Today made for a few more interesting speakers in the morning. The first speaker was Tero Ojanperä from Nokia. This meeting was something of a sales pitch, but the subject revolved around the new API toolset that Nokia is releasing called OVI. They seem to be genuinely interested in allowing users to create their own experiences. Thanks to Twitter ,Jaiku, and Pownce, the mobile internet appears to be opening up. At least for the 900 million Nokia phones that are out there somewhere.
The second speaker was Ali Tabassi from Sprint/Nextel. Xohm is the brand name of a new mobile internet service that will exist in the 2.5GHz spectrum. They have their sights on a change in buying style for mobile internet devices. Picture a model where you can buy a device and then choose a provider. Of course, this breaks free for them from the model of subsidizing devices.
The third and most interesting of the speakers was the CTO of Digium, Mark Spencer. Mark is the inventor of Asterisk, the open source PBX. Asterisk was voted the most influential entity in Voice over IP in 2006. It also happens to be one of the tools that we are piloting for the SoftPhone Project. SoftPhone is a way to extend Penn State communications beyond the closed networks of today. If you have ever used Skype, then you will understand what we are trying to create for Penn State use, but unlike Skype, we are building on open standards that allow others to work with us. His hope for open source telephony is that ways be found to use it that are interesting and different from the same old thing. The last element that made this particular event memorable, was that during questions and answers the fire alarm sounded forcing an evacuation of the entire conference center.
I also attended a panel discussion on the use of Asterisk and OpenSER in enterprise environments. One of the speakers was Deke Kassabian from the University of Pennsylvania. He discussed how Penn has been using SER and Asterisk to rollout 25,000 telephone devices on their campus. Penn State's own work with SER and Asterisk has been focusing on enabling user mobility rather than replacing our own relatively young VoIP infrastructure. I was lucky to have a conversation over lunch with Deke and one of his senior engineers, Steve Blair. It was great to hear the perspective of another EDU.
The last presentation that I attended was more for me than for Penn State. I really wanted to hear Jon "maddog" Hall speak about open source and Linux as well as its place in the world. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to one of his presentations, you should. He is intelligent and also very straight-forward. His willingness to cut to the chase is probably one small part of why his students gave him the nickname. His talk focused on how the world as a whole needs open source because the solutions that are required can't be done by a few software companies. He also suggested that for IT to survive, the stagnation of the U.S. and Western Europe needs the development that can come from the rest of the world. Go Tux!
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