Geeking out with SF Telephony-types.

Last week marked the first ‘Meetup’ of SF Telephony peeps (I can’t stand that expression actually, but it seems to apply here), organized and hosted by some folks over at Orange Labs in South San Francisco. They have a perfect little gathering room on their premises, and it’s not the first time they have generously lent it out to support the local community.

For a first shot at this – with the help a very established set of social tools from the Meetup site – I would say the event was nothing short of a success. I’m guessing here, but it looked like 70-100 people in attendance, with a nice slate of local presenters on tap. The free pizza and cola didn’t hurt either.

The presentations started with a few folks from Voxeo, including fellow baseball nut Adam Kalsey who overviewed and demoed their Moho, free development platform. Give this a try at 415-894-9965; it’s local search application powered at the back end by Yahoo! Local. Adam indulged this coding neophyte that the 160 lines of PHP code this required is essentially an after-dinner project for someone with skills. Still 160 too many for me, but impressive just the same.

Jason Goecke - one of my favorite industry guys – followed with an update on AdHearsion, including an announcement that a formal training/hacking session is planned for this August in San Francisco, that will include participation from the creator himself, Jay Philips. Chris Matthieu followed, who since his entrepreneurial debut on the telephony scene has made a lot noise for a one-man show. He offered an update on his Teleku platform – including his ‘integration’ with the recently introduced OpenVBX from Twilio. Not sure I’ve ever met a happier guy and always good to see him.

The order is now escaping me, but the evening finished with Dan Miller (on Recombinant Communications, no less), a demo from the Orange guys of a television/telephony integration that far outpaces what Comcast does for me (display of incoming call), and the formal launch of the 2600hz Project from Darren Schreiber.

Familiar industry faces were everywhere, which when you live in the Bay Area but are active in something other than the Web, it’s nice to see that a crowd that’s strong – and growing.

Thank you to Zhao Lu and the other organizers; I look forward to the next one.

PS. here is a link to the presentations and pictures from the evening.

Tagged as: Adhearsion, Orange Labs, SF Telephony Meetup, Voxeo