Brian McConnell

Biography

Brian McConnell is an inventor, author, and serial telecom entrepreneur. He has founded three telecom startups since moving to California. The most recent, Open Communication Systems, designs cutting-edge telecom applications based on open standards telephony technology.

Books

Beyond Contact (Hard Cover)
by Brian McConnell
March 2001
Print: $24.95
(3)
(Read Reviews)

Articles

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The Worldwide Lexicon: Adding Collaborative Translation to Your Site
Publish Date: Sep. 28, 2007The Worldwide Lexicon is an open source project that has recently published a suite of collaborative translation tools that enable readers to create, edit and share translations to and from almost any human language. This article explains how you can use WWL to make your site or content accessible in many languages. Why I Stopped Coding and Why I'd Start Again
Publish Date: Jan. 18, 2007What happens when programming stops being fun? What do you do when juggling dependencies and worrying about installation issues takes all of the joy out of writing code for other people? You can stop coding... or you can try to address the underlying problems. Brian McConnell postulates an enhancement of the Python language to make programming as fun as it was in the BASIC-in-ROM minicomputer days. Subspace Networks: Hiding Circuit Switched Networks in a Packet Switched Network
Publish Date: Nov. 14, 2006Brian McConnell describes a trick that he calls "subspace networking," which can be used to embed circuit switched networking within packet switched LAN hardware, while applications are unaware that this is going on behind the scenes. Building Advanced Telecom Apps on a Shoestring
Publish Date: Sep. 12, 2006With the development of open standards telephony, VoIP, and hosted, on-demand computing services, it is finally possible to use a low-cost development track to create next-generation telecom services. For SARS Press 1, for Bird Flu Press 2...
Publish Date: May. 2, 2006One of the key things we can do during a pandemic is to move in-person congregations and meetings online, creating electronic surrogates for daily social activities such as classes, business meetings, and social outings. Brian McConnell examines how organizations can use the latest telecom technology to help keep society functioning and diminish the spread of disease if this kind of a disaster takes place. What Is Asterisk
Publish Date: Sep. 30, 2005Asterisk is an open source PBX (private branch exchange) that provides all the functionality of high-end business telephone systems, and much more. Brian McConnell explains how Asterisk works and where to get it, and provides an overview of its feature set and its platform capabilities. The PBX Is Dead; Long Live VoIP
Publish Date: Jun. 23, 2005The private branch exchange has been the reference standard for business telephone systems for decades, but the technology is on the verge of obsolescence, thanks in large part to open source VoIP technology. Brian McConnell delves into Asterisk, a Linux-based open source softswitch, and why it may herald the end of PBX. Revitalizing the Pay-Per-Call System
Publish Date: Apr. 19, 2005The 900 number, long associated with porn and psychics, is a technology that was ahead of its time. Despite its reputation, pay-per-call service is a proven and practical way to collect micropayments and create a competitive marketplace for information services. Brian McConnell suggests that third-party wireless providers use pay-per-call as a means to build and profit from voice and data services. RSDP: A Really Simple Proposal
Publish Date: Apr. 11, 2005Anybody who has written software knows that communicating with databases is a nettlesome task because of difficulties with installing and configuring them. Brian McConnell proposes a Really Simple Database Protocol (RSDP) that would provide developers with a way to prototype and build database-driven applications that are more independent of back-end systems. Weigh in with your thoughts on his proposal via the Talkback section at the end of the article. Renewable Energy - The Next Opportunity for Silicon Valley
Publish Date: Dec. 10, 2004There are striking parallels between the renewable energy industry today and the personal computing industry circa 1980. Brian McConnell argues that the same basic dynamics that fueled the PC boom in Silicon Valley apply to renewable energy, and this represents an important opportunity, especially as the computing industry matures and becomes a commoditized consumer product business. Hacking Your Way Off The Utility Grid
Publish Date: Dec. 3, 2004Brian McConnell describes how he retrofitted his home to generate its own energy and significantly reduce its energy footprint. Learn how he installed a grid-intertied solar electric system, as well as solar water heating and solar forced air heaters. Collecting E-Commerce Taxes Door-to-Door
Publish Date: Aug. 5, 2004For about a decade, web stores have been exempt from collecting local sales and use taxes for deliveries outside their local jurisdictions. For most web stores, especially those based in sparsely populated states, this amounts to de facto tax-free status when shipping to most of the country. While online stores get a free pass from many taxes, storefront operations are universally expected to collect local taxes at the point of sale. This article discusses one possible solution to the e-commerce taxation problem: simply requiring couriers to collect local taxes at the point of delivery. What if SETI@home Gets Lucky?
Publish Date: Mar. 19, 2003Brian McConnell, author of Beyond Contact, looks at the latest developments in SETI@home and describes what will happen if a meaningful signal is found. Smart Phones: Finally, Computer Integration Is Real
Publish Date: Sep. 19, 2002Instead of tying a computer to a telephone, which was the original vision of computer telephony, the telephone has become a computer. Brian McConnell provides an update on this convergence of technologies and highlights the Treo Communicator that uses the Sprint PCS new voice/data network. Building a Worldwide Lexicon
Publish Date: May. 10, 2002Brian McConnell proposes an open source, peer-to-peer system for making connections among online dictionaries via a SOAP interface.

