Flutterby™! : ETel

Further rundown from the Emerging Telephony Conference: The hall chatter on this one was particularly good. Had some really interesting conversations about law and internet with Dave Pollak who used to be a lawyer and is now a software developer.

Talked to a few folks from SMS.ac about setting up their user base as some sort of single sign-on system, including the notion that because their users have phones there's already some sort of commitment and value, and because they're used to dealing with folks who actually do micropayments, ie: carriers, that there might be room for a middleman in those transactions.

The folks hanging around Night Owl Consultants had some interesting experiences to share, notes about running big data centers, virtualized servers, that sort of thing.

Talked a bit about Learning Friends, and promised to follow up with someone I know who's looking at ways to use technology and telecom to help kids from different cultures to teach each other their languages and differing perspectives.

Kaliya Hamlin rocks because she just makes sure that things go right, and she's great at making those connections between people who are interested in identity issues.

Saw some cool demos, don't know how many of them I can talk about. A lot of emphasis on intelligent call routing, systems (including smarter cell phones) which know various ways to contact you, various modes you might be working in (including trying to sync up with calendaring), and relationships between you and your contacts. So if Charlene called me while I was in "Important Meeting" mode she might get the option to ring me or leave a message, but someone not in my contacts list might get told to email me first, and others might get told to leave a message or an SMS...

Mostly, it was good to see people hacking: Lots of ideas and "what if we tried..." floating around.