At the 2006 Emerging Telephony conference, a series of lightning talks give interesting startups five minutes to present their products and ideas. Three speakers, Ajay Madhok from Amsoft Systems, Dave Weinstein from Casabi, and Brian McConnel from RadioHandi, discuss how their ideas can revolutionize the way consumers deal with digital telephony devices.
RadioHandi, a global conference platform built on open standards and services is the first of three products presented. Brian McConnel explains how his company is working to let users create voice communities. Sharing interests, letting people know where you are, or just chatting away three hours is made possible by a major shift in the telecoms industry.
Next, Ajay Madhok presents context-aware telephony, which promises to give users more choice, privacy, and control over who can contact them, how, and when. In a time when each of us has multiple personal identifiers, such as instant messaging handles, cell phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, Amsoft's service, which intercepts and manages all incoming communications, could be the answer to restoring balance to our electronic lives.
Besides offering more control over our digital communication, Dave Weinstein explains how Casabi puts our contacts, information, and interactions of all kinds onto any handset in our homes. While we maintain contact lists and personal phonebooks on computers and mobile devices, traditional telephones still act as dumb terminals. Casabi aims to bring our instant messaging and contacts onto the home phone, powering smart communications in the home.
Ajay Madhok is the founder and CEO of AmSoft Systems. Amsoft is working on the core web standards such as XRI and XDI (technical specifications of OASIS) to structurally solve cross-network problems like the lack of trust across network boundaries and thus lack of cross-network transactions, something that is critical for value-creation in convergent networks. Madhok is the vice-chair of OASIS Technical Committee on XRI Data Interchange.
Madhok is currently leveraging the best of web 2.0 technologies in the wireless and mobile communications space to spin-out CeLiberate, a new company that provides identity-enabled mobile applications such as Context Aware telephony.
Brian McConnel is an inventor, author and serial entrepreneur. He has founded a series of telecom startups, including PhoneZone, one of the first electronic commerce companies, Trekmail, a multimodal messaging company (recently acquired by mobile email service provider Visto), and Open Communication Systems, which has developed a breakthrough conferencing service. He is also an O'Reilly author and frequent contributor to the O'Reilly Network and maintains Telephony Design, a telecom tutorial and buyer's guide.
Dave Weinstein has over 25 years of experience with a broad range of communications companies in the mobile, landline, and internet arenas. His roles in these companies have included CEO, founder, and vice president of Marketing, Business Development, and Sales. He has co-founded three companies and has been instrumental in a creating value for his companies through IPO, acquisition, and technology sale. Weinstein has also successfully raised approximately $40 million in venture capital.
Weinstein's positions include CEO for Zack Systems, vice president of Marketing and Business Development for First Virtual Communications, Jetstream Communications, and Centigram Communications, and vice president of Marketing for Openwave. In addition, Weinstein was a senior consultant at Bain and Company and was one of the first members of Bain's technology consulting team.
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This free podcast is from our Emerging Telephony Conference series.
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