International Telecoms Week 2017 in Review

I wonder how many blog posts are written at airport bars, waiting out delayed flights.

I’m flying home tonight after spending the week in Chicago for International Telecoms Week (ITW). I went out to demo rumii at Kinetik’s booth. ~~Knetik is building out the backend for the rumii website.~~ A couple folks from Cima Group were also part of the booth, so ours was packed!

I love going to conferences. Even though they are exhausting, conferences a great opportunity to learn to know what you don’t know. You know?

lily ITW photo booth — Demoed rumii at ITW

I do not have a telecoms background so it was interesting to learn about what folks in the telecoms industry look for in technology and services.

One common theme among attendees were questions about fraud detection. Telecom providers lose money when fraudulent numbers use their services. Fraudulent numbers do things like make time-consuming calls to expensive places like Africa.

Gamification

Gameification is a fairly new concept but it is a powerful one. Gameification is making something that may not seem fun into a game. One example from Knetik is how they turned solving math problems into a game. The more math problems a kid completes, the more points or badges they gain.

Virtual Reality

Yes, virtual reality has even piqued the interest of the telecoms industry. Use cases for VR in the telecom industry are viewing city layouts, CAD telecom, and switch design, and of course meetings and daily standups. ITW is a global conference. There were people from all over the world who have clients and offices across the globe. rumii excited them because it meant they could collaborate on physically detailed projects without having to travel.

In recap. I am still at the airport. In another reality, I could have attended ITW virtually, walking from digital booth to digital booth. Instead of running out of business cards I could have beamed over my LinkedIn profile as a virtual business card including the reason that made us exchange our information in the first place.

Of course, the After Party was worth it to be in person. 😉