The first SF Telephony Meetup notes

Telecom platform geeks convened for the first SF Telephony Meetup. I linked to YouTube videos of most of the talks below.

We were welcomed to the first SF Telephony meetup by Gabriel Sidhom, CTO of Orange Labs San Francisco. Gabriel teased us with a thought experiment: "What if the phone wasn’t the first thing that was invented but rather a computer?  And email rather than voice telephony? Then how would we do voice?"

Adam Kalsey , akalsey@voxeo.com, @akalsey for Voxeo and Tropo. "We’re an API for the phone system." V built their API support in Java for the JVM. They run your code in their cloud against shims that translate from your programming language to the JVM. http://labs.voxeo.com/moho. @tropo. Call or SMS: 415.894.9965: gtalk,XMPP: tropolocal@tropo.im

Jason Goecke for Voxeo Labs [good to see you, Jason!] about Adhearsion. Telephony application framework that drives Asterisk. Integrates with Rails at the MVC model layer. Used by AlertPay, for example.  Recent release: Asterisk 1.6 support, ActiveLDAP support. Next release in August to work with Asterisk 1.8, Ruby 1.9 compatibility, and bundler support. Learn more at AdhearsionConf 2010, August 14-15 in San Francisco: Talks, code-a-thon.

AdhearsionConf 2010 Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be joining us for two days of talks, discussions, hacking and pair programming on all things Adhearsion. We also have other folks on deck that will be sharing their innovative uses of Adhearsion. Free. Sunday, August 15, 2010 (all day) Venue TBD San Francisco, CA  USA

Adrian Georgescu of AG Projects, Netherlands, for SIP2SIP. SIP service transparent for the end-points, publicly reachable sip uri user@sip2sip.info. Good for audio, video, fax, IM, file trans, SMS, presence, XCAP (originated by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg), NAT traversal. Launched 2008. 40k SIP accounts. Most devices are using more than VoIP. sip2sip uses a self organizing sip infrastructure (SIP Thor), applying p2p architecture to SIP. Talk on Thursday (the next day) about the highly scalable back-end systems. sip2sip is free for end users (without PSTN termination or SMS) and white label for operators with pre/post paid accounting. Easy provisioning for end users through scripts. SOAP/XML interface lets you build your own portal to administer sip accounts. For operators that want to offer Skype-like services to SIP devices. Contact info:  ag@ag-projects.com. http://ag-projects.com. http://sip2sip.info.  Project wiki.

James Li, Dominic Lee and Adam Odessky of Orange Labs SF showed a television UI for a sip phone app accepting an inbound phone call from an iPad, sharing the television’s audio (CSI Miami) in the call, dialing out from the TV, and a fun demonstration of echo in a four-way conference call. 

@ChrisMatthiew of Teleku @teleku. Rails – RESTful Phone web service API. Competes with Tropo, Twilio. Hosted on ec2. Free Ninja hosting runs on free open source stack. paid Samurai Warrior hosting runs on Voxeo hosting. Teleku translates apps from its own PhoneML, a 7-command scripting language, or TwiML (Twilio’s language), or VoiceXML and translates them to VoiceXML. So you can run those apps on Teleku’s restful API. Now OpenVBX, built by Twilio, can run on Teleku with speech recognition, international text-to-speech, Skype, SIP, iNum, multi-channel support. "I applied to Twilio’s developer challenge. I haven’t heard back from them." Demoed an SMS from the Twilio app running on the Teleku API running on the Voxeo platform. Demoed Skyping a phone number answered by an OpenVBX IVR workflow running from Twilio’s software on the teleku platform on the Voxeo platform.

Dan Miller of Opus Research spoke on this summer of recombinant communications (vs. unified). In the long run, everyone wants to be a platform. So everyone will be peers, cooperating with each other. The biggest companies will likely dominate at scale but small firms will continue to innovate faster.

Darren Shreiber of the 2600hz project. +1-415-886-7901. How do you manage a network of Freeswitch instances? The BlueBox Project: Core is in Erlang, API-based. Heavy use of distributed software (db, messaging). "Let it fail" assumption so lots of redundancy; calls continue when servers go down. They monitor and virtualize integration. Completely Open-Source, not just the APIs. Designed to help service providers to spin up boxes faster, distribute boxes easily, cut costs, increase flexibility. modular services.

Orange Labs SF is hiring product managers and software architects. Peter Hallinan at Blindsight is hiring "not your grandpa’s android developer" now. 2600hz is hiring erlang and sip people.

Not news: No women there, aside from two Orange staffers helping with registration and video. For some reason Telephony remains a boys’ club.