Pictured left to right and top down are some faces in VoIP: Yana Stamcheva, senior software developer at Atlassian; Jennifer Hashimoto, senior implementation manager at Caztel Communications; Kathleen King, public relations at FreeSWITCH; Celeste Mangani of Celeste Mangani of QXIP and HOMER; Mira Georgieva, president of Zoiper: not pictured but well-known in VoIP is Allison Smith, the VoiceGal!
A lot has changed since 1995 when I first tried Vocaltec's Internet Phone in the classroom full of 8th grade students. I was their English teacher. Four years later, I was putting in 15 hour work days with a VoIP startup called Super Technologies, Inc. with low cost or even free calling via something called Super Phone, very popular in India.
Inspired and encouraged by people like Jeff Pulver, Rich Tehrani, Rehan Allahwala, (the other Super Technologies, Inc. and later DIDX co-founder), Jagdish Loganathan, Arslaan Ikram, Melinda and Herman Dewitt ... and companies and services such as CUSEEME, Microsoft NetMeeting, ICQ, Buddy Phone, etc. I dove in just like hundreds of other women and more with time.
I'm sure all of us "women" can share some crazy stories about how we people thought we should not have been there. Big smile, but in most cases, it's been fantastic to be a part of the success of "1s" and "0s" sending packets of sound and other data back and forth around the world. All you women and men involved in IP communications development have played a huge part in helping people start and grow businesses, feel closer to family and other loved ones and more! Quite an accomplishment.
The pictures you see at the top of this blog post are those of a few women who I want you to join Wednesday February 15 at 12 noon CST to celebrate the progress of IP communications, mostly known for the VoIP component.
How to participate?
Via WebRTC: dial 888 at https://conference.freeswitch.org/vc
Via PSTN direct inward dialing: USA 1-919-386-9900
Via SIP: sip:[email protected]
codecs: PCMU/PCMA. G722, CELT, OPUs and more
Or watch it live @ https://www.youtube.com/freeswitch
SIP happens!