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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-256-428-6083 Asterisk Open Source Community Director _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users