Asterisk Conference in Singapore
I was able to meet up with top Digium executives at the recently concluded Asterisk event held in Holiday Inn , Singapore. I went to the event with my brother in law Teng Han and his boss, Chuan Iau of EzyPaySolution.com. They gave me an extra ticket. This allowed me to save at least 190 USD! Thank you Chuan Iau!!! Pictures of the event are here.
The presentation given by Mr Malcolm Davenport was most enjoyable. He was a technical guru (geek) and I learned a lot about what is new about Asterisk v 1.4. Malcolm also dwelled on the works-in-progress for asterisk. I have a group photo with him! The other presenters mostly marketed their products and I was only able to pick up some tidbits here and there. Otherwise, the information they presented would be of more use to Sales and Marketing directors.
Some tidbits include: the history of IAX (courtesy of Mr Greg Vance), resources like asteriskguru.net, asteriskdocs.org and forums.digium.com. Marco Di Cerbo warned of cpu usage when asterisk does transcoding. Dr Ali shared how to make asterisk into an enterprise class server using DBRD (this was the second most enjoyable presentation). Doug Vilim (Sangoma) the T.38 and echo cancellation features of their cards. In a private conversation he also shared how sangoma cards handlled interupts to reduce cpu usage.
Anyway, I was able to meet with Mr Davenport, who was with Mark Spenser right at the beginning of founding Digium (creators of Asterisk). So in that sense, the event was not a total loss for me.
Other speakers included Mr Greg Vance of Digium, Dr Daniel Ali and Marco Di Cerbo of MCSB systems, Malaysia. Mr Doug Vilim of Sangoma, Mr Hendy Harianto who shared his experience in using Asterisk as their corporate PBX system. Mr Alfred Chong and Mr Yew Hock Meng were also presenters at the event.
Mr San Sinhania of Lantone (Singapore Digium Distributor) gave away 10 Polycomm VOIP phones. I was lucky enough to have been picked as one of the ten winners!! Chuan Iau also won one, but since he was not physically present, his prize was given to another one.
I enjoyed meeting lots of people at the conference. Among them were Ahmad Fadzil of Lannik, Sangoma Regional distributor, Yew Hock Meng, COO of LGA which provides Zipbox,Alfred Chong, Gen Manager of JCMEX, regional distributor for Digium. Also present were CT Hai of AValueWeb, Allann Lim of Espore, and Mr L.C. Chen, managing directory of Sita Software, regional distributor of SugarCRM. L.C. was the master of ceremonies at the Asterisk conference.
I had wanted to pay for the event – were it not for the fact that the organizers did not have a payment gateway. I had planned to pay for the event since about 3 weeks prior to the event. We had exchanged a lot of emails and at one point, I even decided to pay by bank transfer. But the account given did not allow for the bank transfer. It was not easy for me or any other registrant to reserve a slot because their payment mechanism was outdated.
The organizers should have studied the Philippine Internet Payment Gateway Accepting Credit Cards Guide.
