We usually cover multiple topics on WTS, but my recent trip to China was so fascinating – and touched on so many tangents – that we didn’t talk about anything else. The main topic was my experience at the Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, with some sidebars to my broader impressions of going to China for the first time. Technology-wise, 5G is the big story here, and not many Westerners have seen what I got see, so if you want to know what’s coming in the wireless world, this is the episode for you.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to our podcast directly from a commercial platform – you can access it any time here on the new Watch This Space website. Otherwise, the easiest platforms and sources to find WTS are Apple Podcasts, Google Chrome/Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music. Believe it or not, we’re also getting found on LinkedIn, Safari, and Alexa-enabled devices. For a more extensive replay archive, you can access all of our podcasts here on my JAA website.

What’s Up? Part 2 – JAA Highlights from July

While the Watch This Space podcast is the main form of original content for this newsletter, Part 2 here is a digest of JAA activities from the previous month, including my other forms of original content, along with my social media stats. More detail and links for most of these activities can be found on my blog or posted on the website.

Industry conferences – it took some time to recover from China, and I was not the least bit road sick to have a travel-free July – plus plenty of events on the books for early fall

Guest blog posts - 2 for TeamMate:
- Helping Customers Migrate to Teams Without Compromising on Telephony, July 18
- Discover the Key Differences Between MS Teams and MS Phone System, July 11
Guest article:
- submitted a new writeup for Contact Center Pipeline, which will run in the September issue
Webinar:
- NICE Talks – How AI is driving CX, with Lauren Maschio, July 20
Judging – I got to announce the winner for Collaboration Leader of the Year for the UC Awards 2023 event on July 27 – Alan Masarek, CEO of Avaya
Writing Roundup for July – summarized here - it’s a monthly digest of my thought leadership across various channels, including Tech Target, No Jitter, Channel Futures, Contact Center Pipeline and BC Strategies
Media citings – three citations last month – apologies, the link to view these as a group has a glitch, and will have this fixed for next issue – however, citations can be viewed individually at the bottom of the home page on my website
Social media highlights - since these stats change every day, the metrics are just a basic snapshot, but they provide a good sense of reach beyond my blog and newsletter. For my business, I use Twitter and LinkedIn, and here are some approximate tallies for July:
- For LinkedIn – I had 16,720 views and 23 posts – views and activity are well down from June, mainly due to my China trip, where most social media was blocked
- My top LinkedIn post registered 1,570 views, and overall, 4 posts had 1,000+ views, and 10 had 700+ views
- For Twitter – there were 1,918 impressions, 211 profile visits, 25 mentions, 10 tweets and 4 fewer followers – very low numbers - same story as with LinkedIn, plus the overall drop-off in general for anyone using X - nee Twitter – with the new name and crazy rules, I expect that trend will only continue
- My “top tweet” for my writeup about the Avaya ENGAGE event with 441 impressions

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for August

In terms of industry events, just one for August:

Cooperative Technologies Conference and Expo, August 8-9, Myrtle Beach, SC – am speaking on two sessions:
- Future of Work – What’s AI Got to Do with It? – solo presentation
- Let’s Ask ChatGPT! – interactive demo with Generative AI platforms

Active work to keep watch for:

Guest article about the MWC Shanghai event for RCR Wireless
Three case studies in the works for a vendor in the Teams ecosystem
Two guest posts already written, and coming for August – each for different clients
Two more guest posts to be written for August with a leading UCaaS player
Being interviewed on a podcast for a leading cloud provider
New white paper and podcast in the works now for a leading contact center vendor
Mapping out my various speaking roles for the UC Expo event in London this October
Firming up details for two speaking gigs at industry events in the early fall
Two more speaking spots in place now – SCTC annual conference in Raleigh, and the CCTC annual event in Toronto
Early-stage planning for my speaking role for Enterprise Connect 2024
My Future of Work Expo 2024 – next February in Ft. Lauderdale – firming up the agenda now, and then I’ll be reaching out to start lining up my speakers – if interested in speaking on a panel or helping develop a topic for us to explore, please get in touch

Hey, Did You Know?
… Alexander Graham Bell (AGB) remains a giant in the world of technology innovation, and his contributions are still very much with us in 2023. I got first-hand evidence of this over the past few weeks - going from East to West - and you’ll be hard-pressed to come across this many far-flung connections in one place, and I have the photos to prove it. Here you go…

From East to West – first, at Huawei’s HQ in Shenzhen, China. During one of our campus tours, they had a rotating photo gallery of Western scientists and inventors who paved the way for modern communications, including of course, AGB. Now shifting West, during last week’s vacation to Nova Scotia, we did a pilgrimage to the AGB museum in Baddeck, which is a pretty coastal town on Cape Breton Island. This was Bell’s summer home, where he did a lot of great work – and telephony was just one of his many passions. You really need to visit to get a full appreciation of just how much he accomplished, and why I would take his legacy over Edison’s any day – and that’s not an easy thing to say. If you do visit, it’s worth noting that his summer home is still standing – but not on the site of the museum – and he’s buried there as well.

And now for something in between, and two telephony artifacts from that era that could still function very well in 2023. First, a very cool party line phone that was part of the décor at a Victorian-era guest house we stayed at in rural Nova Scotia. If you don’t know what a party line was, then that will be your homework for the next issue, and am happy to talk that over with you any time. Especially notable is how the front panel opens up, where you can see a rotary dial, along with all the mechanicals that made it work – I’ve never seen this variation of a party phone before – wow – was just lucky to stay in a place that was full of stuff like this. Next photo – also from the AGB museum – a vintage switchboard – looks good as new. VoIP and packet switched networks made this obsolete a long time ago, so it’s hard to appreciate now just how much ingenuity went into making phone service nearly universal.