (the enterprise deployers of VoIP, VCs, telcos) to the technologists building amazing applications.  What makes an amazing application?  We've identified the key features that make a voice app more than just a packet-switched version of a 1980s hardware device:

Applications where distance doesn't matter.
Anywhere there's bandwidth, you can have a call. An app can improve life for a family in India as easily as it can improve life for a workgroup in Palo Alto.
Applications with multiple media channels.
For example, can we talk while we share a whiteboard? The VoIM apps of Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, et al. have a simple text channel in addition to voice. What can we do beyond that to improve communication and bring people together?
Applications that involve people interacting with computers.
TellMe makes it trivial to extend your voice application with a CGI script. I can have my computer say any piece of data it can get (and Web 2.0 APIs give it access to a lot of data!), and I can respond to anything people type (and, in some circumstances, say) to my application. The power (any data my computer can access!) and ease (same techniques as CGI script!) just blow me away.
Applications that treat voice as data.
You can freeze and thaw voice recordings. Look at the Katrina Voicemail set up by Air America. It's brilliant: you can leave voicemail for people who had a particular phone number, and they can listen to it. Voicemail as it stands is crap, like etching on stone with a chisel. There are so many directions voice can go now that it's within everyone's reach to program voice apps.
Applications that connect to the regular telephone system (the POTS).
That is, computer-to-computer calls are less interesting to us that computer-to-phone or phone-to-computer. VoIP termination is cheap and easy to get, and makes for some killer apps. This is why Skype is more interesting than Google Talk (for now :-).

I'm co-chairing this conference with Surj Patel, who's a master in this space.  We've built a killer program committee, which includes Imran Ali from Wanadoo and Jim van Meggelen who cowrote Asterisk: The Future of Internet Telephony. We'll be producing a kick-ass program over the coming weeks and months.  We're still assembling the one day of workshops and two days of plenary sessions that will comprise the conference, and would love to have your input. In the same way that ETech frames and amplifies the work of alpha geeks, we want ETel to bring to light all of the as-yet-untapped potential in telephony.What do you think's important in this space? Who shouldn't we miss? Who should we miss? Leave comments on this blog entry or mail me at gnat AT oreilly.com.


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Comments: 4

  Shree..\\ [09.12.05 01:51 PM]

Hey Nat..
You guys always come up with fantastic conferences and discussions! Good luck with this one too...I came accross this http://www.inveneo.org/ a while ago, i am sure you guys must have reviewed it in the past.

I was wondering it would be great if you can also include VoIP killer applications that could improve communications in the developing countries or say cost effective solutions to improve communities. I think this is something that people will be interested in. Thanks...

Shree..\\

  Mark J. Levitt [09.12.05 03:49 PM]

Looks like the conference's URL got a bit mangled in the publishing process. Here's the ETel homepage again.

  Jon Schull [09.13.05 02:36 PM]

Mesh networking cellphones in New Orleans.

Why aren't there ad-hoc battery-powered "cell towers in a barrel" that could be "bombed" or floated into disaster zones to turn the thousands of useless cell phones in people's pockets into a crisis mesh network.

(Answer this question, and we can deal with the problem of recharging the cellphones next. But look: today's cellphones are powerful receivers and transmitters and computers. In crisis they should be re-purporseable, whether the telcos like it or not.) RSVP jonschull.blogspot.com

  Nick Efstratis [09.13.05 08:30 PM]

Don't miss www.lignup.com...

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