[asterisk-biz] Astricon 2008 updates: keynotes, content, contests

[John Todd]

Astricon is only 54 days away!   If you're not 
booked, please take a moment to register for the 
conference, get your hotel room, and get your 
plane tickets before things fill up and/or get 
expensive.  This is a great opportunity to meet 
other developers, users, and members of the 
Asterisk  ecosystem, and I encourage everyone to 
attend.  While there are great things to be said 
about the mailing lists, IRC channels, and other 
forums throughout the year, it is still the 
face-to-face meetings that get the most done for 
new code ideas, business deals, and getting the 
"big picture" of what is happening in the world 
of Asterisk and VoIP in general.

With the sad demise of the VON conferences, there 
has been a loss of one of the forums in which the 
Asterisk community members would personally meet. 
While we are disappointed that VON no longer 
exists, we are encouraging anyone who would have 
otherwise attended VON to come to Astricon as a 
venue for the same purposes of face-to-face 
meetings and technology review. (But we're a lot 
lighter on the quantity of "marketing 'droids" 
than VON was in it's last few years, which 
perhaps is a good thing.)


Keynotes
========

While we'll have talk details in a future 
message, we do have the list of keynote speakers 
for Astricon 2008.  We're happy to be able to 
announce the following speakers:

   Brian Aker - MySQL/Sun Microsystems Chief 
Architect.  Brian is one of the core architects 
of the Open Source MySQL database, as well as 
being an Asterisk enthusiast.  His has a deep 
understanding of the nature and process of open 
source development in large projects, and 
regularly speaks on the topics of open source 
ideology, large-scale design, and how open 
networks and open software can benefit users and 
enterprises.  Sun's role as a sponsor of 
open-source software has increased dramatically 
in the past several years, especially with the 
acquisition of MySQL within the last year, and 
Brian's insights into the open-source/commercial 
worlds will be a fascinating overview.

   Stefan Öberg - General Manager and Vice 
President of Skype Telecom.  Stefan has 
previously served in different positions at 
Tele2, the Swedish telecom operator, initially in 
Sweden and then Estonia, and has an excellent 
understanding of carrier, SMB, and residential 
aspects of telephony.  I am excited that Stefan 
and Skype accepted our offer of a keynote spot, 
as his company's perspectives on being the 
world's most widely-used VoIP client and P2P 
network will interest those in the Asterisk 
community who are trying to parallel that success 
with different methodologies and tools.  I'm 
certain that Stefan's talk and views will 
generate good discussion throughout the 
conference.


Content
=======

Again I'm pleased to say that this year is a 
banner year for technical talks.  We have over 60 
talks in total, and three full tracks of 
"advanced" technical discussions.  In-depth case 
studies on Unified Communications, discussions of 
the new R2 stack, advanced PRI and SS7 sessions, 
carrier topics, call center strategies, voice 
recognition, STUN/TURN/ICE implementations - it's 
a wide list of topics:

http://www.astricon.net/2008/glendale/web/confSchedule.php

There is also an entire track on business issues 
- how to sell Asterisk against other platforms, 
regulatory case studies, more open source 
discussions, intellectual property and trademark 
talk, and may more.


Contests
========

Jared Smith is going to be running two contests 
at Astricon!  I won't divulge too many details to 
keep people from practicing too much, but the 
concepts are: "Asterisk Quick-Draw" and 
"Debug-Off".   The first is a test to see who can 
install Asterisk and get a given dialplan working 
the fastest.  The second contest will test your 
debugging skills to find subtle and common 
problems with *NIX systems, Asterisk, or VoIP 
components that prevent calls from working 
correctly.  I'm sure that the crowd has plenty of 
ringers for these two contests - bring your 
Asterisk ninja outfits to intimidate  your 
opponents.

The prizes are pretty nice - Nokia n810 phones. 
They run Linux - maybe someone can get * running 
on it (if it's not already) once we award them.


What YOU can do to make Astricon better
=======================================

Are you attending?  If so, please feel free to 
put one of these graphics on your website, in 
your blog postings, or anywhere else you think it 
might be useful to collect interest and get 
people to know that Astricon is coming up.

Attending:
http://www.astricon.net/2008/glendale/boxes/box_attending.jpg

Speaking:
http://www.astricon.net/2008/glendale/boxes/box_speaking.jpg

Exhibiting:
http://www.astricon.net/2008/glendale/boxes/box_exhibitor.jpg


See you there!

JT

-- 
--
John Todd
jtodd at digium.com        +1-256-428-6083
Asterisk Open Source Community Director