The eComm conference ended yesterday and it was a whirlwind of information transfer. As per conference founder, Lee Dryburgh, it was “five days of presentations in three.” It was a very wide ranging discussion and very successful. He is to be commended for creating and leading such a quality event.

A key to the vibrancy of this conference is the carefully crafted mix of topics: innovative technology (our focus), innovative business models, new product introductions, scientific research, social research, government policy, spectrum management, and always in the mix—the future of communications.

A few interesting presentations and facts:

• We discussed spectrum allocation a lot. I was interested to learn that much of the allocated spectrum is going unused. The FCC doesn’t have any power to make sure that the spectrum as allocated and sold is actually used. And it turns out that even if an allocation is being used, it is being utilized at a very low percentage of its capacity. Everywhere.
• The founder of Smule, Ge Wang, spoke. Smule delivers the iPhone applications “Ocarina” and “Sonic Lighter” (among others). He gave a fascinating talk covering all of his work in music at Princeton and Harvard (he is currently an assistant professor of music at Stanford.) While all the electronic music stuff was very cool, I was struck by the depth of the operational models that the Smule applications entail. There is the application itself (play music, or light the lighter); but much more: upload when and where the ocarina is being played, share the live music with anyone or everyone else, view a global map of everywhere someone is playing an ocarina right now, score music for the ocarina and publish it in a social network. It enables other kinds of creative sparks to fly: one Sonic Lighter user traced out “Hi” on the global map  by walking certain blocks in his Los Angeles neighborhood. (See additional Sonic Lighter note below.)
• Weird resurfacing theme: wireless microphones. Turns out that wireless microphones are unlicensed but use licensed spectrum. It came up as a topic, or joke, in 5 or 6 different talks. We were using them extensively in the room all day.
• The breadth of voice applications was impressive. Communication enabled business processes (CEBP) was a broad theme, much more so than user focused communication tools. Even Skype’s announcement was of a new codec, SILK, and not their upcoming release. One vendor joke that they were actually “planning to make money,” which seems to be a really good reason to focus on solid business cases.
• There were a lot of vendor announcements (SILK from Skype; Voxeo with a new IVR platform release, etc.), but RebelVox was the one vendor who was totally new to the scene. No one knew who we were coming in, so our presentation was a bit of a surprise.

Most of the presentations can be found here. Videos of the event will probably come soon.

Note: In playing with my Smule Sonic Lighter, I discovered that I couldn’t blow it out. “Emphesyma,” someone suggested. But no, it would not work. Finally I accidentally discovered that there was a user preference setting: “Wind Input”. And mine was set to “off”. This software application has an input affordance which is wind.