net@edu - Day 1

At the 2007 net@edu meeting in Tempe, AZ I attended a presentation by Kurt Sauer on "Skype in education - implication for product security." Kurt did a high level overview of Skype's architecture and opined on Skype's future as well as other happenings in VoIP. Here are some observations, large and small from his presentation.

-some slides in both English and Japanese
-could we federate into skype? would we want them to use "our" certificates or are we ok with them being the CA and signing relayed transactions if we did federate?
-how are you going to compete with browser snap-ins? answer: mobile is a bigger battleground and we are well positioned for that

Kurt can be reached at kurt@skype.net and his skype name is kurt.

Next, I attended Dewayne Hendrick's presentation called "The Future of Wireless Internets."

-"Reality is under reported."
-"Our congress isn't dealing with reality."
-Looking to Wi-Fi VoIP to undercut cellular based mobile -we, the U.S., are even farther behind in networking than I thought we were and I thought we were pretty far off

Today confirmed what I've been encouraged to wonder about for some time - we (IT at Penn State) must work harder at expanding our field of view in technology to include the whole globe. Our vendors must do it, our university does it - but there are times when I wonder if our (IT) thinking is effected by global thinking as much as it should be. By taking a broader economic, technology and innovation view we will increase the accuracy of our forecasting for new directions.