Press Release
July 24, 2006
O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference: Opportunity Calls
Sebastopol, CA--The Call for Participation for the second annual O'Reilly
Emerging Telephony Conference, aka ETel, is now open. Technologists, CTOs,
chief scientists, researchers, programmers, hackers, business developers,
entrepreneurs, and other interested parties are invited to lead conference
plenary sessions and workshops at ETel 2007. Topics will be centered on
innovations and projects in open source telephony, P2P VoIP, open source
hardware, wireless mobility, mobile telephony, wi-fi VoIP, telco networks
as platforms, and the intersection of VoIP telephony with web services.
Proposals are due no later than September 26, 2006.
Telephony sits at the intersection of emerging technology, enormous
corporate interests, government bureaucracy, eager consumers, and hackers
who are poised to change everything we know about telephone communications
networks. People in all fields of the telecom world are recognizing and
embracing changes in the telephony industry, and with that a real sense of
excitement and entrepreneurial opportunity. Now that IP telephony is being
democratized, the industry is at a massive inflection point, worthy of
serious investment. When the cost of a call is driving towards zero, the
greatest challenge is to make phone calls more apt, meaningful, and
useful.
Some of the specific topics on the radar for the next ETel are:
Open Source Software and Hardware/Open Telephony: Asterisk and Skype are
just the beginning. Open source platforms have been created and are being
implemented by hackers and businesses alike. What’s the next evolution?
Open source hardware is another fertile field.
Wireless Mobility and Mobile Telephony: The spectrum is opening up and
you can SkypeOut from the local coffee shop. When every device is net
connected, what's next?
Wi-fi Telephony, the Telephone Network as a Platform: Just as open source
telephony allows you to hack your own PBX, what would you do with an
entire open network?
Intersection of VoIP Telephony and Web Services: Phone calls plotted on a
Google Maps mash-up? Web sites that allow you to track someone's cell
phone? Instant price checks from Amazon? Add an event to your web calendar
by just calling an artificial voice agent? The potential for innovation is
huge.
Infrastructure: GSM, CDMA, POTS, wi-fi, wi-max, Mesh, PicoCells,
unlicensed spectrum, and beyond.
Voice as Data: Sarbanes-Oxley is leading to the documentation of
everything. On-demand search on voice is not far away. There will be
innovation for people and new privacy concerns as well.
Ethnography, Culture, and People: How are activists, community groups,
gamers, and altruists employing IP telephony to do the right thing--or
just scratch an itch?
Usability and Experience: Provocative research and instructive workshops
on design, voice user interface design, and product/service design as well
as novel uses of audio in visualization are invited.
Business Models: What will the new business models look like? Will low
cost and accessibility help innovate services that don’t depend on billing
systems, or will the telcos re-invent themselves? Will the community or
legislation make us shy away from taking the risks needed for truly
innovative ideas to have a chance?
Early Warning Signals: What's off the wall today and mainstream tomorrow?
What are the insatiably curious hackers building in their garages that
will change the world, surprise and delight us, or simply shake us out of
our assumptions?
Evening fairs, a much-loved fixture at many O'Reilly conferences, are
science fair style events showcasing under-the-radar projects and people
who aren't quite ready to take the formal conference stage. The ETel Fair
will return for the 2007 conference and promises to be a bizarre bazaar of
ideas, technology, and people with something daring to show the world.
"ETel was a ground breaking conference," says program co-chair Surj Patel.
"We took a risk and broke from the tried, tired old format of most telco
events--thinly disguised trade shows to sell boxes--and created a
revitalized forum for early stage innovators, alpha geeks, and telco
researchers to meet, debate, and share ideas with the people who may
actually make them happen in the world. It was a heady atmosphere. Our aim
now is to take that spirit of imagination, discovery, and action into ETel
2007 and beyond."
ETel is the one place that clearly articulates the direction the industry
is heading. ETel brings together business leaders, visionary researchers
from industry and universities, entrepreneurs, new venture funders, open
source activists, and grassroots developers. Over the course of three
days, ETel provides a road map to identify the opportunities as new forms
of communication emerge. Like other O'Reilly conferences, ETel is a mix of
the inspired and the practical, providing one of the only opportunities
for the established telco/telecom community to come together with the new
generation of developers and alpha geeks who are creating the next wave of
IP telephony applications and tools.
Additional Resources:
Other Upcoming O'Reilly Conferences:
- O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 24-28, 2006 in Portland, Oregon
- O'Reilly European Open Source Convention, September 18-21, 2006 in Brussels, Belgium
- Web 2.0 Conference, November 7-9, 2006 in San Francisco, California
- O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego, California
- MySQL Users Conference, April 23-26, 2007 in Santa Clara, California
- RailsConf, May 17-20, 2007 in Portland, Oregon
- Where 2.0 Conference, June 19-20, 2007 in San Jose, California
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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