While there are many telephone technology conferences each year, two stand out. VON and eComm. VON is where the business professionals in the voice and telephony industries go to make deals. eComm is where the technologists go to innovate.
Prior to this year Etel (the predecessors to eComm) was an O’Reilly sponsored conference designed to provide a forum for people working in the emerging telephony technologies to get together, learn and network. When O’Reilly decided to drop the Etel conference a ground swell of discussion in the telco world lead Lee S Dryburgh to put his day job on hold and facilitate eComm as a replacement. As stated on the eComm site:
“eComm is the venue for those interested in the radical transformation of the trillion dollar telecommunications industry. It has already started down the path that the homebrew computer took three decades ago. Just as democratized computation gave birth to the computer industry, eComm is tracking, highlighting and promoting the people and technologies driving this new wave of democratization.
eComm brings out the visionaries, emergent technologies, real-world startups, cutting-edge academic projects, views from the incumbent telecom players; garage based hacks and stirs required policy debates to create the ultimate three-day conversation.
The story of the decentralization of communications innovation has past the second chapter which was VoIP. It is now regarded as a building block only. As a standalone service it is both uninspiring and unlikely to be highly profitable.”
The DialogTech phone mashup API is an ideal vehicle for developers looking to build creative web to phone applications. At my eComm 2008 talk I will describe the DialogTech architecture used to drive down the costs of sophisticated IVR applications while making them accessible to any web developer or small business.
