I recently caught up with Lee Dryburgh, the organiser and chairperson of the upcoming Emerging Communications (eComm) conference that starts tomorrow, to talk more in depth about the event. Like why he decided to organise an event centered on emerging telephony and how? Especially being based out of Austria! The interview was actually done while Dryburgh was in Austria, using Skype video. So I apologise in advance for the video quality.

eComm 2008 was created after O'Reilly decided to cancel ETel 2008

The first thing Dryburgh was not shy talking about was the origins of his conference. eComm basically was born after O'Reilly "shelved" ETel, its own conference on Emerging Telephony last year. For Dryburgh, Etel was the best telecommunications conference he's attented in years and didn't have enough praised for the defunct show.

"I was very sick of other telecommunications conferences because quite frankly they were borring... It was more of a religion in many ways. These shows became more marketing events... Then by accidents... I ended up at the inaugural ETel. It was just fantastic because there was just sense of community... where telecom executives could be placed beside garage based hackers... It was a fantastic atmosphere ", Dryburg remembers.

Dryburg was then part of the committee for ETel 2007 and according to him, the first person to get invited back to help put ETel 2008 together... well until O'Reilly decided to cancel it.

"I just could not believe it. If there was no event then where else can I go to... I don't want to attack other conferences but VON is something of the 90s... it was exciting back then but this is 2008 and I can't find anything exciting or appealing to spend my own time or money... I couldn't accept that... You just don't cancel on a community in the tech field", Dryburgh added.

Inspite canceling on the ETel community, O'Reilly did not support new effort

Dryburgh then decided to put his life on hold and work for the next 5 months, 7 days a week, and even put his own money in the venture to have his dream conference back. However, he had one condition:

"That the community gave energy and enthusiasm. Because if there was no community to continue on, there was no point. Luckily a lot of very good people came on board... and all I asked of O'Reilly is to point the community towards this new effort. And if you looked today, you'll see that this has not been done".

eComm 2008 is about diversity and quality

What sets eComm apart are two things: the people and the format. Dryburgh reached to people outside the communications field but who are relevant "long term", cutting the time of presentations, including very short 5 minutes "lightning talk" sessions and having a mixture of commercial products and academic research.

To build the programme for eComm, Dryburgh had access to the 90 proposals for ETel 2008 and according to him, was the only one putting a week of effort to go through every single one of them and providing a ranking. But out of the 90 proposals, Dryburgh decided to take the 30 he liked most which became the foundation for the show and built up the remaining 60.

"So I took a higher quality point of view then was originally theirs [ETel 2008]... and only took their [ETel 2008] best and built upwards... That's the best lineup I saw on a decade, since 1998... This is going to be a hell of a conference!".

Dryburgh on the future of telephony: It will not be here in 20 years... forget telephony!

We ended our conversation with some ideas on the future of telephony. For Dryburgh it's not about voice over IP anymore.

"VOIP is very 90s... putting a 130 years old system, change transmission to be packet switch... telephony means you initiate a call to a number. somebody picks up... What we'll see is clients having more modes with various degrees of synchrocity (voice, IM, e-mail)... Twitter is a good example".

More on the future of telephony tomorrow!



Most of the conference organisation was done out of Dryburgh's home in Austria!

Another great thing about the eComm 2008 conference is that it was organised and managed remotely... No, not from the East Coast... but from Austria, where Dryburgh lives. A bit surprising for a Scotsman I should say... although you can actually find very good non-alcoholic beers there... according to him :-)

"What you need is just Skype and Gmail!".