About the conference:

DRCN 2009 is a well established forum for scientists, engineers, designers and planners from industry and academia who have interests in reliability and availability of communication networks, end systems and related topics. From equipment and technology for survivability to network management and public policy, through theory and techniques for survivable and robust network and application design, the aim of the conference is to bring together people from those disciplines in a lively forum. We hope you will join us in Washington, D.C., USA during October of 2009.

At this point they’re calling for papers (limited 8 pages, to be published in IEEE Conference Proceedings) by April 1, and proposals for tutorials by May 15.

Related posts:

1. The 4 D’s of Incument Telco Public Policy
2. Hush-a-Phone Revisited
3. Promoting Creativity and Connection

eComm, “the world’s leading-edge telecom, Internet communications and mobile innovation event,” is being held in San Francisco, CA, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel, from March 3-5, 2009. This year’s theme is Defining the Post-Telecom Era, which the conference organizers will do in a series of rapid-fire talks from a wide range of speakers.

You can save $400 on registration fees by registering before the end of January. Additionally, if you wish to save an additional 20%, contact me for details.

Related posts:

1. Redefining Broadband: Not Neutrality
2. The 4 D’s of Incument Telco Public Policy

WIK is organizing an international conference on critical issues of FTTB/H deployment in March 2009. Following our successful NGA conference in 2007 where VDSL was in the centre of attention the focus of the 2009 event (Berlin, 23/24 March) is on deploying fibre towards the building/home. The conference addresses key issues of technology, deployment & operation, regulation, investment & financing, national fibre broadband strategies and business cases.

This conference will provide insights into the experiences, expectations and perspectives of leading international network operators, investors, equipment manufacturers, National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs), representatives of the European Commission, government officials and independent experts. WIK is delighted to announce many senior speakers including Joeri Van Bogaert (President FTTH Council Europe), Henry Ergas (Chairman Concept Economics Australia), Timotheus Höttges (Board Member T-Home Germany), Kip Meek (Chairman Broadband Stakeholder Group UK), Alf Henryk Wulf (Chairman of the Board, Alcatel-Lucent, Germany).

Related posts:

1. Promoting Creativity and Connection
2. Redefining Broadband: Not Neutrality

This is David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect (F2C09) conference, which will be held on March 30-31 in Washington DC. This year’s theme is the Emerging Internet Economy.

I’ve been to a few of his F2C confs and they’re a fascinating mix of Internet and telecom insiders talking on- and off-the record, engaging conversations, topped off by great food and outstanding music. His program for this year is amazing (again).

The registration fee is half-price this month, so it is timely to mention. Who attends and why? From his site:

F2C 2009 presents the people of the Internet who:

• enable economic growth,
• strengthen democracy,
• facilitate creativity and innovation,
• make the Earth greener, and
• lower the barriers that divide people.

F2C 2009 will tell the story of:

• on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth
• Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine
• how Lafayette LA’s community came together as it built its muni fiber network
• the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn’t
• how municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks
• city nets, wired and wireless, that didn’t work — what went wrong and what that teaches
• what Obama’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow’s network
• and more…

Related posts:

1. Promoting Creativity and Connection
2. The 4 D’s of Incument Telco Public Policy
3. A Global Internet Plan for America

Coming up in a few weeks (January 18-21) in my neighborhood is the Pacific Telecom Council’s 2009 Conference: Collaborating for Change. I’ve heard that this is THE telecom conference to attend if you’re interested in collaborating with others in related fields.

From their website:

Change brings challenges and these challenges are the focus of PTC’09. Services have become far too complex to be developed and offered by a single integrated service provider. Today’s telecommunication services and applications would not be possible without unprecedented collaboration between carriers, software developers, researchers and equipment makers, both in their home countries and across borders.

While challenges remain, change brings many new opportunities as well. PTC’09 will explore these and the strategies and partnerships that bring them to market.

No event embraces the spirit of collaboration more completely than PTC.  For 31 consecutive years, telecommunications companies, equipment and software developers, content and media services providers, vendors, investors, academics and researchers, policy makers and civil society representatives have met each January in Hawaii to forge alliances, negotiate agreements, and to learn from one another’s experiences.

I hope to see some of you there.

Specific break-out sessions I will be attending and reporting from:

Sunday, 19 Jan.

• Submarine Cable Workshop
• Emergency Communications & Disaster Management Workshop
• Industry Briefings 2

Monday, 20 Jan.

• The Satellite CEO’s Speak: Continued Growth in Challenging Times
• Next Generation Networks: De-regulation, Re-regulation and the Global Marketplace

Tuesday, 21 Jan.

• Submarine Cables – Rational Initiatives or a New Bubble?
• How Intelligent Communities Collaborate to Develop Successful Private/Public Partnerships & Funding Models for Broadband

Wednesday, 22 Jan.

• Policy

.

Related posts:

1. Blogging PTC’10
2. The 4 D’s of Incument Telco Public Policy
3. Redefining Broadband: Not Neutrality

We have several tracks of presentations, including Business Uses for Podcasting, New Media, Podcasting 101, and the track I’ve organized, WordCamp.

The sponsor list is amazing, as are the speakers. Some of our speakers are coming from Boston, Portland, San Francisco, China, and elsewhere.

This is a FREE event. I hope to see you there!

Related posts:

1. Hush-a-Phone Revisited

O’Reilly recently convened the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo in San Francisco. I registered for the expo (a few pictures), attended a couple of sponsored sessions, and came away with two significant things: 1) I’m not missing much yet, and 2) a laser etching on my laptop (thanks Instructables!).

