Wohoo! (WEF Weblog)

Singapore is the world’s top economy in exploiting global IT developments, according to the world Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2004-2005. The US ceded its top spot and dropped to fifth place, while the Nordic countries continued their impressive track record. Asia performed extremely well this year, as did Estonia, South Africa and Israel in their respective regions.

Also reported on Forbes :-)

APEET Press Release:

Singapore, Mar 4, 2005 – Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team (APEET) announced the successful conclusion of the APEET ENUM/SIP Live Trial at APRICOT 2005.

The Live Trial conducted by APEET involves loaning Wifi SIP phones, sponsored by Hitachi-cable, preconfigured with an ENUM number and SIP account. Participants in the Live Trial was able to use the Wifi SIP phones to make free unlimited calls to each other and also PSTN calls to the Beijing, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan and United States supported by Jeff Pulver/LibreTel (US), Jakob Schlyter (SE), APRICOT 2005 NOC team and members of APEET.

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Was scanning through some of my old comments and thought this conversation with Mark Mueller is interesting enough to be reposted.

James,

Would be interesting to hear your view on ICANN’s intention to charge a per domain fee of $1 in the “.net” space? I believe they will not only start charging in the “.net” space, but also from new sTLDs. With all what is going on, it seems to me as the IAB (together with the IETF) will be next by charging a fee for each ENUM domain in “e164.arpa”. I don’t know who pays RIPE NCC’s expenses these days, but as we know we do not live in a “for-free” world… ;-)

Regards,

Mark

I think it is inevitable that some part of the money collected will flow back to ICANN – be it a per domain name fee or something else.

For example, With a total expenses nearly 9M, ICANN must somehow have enough revenue. As indicated in the previous budget, it was proposed that the registries & registrars to pick up 8M of the tag but where does it comes ultimately comes from?
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This was posted to GA (General Assembly) mailing list by Danny Young:

I would like to begin by thanking Thomas Roessler and Esther Dyson for their service on the At-Large Advisory Committee and applaud their decision to resign in order to better pursue other endeavors.  I now call upon the remaining members of the At-Large Advisory Committee to tender their resignations. 

This is a vote of no confidence.  I believe that I speak for the At-Large community when I say that your service is no longer desired.  

The At-Large respects the concept of transparency; you do not.  No minutes of any of your meetings have ever been posted. No MP3 recordings of any of your teleconferences have ever been provided.  No record of any committee vote has ever been published.  At a time when the world expects the entities responsible for the management of the domain name system to be transparent, you have chosen to operate in secret.  It would be honorable for you to resign.

I have several discussion with At-Large committee members, at ICANN meetings, over emails, and also at the recent APRICOT.

I asked them what values they bring to ICANN beside signing up regional organizations which have little to do with ICANN charter, they provide no answer.

I told them that they are heading the wrong direction but none think so.

I offer to help them to use tools to facilitate online discussion, no response.

I have given up trying to change the current committee members. Hence, I fully endorse this letter (Thanks Danny) and call for all the existing At-Large committee members to resign.

Reported on Nikkeibp (Sorry, Japanese only):

アジア太平洋地区におけるENUMの普及団体APEET（Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team）が，国内初となる公開通話デモンストレーションを実施している。2月21日から25日にかけて京都で開催中のインターネット基盤技術のアジア太平洋国際会議「APRICOT2005」の会場内で，参加者同士が自由に体験できる。実験の責任者である日本レジストリサービス（JPRS） 技術研究部の米谷嘉朗部長代理によると，「ENUMの実験を国内で一般公開するのは初めて」だという。

(my bad translation: APEET conducted the first telephony trial in Japan. Participants at APRICOT 2005 can experience the new technology and make calls freely among themselves from 21st to 25th. Yoneya-san @ JPRS “This is the first public ENUM trial in Japan.”)

The surprisingly part is how fast this made onto the news. Hotta-san and Yoneya-san sat down with the reporters at 5:30pm after the Internet Telephony track and we saw the report at 9:00pm.

Couldn’t sleep and woke up at 6am. Went downstair to do my emails, met Toru Takahashi and went breakfast with him. Found out from him that one of his company is going IPO…again. To be exact, third time now. Remember, the last time I met him in Korea a year ago, same thing happened. Dunno it is me or what but congz to him :-)

Then spend the whole day chairing the Internet Telephony track at APRICOT. Richard already blogged about it so I won’t repeat here.

