I am was at the Emerging Communications Conference going on in San Francisco this week from the 3rd till the 5th of March. Here is the official schedule.

Since I got positive feedback on my Future of Mobile summary I decided to use a similar format for ECommConf. Each talk has a short description and rate.

Here are the reviews by day:

Day 2

Day 3

Day 1 (Tuesday, March 3rd)

• Hello and Welcome, Lee S Dryburgh, eComm Media, Inc. – Nice welcome, loved Lee’s accent. He organized a marvelous conference!
• The Battle to Win “LOCALnet Neutrality”, Malcolm Matson, OPLAN Foundation – nice talk about communities and conversations, ugly slides (sorry but flashing arrows are something I can’t stand), some good comparisons and some not so good comparisons. Worth listening to – 3
• Reframing the Net: Moving Past the Language and Concepts of Telecom, Doc Searls, Harvard University/UC Santa Barbara – really good talk withouth slides from one of the authors of the well known Cluetrain Manifesto. – 5
• The Economics of Mobility: The Communications Value-System at the Dawn of a New Era, Mark Roettgering, T-Mobile USA – Good presentation, with valuable business insights, focused on the role of the mobile operator in the service delivery process. Mark had a great slide with operator’s margins for specific services. – 4
• Cutting the Cord on Big Bell Dogma, Russ McGuire, Sprint – Weak talk. Some harsh comments from the audience along with the quote of the day :) – 2

• Mobile Phone Internet Connectivity Reinvented, Örjan Johansson, Conveneer – interesting idea of connecting a mobile device to the web as a resource, but the implementation lacks a bit. The company got a huge investment (for recesion times) the day after the presentation.
• No Numbers and My CallerID – The Receivers in Charge!, Stuart Henshall, Phweet – 3
• Pushing Numbers Beyond Telephony, Rodrigue Ullens, Voxbone – talk about how the number format can be used for more than just telephony applications. Voxbone is a very interesting copany – 4
• Service Providers 2.0 – Leveraging The Heuristics of the “New Voice”, Alan Duric, Telio – Telio unveiled. Funky talk about what Telio is doing in Norway in order to be so successful – 4
• Interval of Interest and the Mobile Experience, Ed Fontana, Commuter Community Android App. – I was not really focused, but I noticed a chair on the floor :) – 3+
• Cooking Goes Mobile: Cooking Capsules and the New Digital Lifestyle, Mary Ann Cotter, Cooking Capsules – presenting the idea of Cooking Capsules, a fully featured cooking recipie app for Android – 4
• GRID Launch, James Siminoff, GRID.com – 3
• Ditech Launch, Todd Simpson, Ditech Networks – 3+
• Mobivox Launch, Peter Diedrich, Mobivox – 3
• Tropo, Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo – Launching Tropo; Voxeo’s new platform that extends Voxeo’s reach beyond VoiceXML – 4
• The Open Screen Project, Anup Murarka, Adobe – seen something very similar at FOM. Adobe would like to make Flash and AIR the ultimate choice for runtime on many platforms – Web, Mobile and TV (via Wii and set-top boxes). Some usual questions about iPhone, Flash 10 on mobile and so on. Still a good initiative from Adobe, but might be to closed to become a real standard. – 4+

• iPhone in Action: Web Development or SDK?, Christopher Allen, iPhoneWebDev.com – 4

• Creating New Opportunities from Android Openness, Florent Stroppa, Voxmobili - 4

• How Your ISP Plans to “Help” You, and Break the Internet, Cullen Jennings, Cisco – 4+

• The Business Case for Opening the Network, Alan Quayle – 3

• Codec Evolution and Industry Proposal, Jonathan Christensen, Skype – a lot has been written about this. Find out more about Skype’s SILK here – 4+

• Comms at a Crossroads: What Telecoms and Computing Should Know About Each Other and How We Can Take the Best from Both Worlds, John Forsyth, Symbian – 2

• Criticality and Nuance of Governance for Mobile Handset OS, David “Lefty” Schlesinger, LiMo Foundation/ACCESS – too aggressive to get any new sympathies. LiMo is similar to the anti-globalization protesters, they have a point but they use the wrong way to bring it on. Good questions after the talk. – 2

• Mobile Devices and Social Media for Crowdsourced Citizen Journalism, David Troy, Popvox – Talking about his cool projects. Q: What is the business model? A: Having fun developing it because it was the right thing to do :) – 4+

• Solving the Mobile Video Delivery Problem, Brian Sathianathan, Avot Media – Nice solution, good talk with technical details – 4

• Voice 2.0 Applications in a Mobile Environment, Alec Saunders, Iotum – Talk about Voice 2.0 manifesto, Calliflower (demo and development process) and the mobile app for Calliflower. – 4

• Looking Back at a Year of Deep Dialing: The Present and Future of Phone Menus, Shai Berger, Fōnolo – IVR skipping, IVR spidering (what happens when somebody answers the call???), nice stats on IVR design – 4