Team Member: Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Voice is the most natural, comfortable form of communication, but most customer interaction is done through text. In this presentation from the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference, Peter Diedrich of Mobivox describes their new voice CRM platform that improves customer satisfaction and retention by including sales messages into typical customer interactions.

Scott Ruthfield describes Jiffy, a new open source performance measurement tool for measuring true client-side performance of web sites. Ruthfield identifies the components of website performance problems and the decision process that led WhitePages.com to develop their own solution. Jiffy's goals, components, and a sample implementation provide a thorough introduction to the toolkit.

In this eComm talk, Alan Quayle talks about the pressures driving operators to open their network and how, whilst not groundbreaking, there is a justifiable business case. His presentation highlights some of the services operators can enable, and make profitable, through opening their network, whilst also highlighting some of the critical issues they face in doing so.

If you're looking for a Linux initiative that is truly open source, where you can download the source, contribute without censorship, and drive the project, check out Moblin.org. The Moblin project was conceived in order to drive innovation on the new breed of Internet-enabled mobile devices, to foster community participation, and to avoid locking into a proprietary platform. Dirk Hohndel, the helmsman, woos open source developers to take this platform to its next level by participating in the community.

Today there are tools for testing web applications, but they are difficult to use, costly, and poorly integrated with web browsers. In response to these limitations, Vik Chaudhary and Abelardo Gonzalez of Keynote Systems announce their new web testing product, the Keynote Internet Testing Environment.

Social enterprise can both ease the terrible consequences of the insularity inherent in nationalism, and enhance the positive opportunities for social change within established heritage and cultural traditions. In this panel discussion, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, experts consider topics ranging from multiculturalism within countries to cross-national and international cultural challenges and opportunities.

Anyone who has developed applications for mobile phones knows that dealing with the phone companies takes much longer than writing the software. In this presentation from the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference, Jamie Siminoff announces the launch of GRID.com, a service made to replace the tedious one-off negotiations over services with a frictionless, pay-as-you-go model.

Data centers are becoming more costly and complicated, and that rate is only going to continue increasing. In the presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Bill Coleman describes the unsustainable path data centers are on and the ways that they can be managed in the future.

Entrepreneur and evangelist Malcolm Matson traces the evolution of today's captive network access model and describes the nature of an intriguing alternative: the open public local access network. Matson posits a simple, but profound question: will our conversations be truly ours, or will they be subject to the governance of a monopolistic access provider whose interests may not align with our own?

Biofuels offer an environmental sustainability substitute against petrol-based fuels such as gasoline, yet they are still expensive to produce and are causing a steep inflation in food prices the world over. This panel discussion of experts debates the root causes of the increase in food prices, and the need to tackle the economic and political side effects of biofuel production.