Disruptive Telephony

Are you interested in creating applications that can open up government? Apps that can give people better access to government data?

If so... and if you are in the Seattle area or are attending the GnomeDex event happening this weekend, you can join in to the 24 Hour Open Government Hackathon starting at 5pm tomorrow, August 21st, at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. Here's the basic info:

Who Should Attend?
Ruby, Python, PHP, web developers, coders and anyone who has a passion to code, hack or kluge applications that will free (or otherwise enhance) the accessability and usefulness of government-shared data. Although the sprint takes place August 21-22 during Gnomedex10 in Seattle, you don't have to be attending the conference to join us. Participation is free and open to anyone...we just ask that you register in advance so we know how many individuals or teams we need to accomodate. What's Going to Happen?
The nature of the Hackathon will be fairly free-form. Hackathon Partners will have organizers onsite to help get things rolling initially. At the end of the 24 hours, each app will be evaluated by the Hackathon Partners and prizes will be awarded to those teams or individuals that develop the best applications in the 24 hour period.

It sounds like a great time! I won't be there... but I know many of the folks attending. (The Tropo cloud communications service, one of the services of my employer, Voxeo, is one of the sponsors of the hackathon.)

Registration for the event is free... you just have to get to the Seattle hotel tomorrow at 5pm.

Here are some posts from others about the event:

• Hackathoning Government (from the CTO of the City of Seattle)
  
  
• Announcing the GnomeDex10 Open Government Hackathon

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what applications will emerge from the event.

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Just one day left until AdhearsionConf 2010 opens in San Francisco tomorrow. The schedule looks outstanding and I know that the Voxeo Labs team is already on site getting everything ready. I've seen via Twitter that some hardcore Ruby telephony developers are already enroute.... should be a great time!

Sadly, my schedule doesn't allow me to be there, but the good news is that if you are unable to get there in person, you can follow along on the UStream channel:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adhearsionconf

If you are in the SF area, or can get there, check out more info about the conference at:

http://adhearsionconf.eventbrite.com/

Great to see an event like this happening!

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Today we announced over on the Voxeo blogs and in a news release that Voxeo has acquired Teleku, a startup letting developers quickly create voice, SMS and IM applications using a RESTful API from common web programming languages. Om Malik had a piece up at GigaOm: Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku. We have a page up linking to articles like that one, a FAQ and providing other info:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/teleku/

I had a chance to sit down with Teleku founder Chris Matthieu and record this video about the news:

I'm admittedly biased, but I'm looking forward to what both Teleku and Chris will bring to Voxeo. It's a fun time right now!

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Back almost a year ago, I wrote about the sale of Skype to private investors - Onward the disruption - Skype's sale to private investors is a great step - and wondered how this "new chapter" would work out for Skype. Judging by the news today, it seems to be working out quite well!

Through a SEC filing, blog post and news release today, Skype announced that it is filing for an Initial Public Offering that could raise as much as $100 million USD. Skype's blog post naturally had none of those numbers but others have dived into the details of Skype's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Some of the articles out already:

• The Next Web US: Skype Going Public With $100 Million IPO
• GigaOm: Skype Files for a $100 Million IPO
• Read Write Web: Skype Files for Initial Public Offering
• TechCrunch: Skype Files For $100 Million IPO With Miniscule Profits
• Business Insider: Skype Files For $100 Million IPO

Longtime readers know that I'm a huge user of Skype and have written here quite a bit about Skype. I've certainly had my issues with their direction, but I continue to be one of their paying customers and use the service each and every day. I wish them all the best with the IPO - and it will continue to be interesting to see what they do...

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This week I've been down at the SpeechTEK conference in New York and in the Voxeo booth we had a system that was running 16,000 simultaneous phone calls using our new software release, Prophecy 10. While there, I recorded a video interview with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor where he explained what we did and why we did it.  I thought I'd post it here, because while I'm obviously biased, I think it's a fun example of making a demo system for a trade show/conference. Enjoy!

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