Ecomm 2008 conference will report on wireless revolution in the making

The readers of this blog will probably know that I’m not a geek in any sense of the world, and that technology is a tool, albeit important, for something else, which is human emancipation. So I do not regularly report on technical conferences.

However, here is one that, despite its technical nature, I would like to mention and support, not just because I will be speaking there, but because I have seen how serious organizer Lee Dryburgh has been about inviting all those who are doing the pioneering work on what could one of the basic building blocks of the peer to peer infrastructure, the developments around wireless communications, freed from the constraints of walled gardens and proprietary limits.

Here is the text of the announcement.

Ecomm 2008:

“When some of the world’s leading thinkers in telecommunication and wireless technology innovation gather at the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference 2008 here next month, conferees can expect to witness telecommunications history in the making. The iPhone developer movement, Google’s support for the new Android mobile operating system and FCC-mandated open spectrum have created the perfect storm to change the face of the mobile industry.

With a roster of speakers that includes Rich Miner, group manager, mobile platforms at Google; Jonathan Christensen, general manager, audio and video at Skype; Brough Turner, chief technical officer and senior vice president at NMS Communications; ex-Google employee turned angel investor Chris Sacca; Benoit Schillings, chief technical officer at Trolltech (Nokia), and Christopher Allen, founder of the largest iPhone developer-support community, attendees are guaranteed exposure to the best opportunity space in global telecoms as mobile becomes the new platform for innovation.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see an iPhone SDK, J2ME, Skype and Android battling to take center stage,” said Lee S. Dryburgh, conference organizer and chair. “It’s for certain that eComm 2008 is the first telecom conference focusing on the democratization of telecoms innovation and we’ve attracted the best people on the planet.

“In the context of the perfect storm that arose toward the end of last year, eComm2008 at the Computer History Museum on March 12–14 is definitely the place to be if you’re concerned at all about the future of the telecommunications industry,” Dryburgh added. “The tsunami of change heading for the wireless communications industry is so strong we’ve dubbed the event ‘The Trillion Dollar Industry Rethink.’”

eComm 2008 sponsors so far include Voxbone, Ribbit, Six Apart, NMS Communications, IfByPhone, MIR3, Voxeo, Wireless Grids Corporation, and VAPPS.

Attendees may register online at http://www.eCommMedia.com, where full details about the conference—including the roster of speakers—are available.

The Advisory Board assisting Dryburgh in selecting content and speakers for eComm includes:

* Imran Ali, founding partner in Carbon Imagineering;

* Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis;

* Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives;

* Martin Geddes, chief analyst at technology consultancy STL Partners;

* Norman Lewis, chief strategy officer at Wireless Grids Corporation;

* Sheldon Renan, principal in technology consultancy Vision & Strategy, LLC;

* Brough Turner, senior VP, chief technology officer and co-founder of NMS Communications; and

* Phil Wolff, CEO of Reef9 Media and managing editor of Skype Journal.

The Computer History Museum is located at 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. in Mountain View.

Established in 1996, the museum is a public benefit organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating computing history. It houses one of the largest collections of computing artifacts in the world, a collection of more than 13,000 objects, 20,000 images, 5,000 moving images, 4,000 linear feet of cataloged documentation and 5,000 titles or several hundred gigabytes of software. The mission of the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age.”

To be there contact dryburghl at gmail.com. To attend, register online at www.eCommMedia.com

1 Comment Ecomm 2008 conference will report on wireless revolution in the making

  1. AvatarSepp Hasslberger

    Hi Michel,

    I won’t be able to participate in this conference, but would like to ask you to bring up, either in your talk or perhaps better in your informal contacts, a question that is running around in my mind.

    You may have heard that apparently, wireless technologies, especially the mobile phone tech but also wifi seem to come with health problems. Tumors in heavy users of mobile phones and in people who live close to repeater antennas, headaches, an other less noticeable health effects cannot really be denied any longer. Two articles on my site detailing such health effects are:

    Mobile And Wireless – Largest Biological Experiment

    The Cell Phone Experiment: Is Mobile Communication Worth The Risk?

    A recent article in The Ecologist narrows down the mechanism by which these EM waves may be affecting biological organisms:

    “There are many different theories on how electromagnetic radiation interacts with our bodies, but pulsed microwave radiation, such as that used by Wi-Fi and mobile phones, is thought to affect the body’s cells in a unique way.

    Although microwaves oscillate (change direction) many thousands of times each second, the carrier pulses which convey your voice or emails along the signal actually oscillate at a much slower rate, only hundreds of times a second. This slower rate allows the pulses to interact with protein vibrational receptors, like microscopic hairs, on the membranes of our cells. The cells interpret this unusual stimulation as a foreign invader and react as any organism would – by closing down the cell membrane. This impairs the flow of nutrients into the cell or waste products on their way out. It also disrupts inter-cellular communication, meaning that clusters of cells that form tissues can no longer work as effectively together.

    The increase of trapped waste products can lead to an increase in the number of cancer-causing ‘free radicals’. Worse still, a chemical known as ‘messenger RNA’ inside the cell passes on this ‘learned response’ to daughter cells, meaning that the cell’s offspring also learn to interpret microwaves as an external threat and react in the same way.

    The disruption in cellular processes is thought to lead to the many and various symptoms of electrosensitivity, and the build-up of free radicals released when the cell dies could be connected with the increase in tumors seen in those exposed to frequent doses of microwave radiation.”

    and also

    “Both systems [Wi-Fi devices and mobile phones] use high-frequency microwaves that are ‘pulsed’ rapidly on and off to transmit data. This pulsed aspect of data transmission is important, because it means that, although a signal might appear to be low-powered when measured over a period of time, it could reach ‘spikes’ of much higher levels when data is actually being transmitted.”

    So it doesn’t seem to be necessarily be the microwaves that are bad for us, at least at low levels of strength, but the pulsing (the on-off between data packets) which links them to biological processes.

    Now recently, I have read that there may be different protocols of data transmission, that use different methods of separating the packets of data. One is time division duplex (TDD) and the other frequency division duplex (FDD).

    Could a passage of the technology of wireless communication from time division duplex to frequency division duplex eliminate what appears to be the major cause of ‘linking’ microwave radiation to biological tissues, that is, the low frequency division of transmitted data into time-detached ‘packets’?

    I realize that you may not have the answer to this, but as you are going to the conference with the wireless strategy planners, could you put that question to one or more of them? I would be very happy if you did.

    Perhaps passing from TDD to FDD (or some other change of that nature) could resolve many of the health problems we see today around the application of wireless technologies.

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