Sharon’s Top 12 Reasons to Come to ClueCon – Part 2

By Sharon White

Sharon White has been the main organizer of ClueCon for many years! This is a little behind the scenes look into ClueCon and all her favorite things about the conference.

Click here to learn more and register for ClueCon TGI2021!

8. Raffle Tickets

Who doesn’t like giveaways? For ClueCon, raffle tickets are the primary way that we give away prizes. Every single attendee receives a certain number of raffle tickets dependent upon when they signed up for ClueCon. Sign up early and you receive 20 raffle tickets per day. Sign up right before ClueCon and you receive one raffle ticket per day. But no matter when you sign up, you still have a chance to win some really cool stuff.

At most conferences those tiny tickets can represent a parting prize of a dinner for two at a great local restaurant, $500 cash, or a trip to Hawaii. For ClueCon, the annual grand prize is a custom engraved MacBook Pro. Similar to our t-shirts, we put time and effort into giving our attendees something one-of-a-kind and truly special. Based on the year’s theme of ClueCon, the Macbook is intricately engraved with the conference design. This makes it a unique item you can only get at ClueCon.

The Macbook, 2015

Though there is only one MacBook to win, there are many other prizes. In the past we have given out hundreds of SIP phones, wireless chargers, and even a desktop arcade game. There are at least 8 giveaways every day – and dozens of winners.

Register now you could be one of them!

7. Hotel Life

Everyone at one point in their lives has to stay at a hotel. To me, this is really fun and adventurous. Walking in symbolizes the beginning of a week that I have been working towards for the better part of a year. For the next week this hotel is my home away from home. This year, ClueCon is taking place at the InterContinental Hotel on the Magnificent Mile, right in the middle of downtown Chicago.

Immediately the whirlwind of setting up for ClueCon begins at check-in. I have to work with the whole team to make sure all of our equipment gets to the hotel in one piece, choreograph about 50 people that have poured their lives into setting up ClueCon, organize the conference rooms, and become acquainted with the hotel staff all on the Sunday before the conference. The thrill of ClueCon is in the air right when I first walk in… Then I get to work. By the end of the conference I have an entire family that I will not see again until next year.

The greatest part of hotel life is surrounding myself with the best people to help me through the week. And for that week, the hotel is home for all of us! Hotel life and city life are one in the same – iconic Chicago restaurants surround the area, and the shops of Michigan Avenue are right around the corner. The InterContinental sits at the intersection of famous landmarks and destinations like Cloud Gate and Navy Pier. This year ClueCon will take over 3 floors of the historic hotel, including the sprawling grand ballroom and the medieval-themed King Arthur’s Court.

6. Speakers 

We get many speakers signing up to share their newest innovations or demo their latest projects. And sometimes they might pull something strange to grab your attention…

ClueCon is a conference for developers by developers and to that end it is vitally important that we have the right speakers. When ClueCon speakers submit their talks, the FreeSWITCH founders hand-select the best of the best to share their ideas. This year, there will be a combination of speakers in person at the hotel in Chicago and online! Now that we’ve done two online conferences, we know that it’s still going to be awesome, and a crazy unique hybrid experience.

The presentations are a huge part of what make ClueCon so memorable. There is always a ton to learn about various updates in the world of open source and telecom, and there are so many passionate, knowledgeable leaders who have plenty to teach. These speakers hang around later to answer any questions, chat, and network! You never know what you might learn about, or who will steal the show with a unique demo…

5. Networking

I have worked at retail establishments, banks, even a flower shop, completely different jobs that gave me work experience with all kinds of people. I didn’t really get how well a conference allows you to get to know others. Up until ClueCon the only conferences I had been to were Star Trek conventions and ComicCon’s. While meeting new people at those conferences was fun and exciting, networking at ClueCon has inspired major changes in the tech industry that have an impact on the world. In fact, the first ClueCon led to the founding of FreeSWITCH…

Not to mention, ClueCon has the coolest networking events, like the annual Gigabit Reception. This reception includes not only great hors d’oeuvres and drinks, but the highly-anticipated jam session, and, as always, ClueCon karaoke.

Anthony Minessale at the annual Jam Session.

