Alec Saunders SquawkBox

OCRIRadio has posted its March podcast, recorded on the floor of the OCRI showcase a couple of weeks back.  I stopped by and recorded a segment with Nathan and Phil.  The entire podcast is about an hour long, and my segment starts at about the 8 minute mark.  It’s about what iotum does, and how we launched it.

Thanks Nathan, Phil!

I’ve been in the hotel room for all of 10 minutes now, and my eyes are already burning. 

We’re staying at the Sheraton Centre on Queen Street West, which is one of the nicer hotels in Toronto, but they’ve stuck us in a smoking room.  Although we reserved a non-smoking room, when we arrived we were informed that this was all they had.  It was either this, a non-smoking salon with two cots, or a non-smoking room with a single bed.  So we took a chance on the smoking room.

Entering the room, we were greeted with a blast of scent.  Some kind of "air freshener" has been used to mask the cigarette stench.  It’s hard to say which is worse, though — the scent, or the smell of the smoke which seems to seep out of the walls. 

And, to top it all off, the back of the bathroom door is also splattered with a dried brownish sticky fluid, with little hairs in it. 

Not the usual Sheraton experience.

UPDATE: Monday April 3 at 8:20 in the morning, we got a phone call from the lobby.  The Sheraton has moved us to a room on a non-smoking floor.  Thank you!

Bill Gates is apparently frustrated with Outlook.  He wants it to be a whole lot smarter than it currently is.  It should know the context of communications requests and email.  It should be able to deliver a personalized response, based on context, automatically.  And the same capabilities should apply to voice.

Drop us a line Bill.  You’re describing what iotum does, for voice.

I’m heading to VON Canada this afternoon with Howard.  The next three days will be filled with meetings, sessions, and reconnecting with colleagues, old friends, and potential business partners.  Somehow I’ve managed to commit to sitting on or hosting 4 panels, and delivering one of Jeff’s industry insight talks.  Not surprisingly, the talk I plan to deliver will be on Voice 2.0. 

In addition, iotum will be announcing the first stage of our Asterisk strategy on Monday.  We’ve been working hard at this for a while now, ever since we installed Asterisk in our own offices.  More details tomorrow, but suffice it to say we’re making a pretty full-on commitment to the Asterisk community.  I hope it’s well received.

If you’re at VON Canada, and would like to connect, just call me on myiotum number — 613-482-9088.  If I’m not in a scheduled meeting, or sitting on a panel, that will ring through to me.

Thorben Jensen has been generating some traffic on the Asterisk-biz mailing list over the last couple of days.  He has announced a free virtual PBX service, called EasyPABX.  You can head over to his site, sign up, get a free DID (in Denmark), set up some extensions, and you’re running.  If you would like to use DIDs in your home area code, no problem, you can just point them at EasyPABX rather than use the supplied Danish numbers.

Met with skepticism on the mailing list, his explanation was "many things today are free", and he compared his business to GMail, or Hotmail. The voip-info wiki reveals that his business model is to court resellers who will brand the site to themselves, and provide their own SIP DIDs.