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

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@digium.com +1-256-428-6083
Asterisk Open Source Community Director

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AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona
Register Now: http://www.astricon.net

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