One of my first ClueCon’s, I was manning the registration desk and I started watching two of our attendees meet and bond in seconds, something that could lead to collaborating to bring new technologies to the forefront by combining their knowledge and intellect. I remember thinking “They meet here, at ClueCon, and maybe a few years down the line we will be introduced to a product that was birthed right here in front of the registration desk.”  Who knows? Maybe that collaboration will help to make the world a better place. Don’t get me wrong, Star Trek conventions are amazing, but who can compete with the innovation that comes from developers getting together at ClueCon?

To be continued…

Dan Jenkins – Nimble Ape Ltd.

Dan runs the Real Time Communication consultancy Nimble Ape Ltd. Dan has recently started a new business called Broadcaster VC Ltd, aimed at AV Professionals bringing in remote talent into existing AV workflows – of course utilising WebRTC at its very core.

I’m a control freak

I’m a control freak. And you should be too!

Building the first version of Broadcaster.VC was _easy_ (or at least the RTC portion of it was…) but ultimately it was a proof of concept that more than a few close colleagues and friends could use. It was actually still quite difficult to run end to end and ultimately that’s the pain prospective customers faced. Becoming a control freak allowed us to get past those problems and gain traction with potential customers quicker.

Chad Phillips – Apartment Lines

Chad has been involved in the FreeSWITCH community since 2008, with heavy emphasis in Verto/WebRTC integration, and advanced call workflows via Lua scripting. He’s contributed heavily to open source projects over the years, and is an advocate for the power of sharing technology in community.

Dovid Bender – Flat Planet Phone

Dovid has been working for Flat Planet phone for the last 16+ years as employee #2. Over time he has helped bring the company from several servers to multiple POP’s around the world including France, New York, Cyprus, and Israel. Dovid’s major skill set is in telephony, networking, and troubleshooting. A big part of what he does is solving customers issues be it bugs, faulty networks etc.

Flavio Goncalves – voip.school

Flavio considers himself a geek, entrepreneur and surfer, not necessarily in this order. With surf he learned a lesson, practice does not always lead to perfection!

He has 30 years of experience in IT and 20 in Real Time Communications. He’s the author of the books, Asterisk Configuration Guide and Building Telephony Systems with OpenSIPS.

He founded several companies related to Voice over IP, VOffice a systems integrator, SipPulse a Softswitch Dev house, voip.school and WeHostVoIP, an easy to use PaaS company.

Tim Panton – pi.pe gmbh

Tim has written a cleanroom webRTC implementation for small IoT cameras and contributes to the WebRTC standards efforts at the IETF and W3C. He had one patch accepted in freeswitch, which Anthm completely rewrote so it worked.

Mojtaba Esfandiari.S – NasimTelecom

Mojtaba is a Phd Student in Software engineering at Azad University of Mashhad. His research is related to Content Delivery and QoE in Video Streaming. He is a VoIP consultant and software engineer that focused on SIP service solutions for operators and carriers and works as R&D manager in NasimTelecom. He is Technical Manager at IPPBX laboratory in Ferdowsi University on Mashhad with 15 years of experience in developing software switches and working with them, like Kamailio, Opensips, Asterisk, Freeswitch. I am member of Kamailio developer project.

LRKProxy as IMS Media Gateway (IMS-MG) in IMS

The LRKProxy is a Light RTP engine that works in Kernel space in Linux. It works as a type of packet classification in router architecture for relaying RTP packets. It has been developed as a module in the Kamailio project. In the upcoming presentation, I want to talk about how we can use LRKProxy as IMS-MG in IMS solutions.

Maksym Sobolyev – Sippy Software, Inc.

Open-source/free-software afficionado. Long term supporter of and contributor to SER, OpenSIPS, Kamailio, Asterisk (and many others). Author of RTPProxy and Sippy B2BUA / SIP stack. Entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of the Sippy Software, Inc.

 

VoIPTests: What is it and how it can be used in a telco environment?

In his presentation, Maksym will be talking about the lesser-known open source project VoIPTests, a set of tools that we developed to address continuous integration problem for several well-known VoIP projects that we care about and its potential applications outside of that domain.

Sandro Gauci – Enable Security GmbH

Sandro Gauci leads operations and research at Enable Security. To the real-time communications community he is known as the original developer of SIPVicious OSS, the SIP security toolset. At Enable Security, he helps develop offensive security tools in the RTC space and provides security consultancy, training and penetration testing services.