When it comes to IP telephony, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet–but you will at ETel, O’Reilly’s first Emerging Telephony Conference, January 24-26 at the SF Airport Marriott. http://conferences.oreilly.com/etel
As Ed Stephenson points out in a recent article there is an “avalanche of VoIP-related services…Resistance is futile,” he writes. “There is no going back.”
If you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em–and us–at this three-day conference Stephenson calls “critical if you want to understand your options in this new frontier.” Like Stephenson, we see the rampant possibilities of emerging telephony as a modern Wild West, with all the opportunity and chaos of the original. ETel is aimed at developers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople who want to know how to get in on this telephony gold rush and stake their claims.
Major players in the communications industry–Google, Yahoo!, eBay–have gotten in on the ground floor through acquisitions or research and development alliances. For example, Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo!’s senior director of voice product management, will share with ETel attendees Yahoo!’s new consumer voice initiatives and the opportunities they enable.
Several recently launched products whose developers and sponsors will be speakers at ETel include:
– PhoneGnome, from TelEvolution, lets you make an unlimited number of free calls without ever spending another dime. David Beckemeyer, one of the founders of Earthlink, will explain how this $99 box will provide a platform for helping developers get their VoIP-based applications to consumers.
– Office 12, from Microsoft, adds new voice capabilities to its popular business software, allowing users to communicate with colleagues, customers, and partners in real time through email, phone, IM, short message service (SMS), video conferencing, and web conferencing. Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall and Amritansh Raghav will demonstrate at ETel.
– FON, a new network that invites users to share their broadband Wi-Fi connection in return for Wi-Fi access elsewhere. Entrepreneur and company founder Martin Varsavsky will share his ideas for “a Wi-Fi revolution for universal wireless communication.”
– iotum, the VoIP-based service for mobile professionals, is designed to give users a simple way to control who reaches them and how and when. Alec Saunders, who spearheaded the technology, will also be available at ETel.
– Erik van Eykelen of Voipster–the Mozilla for the VoIP world–will present a browser-embeddable VoIP and IM application based on an open source VoIP initiative comprising a client-side VoIP engine.
These are just a small sample of the exciting innovations you’ll see and hear about at ETel. For a complete conference agenda of speakers, workshops, sessions, and events, go to http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/44/program.html.
IP telephony is a whole new adventure, and it’s time to get some skin in the game.
