Dave and Evan meet with Justin Mitchell, Founder and CEO of Yac. 

Sometimes voicemail can convey a message better than text, but voicemail isn't really a conversational tool. The answer is conversational voicemail. 

Yac provides conversational voicemail, and if you don't know what this, listen to this podcast. 

The reason enterprise chat has become so popular (and why email remains so popular) is because people really like async communications. Orlando based Yac brings back to async comms what chat apps leave out - voice. Yac works by itself or can complement apps like Slack. 

We all know that text has its limitations. For example, all caps just isn't the same thing as really shouting -- and sometimes shouting is necessary. Sure you can leave a loud voicemail. That's the message, but it probably won't result with an interactive or conversational experience, 

Put more emphasis on the conversational aspect than the shouting part and you have Yac. It is just in time because distributed teams are all the rage and nothing goes better with rage than all caps - I mean Yac. 

Justin started working in startups at 16.  At 19 he co-founded and launched his first company and 2 years later helped it IPO on the NASDAQ.  He bounces between design, engineering, and marketing  on his breaks from working on 27 patents.

Dave and Evan meet with Martin Taylor, a Co-Founder of Content Guru.

Content Guru is a leader in cloud-delivered customer engagement. Its Storm CCaaS solution is well known in Europe and expanding in North America. That's one of the topics we cover in this podcast. We also get Martin to explain the brands in his life: Redwood Technologies, Content Guru, and Storm.

Martin Taylor has been tinkering with technology since he was a child. “I was writing computer games when I was 10,” he says. He started Content Guru with his brother Sean in 2005, offering contact center technology as a service.

Martin has somehow managed to have one job since 1993. Even though his role, the key products, industry, and brand has changed. Perhaps this is why he's responsible for strategic market development. Actually, he has lots of tiles including  Deputy CEO, Global CMO, and Co-Founder. 

In his spare time Martin is a keen runner, having once been the Berkshire cross country champion and competing, along with Sean, in the English Schools Cross Country Championships.

Dave and Evan meet with Hugo Feiler the CEO and co-founder of Minima. A base layer protocol that brings blockchains to smartphones. 

Minima is the world’s first truly decentralized blockchain protocol that runs in full on mobile phones. Minima has created an ultra-lean blockchain protocol that fits on a mobile or IoT device, allowing every user to run a full constructing and validating node. It creates the possibility of operating a network that is decentralized, scalable, and inclusive, while remaining secure and resilient. A network that guarantees anti-censorship and no overarching authority. 

Prior to launching Minima, Hugo created global advertising campaigns for companies including Vodafone, Toshiba and Sony Electronics. He was previously General Manager of marcomms at Sony Europe for its computer and audio divisions.

It's not all fun and games when the net is down.

Dave and Evan meet with Mo Nezarati, President of Voice at Subspace. 

A funny thing happened to the folks at Subspace when they set out to improve gaming, they discovered how to upgrade the entire internet. Subspace harnesses the power of games to improve real-time apps. 

Latency and other network issues deprive us all from the online experience we deserve and expect. The obvious solution is to build a high performance, global platform that can personalize network performance for our specific situation - that's what Subspace did.  It uses gaming data to fix the performance of real-time applications around the globe. 

Mo is a voice pro. He has technical chops and understands the business side too. His career experience includes 26 years at Esna, a company he co-founded. Esna was acquired by Avaya in 2015, and that's where Mo launched Zang.  That service is now known as Avaya OneCloud Spaces and CPaaS, and are among Avaya's most significant recent launches. He did a short tour at Sangoma after Avaya and landed at Subspace about a year ago. 

Dave and Evan meet with Ray Pasquale,  CEO and Founder of Unified Office. 

Unified Office is a next-generation IT managed services provider focused on the Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) market. Unified Office was built from the ground up focused on delivering business class communications services on the latest mobile devices. We take the latest in communications technologies and make them readily accessible by integrating them into an easy-to-use, scalable, virtualized service that extends from the desktop to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones called Total Connect NowSM. This offering allows people to stay connected to their business, anytime and anywhere, in a hyper connected world of business that operates in real time.

Dave and Evan meet with Brett Shockley,  CEO and Co-Founder of Journey.ai. 

Brett's journey, prior to Journey, included being the CTO role at Avaya. He was responsible for Avaya's mergers, acquisitions, major partnerships, corporate strategy, and emerging products including Avaya Labs. Before Avaya, Brett was the VP & GM Customer Contact Business Unit at Cisco. He has extensive experience with the contact center industry, and is a tireless customer advocate. 

Brett also founded Spanlink Communications and Calabrio. He is also on the board of eGain Corp. and Spok Holdings, Inc.

In addition to holding a patent for a telecommunications device, Shockley has an MBA in Marketing from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology. 

Dave and Evan meet with Darren Schreiber, the co-Founder and CEO of 2600Hz.  With nearly two decades of telecom experience under his belt, Darren’s core focus is on distributed computing and communications technologies. 

His contributions to the open source telecom community are immense, including co-authoring the FreeSWITCH books and mentoring at universities and workshops.  He previously ran a large managed services operation, and he worked at one Bandwidth.com.

You may or may not be familiar with 2600-Hz, but you have very likely heard of its customers. Its technology is used by many well known service providers, carriers, and enterprises. 

In this podcast we learn more about the company, its KAZOO product, and the shifts and trends occurring in communications. 

Dave and Evan host their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.

Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.

Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.

Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as: 

• CTIntegrations https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/ctintegrations/
• 6 Points https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/6-points/
• IMPower https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/impower-solutions/

Dave and Evan meet with Aurangzeb Khan, SVP GN Jabra.

Aurangzeb was co-founder & CEO of Altia Systems which Jabra (GN Netcom) acquired in 2019. Currently,  Aurangzeb is the SVP of Intelligent Vision Systems at Jabra, best known for its Panacast products. The PanaCast products use multiple cameras, or a cam-array to create real-time, immersive video.
 
Earlier, Aurangzeb was President & CEO at Everspin Technologies. He was co-founder, President & CEO at Altius Solutions and, immediately following the merger Simplex Solutions, contributed to the IPO in May 2001. Aurangzeb held senior engineering and general management positions at Cadence, Cirrus Logic, Tandem Computers (now part of HP), and Fairchild. 

In this podcast we ask Aurangzeb multiple questions about cameras (or is it a single question about multiple cameras?), parallax distortion, how to sell a startup for $125 million, and why the world needed a new video cam company. 

Aurangzeb received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University, executive education at the Stanford GSB, a double-major B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.Sc. in Physics and 1 Ingrid Lunden,