Sebastopol, CA -- The second edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (ETel) wrapped up on March 1, following three days of mind-expanding presentations and workshops delving into the future of realtime and mobile communications. More than 500 business leaders, entrepreneurs, hackers, open source activists, grassroots developers, and visionary researchers attended ETel, all actively participating in an open environment where learning was a shared experience.
"The conference team and I have been overwhelmed with positive feedback from ETel attendees, speakers, and sponsors. The program has received rave reviews as being an extraordinarily valuable investment of time for the busy principals and innovators of the telephony community," stated Surj Patel, ETel Conference co-chair. "In fact, it turned into a mini who's who of the next-gen telephony world with industry figures like Ed Guy, Om Malik, Trevor Baca, Jeff Bonforte, and Mark Spencer rubbing shoulders with Phil Zimmerman, Lee Felsenstein, Brad Templeton, and more. We're all grateful that our efforts were so well-received."
ETel was held on February 27 through March 1 at the San Francisco Marriott in Burlingame, California. The first day of the conference was devoted to hands-on workshops led by the geek gurus of the telephony community, and the following two days consisted of short, intense, plenary presentations on cutting-edge projects and business ideas from many of the thought leaders in the industry. Speakers and sessions at this year's ETel included:
To view a cross-section of ETel speaker presentations, visit:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/50/presentations.html
A number of events took place during the conference including ETel Launch Pad, where seven companies demonstrated their groundbreaking start-ups and innovative technologies to the telephony community. Participating companies were GrandCentral Communications, Peerant, Flat Planet Phone Co., Cellcrypt, mySay, Jive Software, and Mig33. ETel Launch Pad was co-sponsored by GigaOm, Covad, and GrandCentral and hosted by Om Malik and Surj Patel.
Another event of interest was the telephony mashup contest, co-sponsored by StrikeIron, Tellme, Sylantro, and O'Reilly. Three finalists were chosen to present their creations at the conference on Wednesday: FishLign, RoboCal, and After Hours Doctors Office. After the demos, the audience voted by text message for a winning entry. The $1,500 prize was claimed by After Hours Doctors Office, a telephony mashup that combined voice with the Amazon Mechanical Turk, in order to get patients in contact with a doctor in short order.
In conjunction with ETel was FreeTel, a one-day mini-conference organized by Simon Ditner and Evan Henshaw Plath that aimed to bridge emerging telephony applications and social change. A series of talks and workshops targeting activists, advocates, fundraisers, and organizers were given by technical innovators who have been successful at using telephone networks as a powerful tool for social change.
Finally, there was the ETel Fair, a science fair-style event where under-the-radar inventors showcased their ingenious projects. This year the fair was host to a number of students from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Their original projects included Botanicalls, an app allowing plants to communicate their owners; Bangla Bollo, an app designed to simulate a conversation in another language; and SupriseDialer, a program which enables several people to record a message (such as a birthday greeting) and schedule it to be delivered at a later time.
In addition to Launch Pad, announcements made at ETel included:
ETel 2007 was sponsored by Orange, Jaduka, LignUp, Make, and Voxeo.
Additional Resources:
For complete ETel conference details, visit:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etel2007/
Read the ETel conference blog for the news, blogs, photos (available for use with attribution), and announcements:
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/etel/
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