Last week I attended the eComm Emerging Communications conference in Amsterdam. It was very interesting, thanks to Lee Dryburgh and team for putting it together. The format was very nice with no parallel session and a mix of talks and panels. If I found a talk interesting I would listen otherwise tune it out and do work such as email until the next talk.  The topics were quite broad which triggered thinking about new stuff.

Out of the content, I found RebelVox to have a very interesting technology and demo. It was basically introducing buffering into real time voice which facilities a number of interesting features and application in IP communication. One is that you can listen in on a call being left as voicemail and then decide to pick it up.

The Google Wave team was there and did talks and demos. Very interesting and it explained better to me what Google Wave can be used for. All participants in the conference got wave accounts (and no I don’t have any invites) and Google Wave was used as a backchannel forum for the conference. If you have wave search for “tag:eComm with:public” and you will see this. Quite nice illustration of how wave can be used as a collaborative tool.

On the social networking front, we went to a wine tasting conducted over Skype. It was performed by the brother of an attendee that has a wine company in England – Elwood Wines. A Macbook was used for a video call with the tasting guide and it worked just fine – another example of what IP communication tools can be used for.

Talking about wine, Andy Abramson (a big wine expert which showed at the tasting) and Comunicano (where GIPS is a client) won an award at the show for his service to the community, congratulations Andy.

GIPS is a platinum sponsor at the upcoming eComm conference in Amsterdam this month. Want to know why? Well you can hear or read directly from GIPS vice president of engineering Jan Linden and Chief Marketing Officer, Joyce Kim and learn more about H.264 SVC.

On another note, it was nice to see that the Seattle Times ran with the Yahoo video chat story syndicated from the San Jose Mercury.

Once again GIPS is sponsoring eComm but this time it’s in Amsterdam. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the conference in California earlier this year, here’s a little more information about the show.

It’s not a tradeshow, it’s not a sales pitch stage and it’s definitely not boring. If you’re a thinker, an innovator or entrepreneur it’s a great place to meet people wearing the same hat – it’s bubbling with ideas, products and futurists  and gathering all these people in one room is no small feat.

While shows like DEMO are great – it’s like trying to get into a nightclub, when you’re underage, don’t have the right attire or if your names not down you’re just not coming in….unless you want to pay nearly $20K. eComm is different; it’s that afterschool gathering of the Mensa Science club with brilliant minds from across the globe in one large conference room discussing emerging communications.

This year, Jan Linden GIPS vice president of engineering will talk about video conferencing with a focus on H.264 SVC. (Above is Jan’s presentation earlier this year on the iPhone.) So if you want to learn more you should seriously think about attending. Our CTO, Roar Hagen will also be at the show too.

It’ll be the best conference you attend this year.

While it’s a little further away, I just wanted to alert you to a conference that GIPS is sponsoring in the autumn. eComm Amsterdam will take place October 28-30. It’s a conference that was designed to promote and accelerate communications innovation, which is why GIPS is taking part in the event again.

Lee Dryburgh, the founder of the event has done a good job of styling the event to echo the style of the TED events. Similarly, the conference is broad-reaching and has the right people in the room to discuss the telecom industry and the opportunities that are growing as drastic changes further impact the multi-billion dollar a year industry.

The show also got me thinking about connecting and communicating. My computer and mobile phone are the devices I rely most upon – in fact too much sometimes. Having the ability to send email via a phone saves me lugging around my laptop and I can respond far quicker. The downside of course as many of us know, is that we’re never off those damn devices – like a child playing with their favorite toy.

However, all these devices are rendered less-capable if the bandwidth to support them is not there.  A study released yesterday of real-time internet connection speeds shows the United States still lags behind other advanced nations. According to Communications Workers of America, the average download internet speed is 5.1 mbps in 2009.

I’m pretty lucky though as you can see in the image below, my speed is above average but still below average speeds in Sweden, South Korea and Japan.

Try it out and find out what is your upload and download speed here.

There were many great presentations ranging from very technical and geeky to refreshing high level thoughts on communications. Even though there were many more really good ones I would like to single out a few that I found especially interesting.

Ge Wang of Smule/Stanford had an exciting keynote on “Creating New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone” where he presented a number of really cool applications for the iPhone including an application called Ocarina that turns the iPhone into a flute (you blow into the microphone).

Ge Wang playing the Ocarina on the iPhone at eComm2009. Copyright 2009 by James Duncan Davidson

In terms of new applications/services I really liked Matt Ranney’s presentation on  RebelVox‘ technology that in a great way combines live and  asynchronous voice communications. This can be viewed as an integration of Voice SMS/IM, text IM, and live voice calls. This is definitely a type of service I would be prepared to pay for.

A nice perspective on today’s communication style was presented by Stefan Agamanolis with Distance Lab. He likened today’s mobile communication with fast food and proposed “Slow Communication” as corresponding to the current trend of Slow Food. Very rarely do we pay full attention to a phone conversation anymore. Either we are on the computer at the same time or because we are no longer tethered to a fixed phone we are easily being distracted by things around us.

The trend towards enabling web developers (rather than just voice developers) with simple enough tools to allow them to build voice applications into their web offerings is continuing to evolve. A recent example is Voxeo’s launch of Tropo.com.

As a speech coding person it would be surprising if I didn’t comment on Skype’s SILK codec announcement. The codec, which can be run in narrowband, wideband, or even “superwideband” mode seems to be a very well designed codec with good quality at many bitrates. Binaries can be obtained without any licensing fees and there is no obvious restriction for usage. I.e., it can be used for applications that do not involve Skype at all. As practically all free codecs, and most standard codecs for that matter, it doesn’t come with indemnification against patent infringements. That is only to be expected, and quite natural since there is no licensing fee associated with the usage of the codec. Indemnification is of course one of the benefits you get from buying a solution from a vendor like GIPS. In addition to making binaries available to everybody it was announced that Skype is planning to release source code to select partners for optimization on certain platforms.

Regarding the technical specifications of SILK my only concern is regarding complexity and memory usage. Not that any of those numbers are worse than comparable codecs; they are actually in the same ballpark as most and complexity is better than e.g. AMR-WB. However, this level of complexity is high for many mobile and embedded solutions and there is a need for lower complexity wideband codecs.

A very nice gesture by Lee was to donate 10 % of the proceeds to a local charity. The money went to Shelter Network that “…is committed to providing housing and support services that create opportunities for homeless families and individuals to re-establish self-sufficiency and to return to permanent homes of their own”

Myself talking about VoIP on the iPhone at eComm 2009. Copyright 2009 by James Duncan Davidson