Two very interesting discussions:  open source VoIP technology, and Identity 2.0.

1.  Surj Patel talked about mergers of online applications with telephony.  Some examples:  amabuddy -- amazon over voice (great); dodgeball -- social app with hacked free sms; google sms -- over wireless voice next?, and more.  He predicts that software will get better and punks will start writing cgi scripts for their own phone-network applications.

Surj himself is building an open source linux cellphone.  It's made of inexpensive components.  He predicts he'll have a prototype in 3-4 weeks.

2.  Nivi introduced us to "email for voice":  slawesome.com.  He just put it up a week ago.  You can also use it to make podcasts.  He wants to take text and make it into interactive audio and video. 

3.  Brian McConnell talked about providing on-demand access to any audio resource, using Asterisk as the telephone part.  He's created a telecast system.  Call 415-368-3022.  You'll hear an English radio station that's coming from somewhere in Switzerland.

4.  Blaine Cook talked about the slowness of the telephone companies.  For example, someone discovered that TMobile voicemail uses caller-ID for authentication, and caller-ID can be spoofed.  TMobile offered to hire the person who pointed this out (but TMobile didn't fix the problem).  Everything can be spoofed -- ANI databases (central to E911) -- and so the rules by which the telephone network works are crumbling.

Last year during the Republican National Convention, Blaine and his colleagues did radio streaming so people with cell phones could listen to radio news.  They did text-to-speech, so that people could get voice messages about what was happening.  Same during the election -- working with four people for 20 days, they built a system that allowed a voicemail message to be delivered to 10,000 people in 20 minutes.

2.  Identity 2.0:  Dick Hardt gave his celebrated presentation.  His view is that Sxip will be widely adopted because it's simple, clear, open, and allows claim-based mechanisms to determine identity.  He said that talking about identity now is like talking about the net in 1993 -- everyone needs really basic information to grasp the concept.

Brian Fitzgerald talked about OpenID, and a lively conversation ensued.

It's very hard to blog this conference -- there are so many things going on at once, and everything is interesting.