Went to lunch with Dave Crocker who is trying to explain CSV (smtp authentication and accreditation) idea to me on antispam. Neat idea.

The highlight of the day must be APEET dinner. JPRS managed to find a very nice Japanese restaurant – a bit out of the way but great ambience, excellent Japanese food. Most of all, all of us enjoyed ourselves; I lost track how much I drank but I think I managed to make it back to the hotel on foot…

[In case it is still not obvious, all my travel entries are really for my wife (and my boss) who wants to know what I have been up to.]

Started early and have breakfast with Marc Blanchet, the former co-chair of IDN WG with me. Anyway, Marc is back doing IPv6 and his small startup in Canada is doing great – expanding their business in Asia.

The spend most of the day at the APRICOT AC meeting, listening to the various presentation from the bidders of APRICOT 2007. All of them are interesting and it is a difficult decision (no leak here, of cos).

Then I went over to the APDIP Internet Governance; I hope I didn’t say anything stupid or gets into trouble for what I said. I suppose it is always a possibility and someone somewhere isn’t happy with what I say.

Immediately, after the APDIP panel, I have to rush to the APEET BoF. The trial we were doing got so much interests that many people have been asking us to do a BoF to talk about how we did it, how it works, what else can they do with the phones and the ENUM service we provide.

Following the APEET BoF is the Internationalized Email BoF – The meeting run all the way into the night and we finally end at 9pm…

Have breakfast at Suguru Yamaguchi. I know him when he is still a “young” professor many years ago but now, he is the IT Security Advisor to the Japan Cabinet and Prime Minister. Wow very important person now! Anyway, have a little discussion with him on privacy and asked him to hook up with Joi.

Gave out SIP phones in the morning and wandering excitably around the hall talking to people about their phones. In fact, we run out of phones by noon time, and APRICOT haven’t even started. Another great news is we got US (thanks Jeff and Libretel) and SE (thanks to Jakob) gateway up in addition to CN, TW and SG. We got so much interest that we going to do an impromptu BoF tomorrow.

Got Joi to speak about blogging at APNG (phew, wiggled out of that :-) and really enjoy his talk!

Banged into Steve Crocker and have lunch with him. Then Toru Takahashi, Randy Bush and Geoff Hutson joined us. While Steve is showing me his file collobration tool, Randy is knocking me to get the SIP phone working with his Asterisk.

Just finish listening to Jun Murai keynote and sitting at APNG to get a bit of peace and quiet…Need to spend the next few hours doing my keynote on Thrusday on VoIP.

Oh yea, the famous Bert was spotted in APRICOT. But I think he spent too much time in the toilet. ha ha!

This is an exciting day for me. We are giving out Hitachi WiFi SIP Phones at APRICOT 2005. This is part of the APEET ENUM/SIP Live Trial we have been putting together for the last few months. Every wifi phones are assigned with a SIP address which also comes with an ENUM¹ number and this allows APRICOT delegates to call each another. Additionally, we also put up PSTN gateways in China, Taiwan and Singapore (US pending) so these phones can also be used to call back to PSTN phones in these countries (free of cos).

We also pre-registered every APRICOT delegates with a SIP account and ENUM numbers which they can used with their softphones with instructions on how to set it up. There is also an ENUM registration system where they could use it to configure the ENUM to associate it with their webpage, emails etc etc. ENUM client is also provided, of cos.

This is so cool to see people queuing up and asking questions about their new phones. It is also fun to see people excitingly calling each another as if they never made a phone call in their life. Most are just impressed that it just works! (out of the box, battery included ;-)

There is also a booth setup where we explained to people how we setup the system and we have some SIP phones on display. Particularly of interest is this phone from Panasonic which comes with ENUM resolution built-in!

Thanks to APEET members who are still hard at work yesterday trying to get things setup. Keep your fingers cross and I hope we survive this week :-)

¹ Technically, it isn’t ENUM because we are not using e164.arpa. The numbers we gave out is assigned from apenum.org, ie. 8.8.8.apenum.org.

² Disclosal: I am the chair for APEET. But we are not-for-profit and doing this really to promote awareness of the technology (beside the learning experience). In fact, we did the whole thing with zero budget, thanks to all the sponsors :-)