Everyone Loves The Telephone

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Last week I went to a conference called ”Etel“ in San Francisco.  Etel is short for “Emerging Telephony.” Me and a couple other ITP’ers went to present some projects we did that utilize an open-source PBX called “Asterisk” let us program robots that will talk to you when you call them. We were just a small part of the conference. Some other bloggers covered everything way better than I could- if you’re interested you can check out the press here.

One of my favorite things at the conference was this OpenMoko phone-- that little orange thing above. (Pic stolen from Shawn’s Flickr) If you’re a control-freak this phone is for you.  You know how your Verizon or Cingular, or Shi-t-mobile phone menus kinda suck?  Like, maybe you have to go through about 8 menus before you can get to your missed calls list?  Or maybe your ringtone keeps defaulting to that one Britney Spears song unexpectedly.  Well, if you had a OpenMoko phone you could change all that.  You could make any menu system you wanted.  The whole phone is a touch-screen (no keypad), so, if you wanted to replace all the numbers on the touch-screen keypad with little dancing hamsters, you could.  Then every time you made a call, instead of pushing buttons with numbers on them, you could play with dancing hamsters.  Get it?  The options are infinite!

Unfortunately, the first day of the conference I missed a bunch of talks to work on my thesis and another school project.  This is the view from the lobby.  It was nice to see water and sky for a change.

Wednesday evening we presented our projects. Here’s Anh showing his ”Surprise Dialer“ which lets you surprise someone with a message from a bunch of their friends.

Before the presentations we took a quick trip to Kinkos to make about 500-too many flyers.  (I needed maybe....20?!)

Did I mention we presented our projects during Etel Happy Hour?  Everyone seemed to think our ideas were really good after a few glasses of wine.  Why don’t we serve drinks at the ITP Show??

Here’s Matt presenting his ”Bangla Bollo“ project which will help you practice speaking and listening to Bengali over the phone.

Jury and Chris busted out the ”Megaphone 3000“ which turns your cell phone into a remote controller for a bunch of games played on a giant screen.

Kate H. and Kati lured passers-by into their jungle of hotel plants to show off Botanicalls. Member this one from the ITP show?  Your house plants call you when they need water.  Awesome.  The big excitement for us that evening was when the server that handles all our calls decided to die.  This meant whenever someone tried to call and test our projects, they would either get a busy signal or hung up on.

Luckily we had Asterisk-genius Shawn Van Every with us.  He prayed over the server, and quickly got it back up and running.

That evening I took this blurry pic when we went out to the city for some Mexican food.

My nachos stood still for their glam shot.

After that it was a quick trip to Beauty Bar across the street.  (why did we go here?  don’t we have one of these in NY?)

And even in the bars....more fun with phones.  The next day at about 11AM a few of us got a call from the conference organizer who explained that a speaker had dropped out-- and offered us a spot “on the big stage.” This was such a sweet opportunity because this way the whole conference-- or at least everyone in the main room got to hear our pitches.

Ducan Davidson (Etel photographer??) snapped this photo of me presenting on stage.  Oh- by the way I presented “The Human Race.” Remember?  It’s the project were callers on hold compete to be the first to speak to a human.  You can try it out at thanksforyourpatience.com. Some really nice bloggers wrote about it here and here.  When the conference was over I went into the city to visit my friends Laura B. and Jen Raffanti.  Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures-- so I’m going to bust out with these old ones so they can still represent.

Boychenko and her pride-n-joy the pontiac “spitfire.”

Jen and her pride-n-joy Marley the make-out dog.  Love you both!!!  Did I mention there was an earthquake in San Francisco that day?  I dodgeballed back to NY to let everyone know.  Unfortunately no one seemed concerned for my safety.  Sighhhhh....

Anyway, the flight home included a full row to myself,

and California-only all stars Pete’s coffee and See’s candy,

Back in the 14-degrees-feels-like-1-degree weather of NY now.  (Why don’t they just write “don’t go outside” !!) Until next time Cali...