First off, the expo floor wasn’t all that crowded so it was easy to make my way around. Secondly, I wasn’t attending as an “enterprise” representative, which made my journey more strategic. Many of the booths on the expo floor were touting ways to “mash up” legacy systems to create new forms of data (e.g., reports previously unavailable) or to be the next “social” apps hosting platforms (e.g., hosting the corporate wiki). [Related post]

Here are my notes from crawling the expo floor. Note that I’m only commenting on a few of the companies that struck me. I missed a few, and avoided others. Such was my timeframe for this event.

• Springnote: online wiki-like notebook, uses OpenID.
• Rackspace: enterprise hosting provider. I was already familiar with them. Thanks for the pen.
• Blist: (pronounced BList, not B-list) I checked them out a while ago following their launch at DEMO. Intriguing database service, but s. l. o. w. I asked about this, and was assured that they’ve addressed their performance issues, and have added international characters and sharing capabilities. I need to check them out again.
• Camwii: Interesting screen-sharing app. Best described in their video. Good: lets me share the part of the screen that I want (via a “looking glass” frame), lets me see what my shared partners see (feedback loop), and can be “private labeled” for customized use (1:1 or 1:many). Questionable: is 100% flash, which means it works on most computers but is tied to Adobe proprietary format. Also uses your phone number as ID. Now that becomes a database with a good key value.
• Truvico: one of several companies that provided continuous data analysis (words, statistics, what’s happening on your site).
• Amusing side note: someone cut the lights on the expo floor for a few minutes (1:40pm). Something eerie about the whole space going dark. This happened on top of what many booths were reporting (and I was witnessing): s-l-o-w network access. Holy cow.
• Magnify360: a “behavioral targeting platform,” which was explained as real-time behavioral programming. This is about “targeting” and “personalizing” to “increase conversion rates.” I feel better already knowing that my every need is anticipated and provided for.
• Kapow: two things: buzz phrase kings (see photos above), and really, really expensive.
• ConfIdent: Weirdly, I didn’t learn what ConfIdent was about, and couldn’t really tell from their website either. What I did see was Vidoop: a system of gaining access to a site by using picture passwords. This was interesting. Passwords were determined by a set of images. The images are random-ish, but they fall into categories like food, travel, space, etc. I somehow would choose or have, let’s say, 3 categories so I would choose the 3 pics out of 9 shown that correspond to my categories. Vidoop is also an OpenID platform/service.
• Nokia: Nokia was one of the big sites on the floor. I went to the table/area designated as “Advertising” to find out what that meant. Nokia has partnerships with various vendors (no surprise) like Sprint. Nokia claims to be carrier and handset agnostic. They act as advertising middlemen, gathering all of the demographic data from Sprint that helps them target your desired audience. Let’s say you want to reach all of the moms, ages 24-35, living in a particular area and having a specific income. No problem, Nokia can serve that group. This was one conversation that made me want to wash my hands and face afterwards. No sign of a cluetrain at this station. Better not be on the tracks when Nokia comes through.
• Etelos: a platform for application deployment. They had several partners and clients represented in their booth.
• Spinscape: a hosted mind mapping tool (similar to The Brain?) that’s web driven, collaborative, extensible with Google Apps and Gadgets. This thing can “auto-discover” everything on your hard drive. In collaborative mode, you can have nodes and assign roles and responsibilities for various levels of collaboration.

That was a first pass at the expo floor. Next I ran to catch the OpenID sponsored session.

OpenID is promoted as a bridge to sharing. It’s being engineered for adoption at an ID layer. Question about open sourcing, noted that it works well with Novell and others. Why relevant, why only authenticating? OpenID has been around for three years, OpenAuth is brand new and needs to focus on what it can enable: integrating contacts. Concerns expressed about it being hard to grasp. Challenge: user experience not optimal.

I asked about how this is taking back control of our IDs when each silo has its data and can gather additional intelligence about us by partnering with other data silos. The answer was largely about the inability to get any hosted service site to delete info on request (once you register, it’s their data). Yeah, we know. Then how is it that openID will help me “manage” my identity?

The question remains. Back to the expo floor.

• Photobucket: claims they are the world’s largest repository of photos, video and more. (Somewhat similar to Flickr, which is limited to photos.) Photobucket has facility for doing minor photo editing. They do not have a search capability to find CC-licensed resources. Bummer. The best thing about Flickr is an unrelated site, compfight.
• Topix: a “top 20 news site.” (huh?) Shows news that’s local to you, as they determine where you are. You can also change locations of course. Extensive news forums, and users can edit stuff. They also offer commercial feeds.
• Yugma: collaborative desktop sharing with chat, conference calls. Java, subscription basis.
• Sprout: a web-based authoring platform for creating widgets: layers of stuff with links and functions. Can do limited mash-ups. Interesting: no sign-up necessary to create. This actually looked like it could be fun, but my old computer didn’t want to work at any reasonable speed with sprout’s programming.

At this point, the expo hall closed. We were all shuffled out. Many of us went to see O’Reilly’s keynote and the talks that followed. I have notes, but on re-read, they’re pretty boring.

Clay Shirkey was the reason I stayed. My notes fail in light of his post of that talk.

That was a great way to end Day One.

As for day two, nothing really struck me. The sponsored session on “Creating a Social Network, It’s Easy” seemed to be more about hiring the group than learning how. Afterwards I went to the women’s networking event. I wasn’t already part of the small leaning-together cliques and didn’t find a conversational way in. So much for networking.

Related posts:

1. Hush-a-Phone Revisited
2. A Global Internet Plan for America