AstriCon 2007: Confessions of a Digium booth worker
kshumard October 3rd, 2007
Well, another AstriCon has come and gone. This year’s Ast-rav-a-ganza in sunny Phoenix, AZ was another spectacle of Asterisk-based presentations and networking. It’s always exciting to me to meet members of the Asterisk community in person, especially ones whose bugtracker aliases or IRC nicks are well known to me. Matching faces to names/handles is always surprising in one way or another, but the added dimension of a real live person makes the connection seem more real somehow.
Most of my time at AstriCon this year was spent in our 10′ by 20′ booth. Besides handing out cool Digium gear like bright orange hats with our Digium bubble, bright orange “GEEK” t-shirts, and free HPEC and G.729 licenses, I also got to meet and greet hundreds of Asterisk users, administrators, and entrepreneurs. Being one of the “tech guys,” I had plenty of opportunities to hear about unique Asterisk installs and suggest tweaks or improvements. The numerous ways that people continue to extend and deploy Asterisk continually amaze me.
Of course, the big event of the week was the announcement of the Switchvox acquisition. Because that happened Wednesday night, and the Switchvox booth was adjacent to the Digium booth, we were able to tear down the wall, thank you Mr. Gorbachev, between our booths and merge into one larger L-shaped booth for Thursday and Friday. After that, “booth duty” was much simpler because Tristan from Switchvox stole the show with her live demos of the Switchvox platform. I hadn’t previously seen Switchvox’s capabilities; I don’t think I was the only person at AstriCon to be impressed by its capabilities.
Working in the booth, I missed Marko’s keynote (maybe next year the expo hall will close for keynote addresses?). But there were plenty of conversations at the booth on Friday morning describing varying accounts of how he almost crashed a golf cart at top speed during his ‘grand entrance.’ Between that and Allison “The Voice of Asterisk” Smith’s orange-and-white Asterisk dress at the Digium-sponsored party Thursday night, it was an Astricon to remember. Here’s to hoping next year’s Astricon is even better. : )