Jordy Blog

Custom Communication Apps

My brother and business partner Gabe will be helping to lead a discussion on FreeSWITCH and Asterisk at the the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow.

Gabe is the CTO of our small startup company (Izeni), and our team has built, and continues to build, some pretty cool projects based on these (and other) open source telephony technologies.

Some of the recent FreeSWITCH customization projects we’ve built for our clients include a custom call center that can handle up to 100 concurrent agents on commodity hardware, and a distributed SIP load tester that’s capable of pushing thousands of concurrent SIP calls (suitable for stress testing extremely large telephony infrastructures).

But those are just 2 examples of the many ways a company can customize a free software phone switch to enhance their current products or services with open source telephony. Whether you need a hosted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution, or just some method to bridge phone calls, record calls, make outbound calls, etc; FreeSWITCH and Asterisk are up to the task.

Anyway, if you’re in Utah and are interested in learning more about Open Source telephony, you should come by tomorrow to check out the discussion. You can also can review the (expansive) FreeSWITCH and Asterisk feature sets. And if you need some phone-related development done for your company, that kind of work is highly specialized, easy to outsource, and right up our alley. We’d love to help!

Along those same lines is something that’s been on my mind lately: I’d be interested in starting a Utah FreeSWITCH Users Group, originally meeting in only in Utah Valley, but hopefully spreading as the FreeSWITCH project comes into more common usage. If you’re local and would be interesting in participating (or leading), please let me know.

And if you think of some way you’d like to have your product interact with phones, text messages, even IM –that’s just what we do. We’d love to help you work through it –even if it’s just to help you see what’s possible.

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Utah Open Source Conference Starts Tomorrow (Thursday)

My friend Clint Savage (aka Herlo) has lead a team of volunteers in planning the first ever Utah Open Source Conference, which has come together quite nicely (especially for the first year).

News and updates on the conference have been plastered all over Gabe’s excellent Utah Open Source Planet, but I thought I’d post a reminder here for my readers and the local business folk who catch me on ConnectBlogs since the conference boasts a rather appealing business track.

If you’re in business in Utah and would like to see how open source can save you thousands of dollars annually in IT expenses, you should check the Utah Open Source Conference out. You’ll be able to learn some open source basics, see what other Utah company’s are doing to harness open source, and (perhaps most importantly) network with some of the brightest technologists in the state –people who may be able to help you make your business run more smoothly for a fraction of the cost.

Here’s the registration page, which will remain open until the event sells out –but act fast since there aren’t a ton of spaces left. I should mention that there’s a steep discount if you’re a member of one of Utah’s fantastic open source user groups.

Event keynotes include legendary open source technocrat Bruce Perens, and the Open Source Initiative’s articulate Matt Asay. There will be numerous excellent local speakers as well.

CTO Breakfast: October 2006

Utah Job Market, Collaboration, Product Life Cycles, and More (Oh my!)

I had a great time at the Phil Windley’s CTO breakfast this morning. (I’ve actually been anxious to go for months, but just haven’t gotten around to it until today.) It was fun to mingle, see old acquaintances, talk about current tech issues, etc. It was pretty informal, like sitting at a table with a few of friends, except the table is really big and there are a lot of friends. Everyone just chimes in about whatever they want to talk about, and Phil just facilitates. I imagine he’s a really good teacher.

There were lots of good discussions. I particularly liked hearing employers’ perspectives on hiring in the local job market. Basically, now is it a great time to be working tech in Utah. There are tons of openings to fill, and not near enough qualified people to fill them.

I also enjoyed a discussion on why Google Docs and Spreadsheets haven’t really taken off, despite being functional, relatively feature rich, and easy to setup and share. When it comes to collaboration, Google Docs really does make sense on so many levels that much of the group concluded that reluctance must stem from security and privacy issues. I think there might be some of that, but that doesn’t stop most of us from using Google for search, personal email, site analytics, and everything else. I’m personally starting to slow down on some of these Google-usage fronts, supposing that there really could be issues someday if Google were to become less benevolent; but I think for most non-nerdy people it’s a mute point, at least until they’re aware –which most people aren’t.

My analysis: I think online doc sharing just hasn’t reached a critical mass yet. It’s too new, and too early in the product life cycle, especially when other (albeit clumsy) solutions are already in place. I had the hardest time getting my classmates to use a wiki for collaborative writing, and that was only a year ago. I’m sure that some of them will use them in the workplace or on social networks now that they’ve tried it out, but it was a hard transition. A true WYSIWYG editor would have helped to level the learning curve a little, but long years of editing and forwarding email attachments have proven hard to shake, despite being a clearly inferior way to collaborate. But wiki, Google docs, and other newish collaboration software will be huge in no time. Just give the early adopters (geeks and nerds) some time to do their thing.

I also had a chance to plug the Utah Open Source Conference. I think there were a few people interested, but I also think people will want to see more concrete progress in Utah Open Source Conferences before there will be real widespread buy in. All in due time…

Anyway, CTO breakfasts are fun. I plan on coming a lot more often, and I hope you will too. :)

Planning UTOS – Utah Open Source Conference

I’ll be going to a BBQ meeting tonight (Thursday) to help lay out plans for the first annual Utah Open Source Conference.  The event won’t take place until August of next year, but we wanted to get started early because we want it to be HUGE! :)

Anyway, if you want to come along and help, this kind of stuff is great for Utah and open source. There’ll be some cool folks working with us, and there’s sure to be some good grubbin’, courtesy of Herlo.  Hope to see you there!