Podcast Directory

A busy weekend:

• Bird is back, an announcement with Airwallex;
• A massive loss for the industry with Kevin Graham leaving Vonage;
• Noah‘s alive! We have him on next week’s TADSummit Innovators;
• More fallout from the AT&T breach;
• Johnny loves SignalWire, especially their short; and
• Unsound investment advice on Twilio,.

Robert Vis continues to deliver on his plan to transform the programmable communications industry. Announcing on his TADSummit Innovator’s podcast (over 5k views) focusing on the value add for customer communications and bringing the price of SMS close to cost. Sinch did not like that, especially when Bird dropped prices in Sweden. And today delivering on the payments strategy, partnering with Airwallex to power their international payments operations.

Bird will leverage Airwallex’s financial infrastructure to simplify payments for over 30,000 customers, replacing the more than 20 global banks it relied on previously.

“Prior to working with Airwallex, we were using legacy systems and technology which slowed down our entire global operations. With Airwallex, we’re able to streamline our payments infrastructure and supercharge our finance operations globally”. – Robert Vis, Founder & CEO at Bird. Keep an eye on how this deal develops.

Kevin Graham announced his departure from Vonage, with a walk and a love letter. For the walk, check out the video clip (I had to delete the audio because of copyright) at the end to see what Graham is getting up to. On the love letter, a very powerful statement pointing out:

“Unfortunately, the industry has not helped itself during that period due to some poor commercial judgement driven by short term thinking in addition to some downright unethical business practices from a small but influential minority. Trust in A2P SMS particularly is at an all time low, and whilst we all have our views and respective lens through which to view such matters, it hasn’t been good enough. Better collaboration and governance is required to deal with those who claim to innovate but in reality have been harming this industry for some time.”

source Kevin Graham

I’d just like to point out that the MEF requires its members to ignore my body of work on the problems in the messaging industry. We need many more people to stand up and share their truth before it’s too late.

Noah’s alive! We’d not heard from him in a while. And with this post on Linkedin he’s back firing on all cylinders in pointing out the insanity of trusting businesses with our personal data given their systematic failure to protect it. Stop the insanity and start taking back your identity, rights, and privacy. Apply to be a member of TNID-Trusted Number ID, where consent and preferences are yours to control.

And to prove the point Noah is making Alex Quilici (YouMail) posted on the personal data exposed from the AT&T breach.

Johnny’s pumped about SignalWire, especially after their recent short, “Of course they use FreeSWITCH” Which I also attached to the end of Podcast 61, after Graham’s silent hiking video.

Johnny kicked off the week with an article from The Motley Fool, and extended it by suggesting you take $3M and turning it into $1M to make yourself a Twilio Millionaire. Johnny’s advice was to stop the share buyback and focus on copying Bird.