Paul Witty Application 2014

= About me = I started work straight from university in a 60ish person startup called Codian back in 2006, who were bought in 2007 by a Norwegian videoconferencing company, Tandberg (2,000 people), who themselves were acquired by Cisco (60,000) in 2010. At the start of 2012 I left Cisco to be one of the founders of Acano, a startup doing unified communications based around SIP/Lync and XMPP.

During this time I've largely been a C/C++ programmer, with a few more experimental projects (e.g. looking at packet loss resilience in video systems, blue sky thinking of different ways unified communications might work). I spent a short time at Cisco working on CLUE within the IETF, as well as keeping an eye on WebRTC (though not participating), but ran out of time to work in standards groups when in the frantic getting-a-product-out-the-door phase of being in a startup. Hopefully we're past that now...

= XMPP work = I weighed in a bit on the Jingle XEPs back when they were first being developed, attending the Brussels summits in 2009/2010. After that I ended up on non-XMPP projects for a few years, until joining my current startup in 2012, where I've been the main XMPP guy, implementing an XMPP stack for clients & components, and working out clever (and not-so-clever) ways to use XMPP to solve a lot of the problems and limitations faced by traditional videoconferencing systems (the answer is usually pubsub). I'm hoping to eventually get to write a lot of what we've done up as a proper specification.

Recently I've been taking an interest in mobile clients, and trying to solve some of the problems encountered with these. I attended the Brussels summit this year to talk about these, as well as any other interesting points of discussion.

= Contact = Email/XMPP: paul.witty@acano.com

XMPP: paulwitty@jabber.org (the acano.com tends to be a less reliable way to contact me, because it's usually used for development work and so does lots of crazy things)

Company: Acano