The TADSummit opening keynote ‘Carnival of the Creators’ was dedicated to innovators large and small from around the world using telecom app development to create new businesses and customer value. This was an intense, fast-paced session (5 min pitch, 5 min Q&A) demonstrating success case after success case. Its not just start-ups, its large established enterprises and telcos. It provided a summary / teaser of all the content to come over the 2 days of TADSummit, and provided a inspiring way to kick-off TADSummit 2016.

RogerVoice update, making communications accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, Olivier Jeannel de Thiersant, CEO RogerVoice. Olivier’s team has grown from 2 to 4 people since we last met him, his core platform has evolved as his service expands, his focus has expanded from solving a highly important problem to growing his customer base. He is addressing a problem that is fundamentally changing the lives of people, the video he showed was heart-moving as a deaf person made her first call using RogerVoice.

Internal innovation success case built on telecom capabilities in the enterprise, Philippe Vayssac, CIO Groupama. After Olivier’s heart-moving pitch, Philippe gave another with GranVillage. How Groupama, an insurance company, is helping solve problems its small farmer customers face – getting more sales. Philippe also hinted at an important tool he uses for successful innovation: effectuation, he goes into more detail in his Day 2 presentation.

Voxist: the first 6 months, Karel Bourgios, Founder and CEO Voxist. It may sound boring, but voicemail is still used, and quite intensively by some segments of the market. Karel’s opening keynote shared his experiences in the first 6 months in building the business, the role TADMentor plays in helping him. His later presentation goes into more depth on the service and role his platform can play in the future. Its another opportunity telcos have missed, but its nice Karel is making it happen.

Building realtime APIs at Liveperson, Eitan Yarden, Architect, Liveperson. For me, LivePerson is the defining enterprise telecom application case study. They have 18000 customers around the world, and a world-class development team. Messaging is the sharp-end of CRM these days. They shared the rationale behind their messaging API being web-sockets based, and in later presentations shared websockets API best practices and how they’ve integrated bots into their API framework. We also persuaded them over Tuesday breakfast to join the Dangerous Demo, as you can see in the opening picture of this weblog.

IdeaMart: Sri Lankan Innovation on telco capabilities, Shafraz Rahim, Developer Relations and Platform Evangelist at Dialog Axiata. I was really pleased Shafraz and Nadeeshani (his colleague) made the long trip from Sri Lanka to Lisbon. Their recipe for success should have been copied and localized years ago by most of the telcos around the world. But that is water under the bridge. Shafraz shared the massive impact IdeaMart has made to the Sri Lankan economy, this is not a one-off example, many other operators can achieve similar success.

Update on Telenor Digital’s experiences in building a Programmable Telco Core Network, Werner Eriksen, Telenor Digital.  This is a project every telco should be paying close attention to. They are taking an open-source-centric approach to the telco core. BTW we also roped Werner into the Dangerous Demo. Part of Werner’s focus in 2016 has been on reliability, and this certainly paid off in his demos as you’ll see in the Dangerous Demo weblog. Next year is when the ‘rubber hits the road;’ where they scale up across the group.

TADHack Winner: Snappy Kamailio, Daniel-Constantin Mierla. Ubuntu Core is a tiny, transactional version of Ubuntu for IoT / edge devices. It runs a secure, remotely upgradeable Linux app packages known as snaps – and is trusted by leading IoT players, from chipset vendors to device makers and system integrators. LimeSDR (Software Defined Radio) is an example, you’ll hear more about them in later weblogs. Its an enabler of edge computing, adding apps wherever a processor resides. Both John Zannos and Vish Nandlall’s presentations highlighted the strategic importance of what they enable. We also got Daniel involved in the Dangerous Demo, more on that later.

TADHack Winner: Virtual Healthcare Triage, David Alfaro (Cisco and Voximplant winners). This hack is a simple way to use comms to escalate from messaging to video. We also included them into the dangerous demo – they only found out about this on Tuesday, with the demo being the following day. In the US many insurance plans offer phone based doctor services, but its about time they moved that into the 21st century.

After this session the audience was palpably excited about what was to come. The thought-leadership at TADSummit isn’t just a nice-idea presented on some slides, its demonstrated through both in-market real-world results and live world-first demonstrations. This is what makes TADSummit unique.