admin

Well, it has been almost 4 days since VON Boston and I’m sorry to say, that not much has changed since last year – apart from the fact that this year’s VON had seemed to be a little smaller to me.

As some of you may know, I’ve teamed up with Jeff Pulver’s Free World Dialup (FWD) team. If some of you are familiar with FWD, it was the first ever FREE VoIP community network. Much before networks like Skype, almost 12 years ago, the vision of free communications had been planted by Jeff Pulver and other pioneers. It has taken almost 12 years for the technologies to mature into a state where the vision is now close to being complete. Our intention is to be the driving force behind the community oriented telephony, providing a telecom’s vision into the Web 2.0 infrastructure, but not limited to Web 2.0. To learn more about FWD, please visit http://www.fwdnet.net, where you will learn more.

As a personal favorite of mine during VON, I was more than happy that Digium’s Asterisk pavilion had grown into the first – Digium Asterisk World. As some of you may know, I’ve devoted my last 5 years to the promotion and adoptation of Asterisk technologies and Asterisk based products and I’m extremly happy to see that Asterisk had become a dominent force in the VoIP market. All around the conference, you would see comapnies openly stating that they are compatible with Asterisk, proving again that open source can easily be considered a valid alternative for the telecoms market.

I hope that next years VON will introduce more Asterisk solutions and additional companies operating with the Open Source sector. I really hope to see more open source projects featured at VON, projects like OpenSER, FreeSwitch and Yate. While OpenSER had been around for a few years now, FreeSwitch is fairly new to the market and experts had adopted to it nicely – however, the entry bar is still too high.

I’ve attended the OpenSER administration training that took place during the last day of the convention. I can say one thing about the Daniel, one of the creators of OpenSER: you are a wonderful coder, but leave the teaching to other people – you are so boring!

Really, I like the guy, but after 3 hours of mind numbing listening – I simply left the place as I didn’t learn anything from the training. Just downloaded the presentation from the website and I’ll use mostly that. Daniel, if you are reading this, I suggest that you get some other member of the OpenSER team to do the lectures for you, someone with a bit more flair and showmanship.

Well, that’s it for now, if you’ve been to VON Boston, drop me a line.