Ruby and VOIP - Continued

I completed my presentation this past weekend of Ruby and VOIP to the Twin Cities Asterisk User's Group. It went very well and I had a great time talking about Ruby and how I see Adhearsion and Telegraph being used in this emerging technology space. There were some great questions from the group and I think they had fun seeing my demonstrations as well. Plus, this time I had 2 hours to present, so I was able to get through all of my demos!

Contrasting this presentation with the one I did a few weeks ago at RUM, it was an interesting difference in groups that I presented to. Both groups are extremely technical people and include collegues that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for. It was interesting to me that there wasn't much crossover exposure of technology between the groups. Many people at the RUM group, had heard of Asterisk, but I think only 1 person raised their hand when I asked if anyone had download or run it. Likewise, the Asterisk folks had heard of Ruby, but none of them had written a script before. I had however planned for this and modified my slides slightly since the Ruby User's Group needed some background information Asterisk and the Asterisk User's Group needed some context on what Ruby is. If you are curious, you can download my modified slides here.

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What is so interesting in VOIP as I see it coming from a software background, are the applications that we can develop and put online. Bringing the ideas of Web 2.0 to VOIP makes these frameworks a disruptive technology - and disruptive in a good way. The status quo in telecom hopefully is not going to cut in any longer and being able to write applications to interface voice and web in some ways I see as the next frontier in internet application development. Additionally, with these two isolated camps of software developers and hardware telecommunication experts, I see the market needing more people that can bridge that gap and create some really kicking applications.
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And at the end of the day though, what I enjoy most about working with both of these frameworks is that they are FUN to use. They allow you to be innovative. Go ahead, think up a new feature or application and have at it!