ETel Workshops

Today is the first day of ETel 2007. Surj (my co-chair) and I spent a lot of yesterday going through the schedule and reviewing our notes. As I was doing this I realized what a great set of workshops we have this year. The ones that caught my eye are:

OpenMoko / FIC NEO 1973 Workshop - The first ever workshop for the first fully open source phone. I can't wait to see the prototypes.

Searching Calls: Indexing, Searching, and Retrieving Recorded Speech - Being able to search my voice mail and phone calls as trivially as searching the web sounds amazing. Tomorrow there is going to be a demo that shows off this technology. Might be another business model Pluggd, the podcasting search engine, to consider.

Building A Telecom Business Without Selling Your Soul - Led by Brian McConnell, one of my dinner companions from last night, this looks to be a very interesting talk. Brian is on startup number -- a conference call business named Radiohandi. They are growing purposefully and are doing a lot of smart things. There's a lot to learn from him.

Blackbag VoIP Security Briefings - Nothing provides a dose of reality like a security talk. More and more of my own voice data goes over VoIP, but I am definitely not aware of all of the security issues. This should be a really good session.

Utility Computing and the LignUp Voice Application Platform - This session is going to provide an overview of a voice platform built on top of Amazon's EC2 and S3 webservices. It's one of the first of its kind. I want to hear what the particular challenges of handling a voice application on EC2 were.

If you're at ETel today say hi. I'm busy, but I always love meeting people.