Awards and Astricon!
markster August 16th, 2009
Again it’s starting to be that time of year where AstriCon http://www.astricon.net is becoming visible on the horizon.
This year promises again to be a record-breaker – we’ve already got
more pre-show signups, more participants on the show floor, and a
fantastic line-up of speakers and sessions. There will even be a job
fair for those of you looking for a change in venue, or for those of
you looking for Asterisk-clued admins and developers. (watch this
space for more details)
In fact, it looks like AstriCon is situated to be among the biggest shows for the quarter in the whole VoIP industry – how’s THAT for an open-source project? I think it’s great, and I’m looking forward to the biggest and best conference ever.
We’ve got a focus this year on Enterprise and Government deployments of Asterisk as well as the very active “Cloud” uses, and there is a track on each of those. As always, we have an in-depth Technical track for developers and administrators, a Call Center track, and a Commerce track for resellers and consultants. Each of the tracks is focused on their respective areas, but almost all of the talkss would be interesting to almost any attendee – there is a lot of crossover between what each group finds interesting, which is why I love talking to attendees. Everyone has an interesting story or application!
Speaking of which…
Last year, we had a great crop of participants in the Asterisk Innovation awards program, where Digium tries to recognize some of the most novel and profitable uses of Asterisk in the now-huge community of users and companies that create products around the toolkit. We have had a great response this year – more than ever! – but I know I have seen other really cool Asterisk-based products out there that are new, but somehow didn’t make it onto our list. If there are any last minute, gold nugget application candidates out there (even silly ones), I’m happy to sneak them into the running. See this link: http://www.digium.com/en/company/awards/innovation.php and mail Julie with your proposal, and I’ll hopefully be awarding
your company the prize at the AstriCon opening sessions.
The economy may make things tough for many of you, but I’d encourage you to see what you can do to make it to AstriCon. This is such a valuable conference, from both a social networking perspective as well as what you’ll learn in the great line-up of talks. Beg/negotiate with/threaten your boss with inappropriate photos, squeeze your budget, and maybe trade in some frequent flyer miles – this conference will be worth it. Even if it means eating chicken nuggets for a few lunches instead to help offset the cost of the room (which we got a good rate on again this year.) :-) What you learn at AstriCon makes you more valuable to your company, and more
able to do your job. We’re trying to pack as much knowledge into three days as possible, and you won’t be able to help coming away from the conference with dozens of things to try, or ideas to research, or new friends to communicate with. I hope to see you there!
- Mark Spencer
About the Author
Mark Spencer founded Digium¬Æ, Inc., in 1999 as Linux Support Systems while still a computer engineering student at Auburn University. When faced with the high cost of buying a PBX for the company, Spencer simply used his Linux PC and knowledge of C code to develop his own PBX. This was the beginning of the worldwide open source phenomenon known … more about markster