Blog

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Class R (Revenue) Stock: A New Class of Investment? [GigaOM]

June 18 2009

Balancing the interests of investors and entrepreneurs is an ongoing topic of discussion in Silicon Valley. But while numerous efforts to create new types of investment classes aimed at removing this imbalance (for examples, see the Founders Fund, Adeo Ressi’s The Funded and the newly launched SharesPost) have recently emerged,… read more

An Open Letter To Newspaper Publishers

May 07 2009

Dear Publisher, With so many people predicting your imminent death, you're probably wishing the Grim Reaper would just stop by and get it over with. The good news is that when everyone in the technology business or the financial press... read more

Don’t Call the Gravedigger — Newspapers Aren’t Dead (Yet) [GigaOM]

May 05 2009

Newspapers are struggling, at least in part, because of a basic misunderstanding about advertising: While nobody wants to deal with Whack-A-Mole popup ads, if you create a welcoming marketplace, people will visit, and sellers will happily pay rent (advertise) to be there. Wouldn't it be ironic if a key to… read more

For SARS Press 1.. (How To Host Classes Online When Your School Is Closed)

April 28 2009

This is an update to an article I first posted on Oreilly in 2006. The information has aged substantially since then, and with the recent news about the spread of a new flu strain, I thought it made sense to... read more

Social Translation with Der Mundo (Beta Testers Wanted)

February 25 2009

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about social translation using the Worldwide Lexicon as well as a review of Google's App Engine platform. This week we quietly turned on a general purpose tool for translating any website or... read more

Social Translation : Using the WWL API To Build Multilingual Sites and Web Apps

February 11 2009

Language is one of the few remaining barriers on the Internet. The web has rendered time and distance largely irrelevant, but much of it remains fragmented by language. The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source project I have worked on for... read more

Why I Started Coding Again (Thanks, Guido!)

February 11 2009

This is a follow up article to a piece I wrote in 2007, "Why I Stopped Coding and Why I'd Start Again". I took a several year hiatus from writing code, mostly because I found that I was spending more... read more

Quicknet: What Might Have Been [GigaOM]

February 02 2009

The technology industry is full of alternate histories, tales of what might have been had things unfolded just a bit differently. We all know about Skype, but did you know that the likes of Skype could have emerged a decade sooner, and almost did, thanks to a scrappy little San… read more

Quicknet: What Might Have Been [GigaOM]

February 02 2009

Memo to GM: Drop Dead [Earth2Tech]

November 21 2008

Many of the readers on this site support or invest in cleantech companies, of which green cars are an important component. We’ve all seen the dire predictions about what will happen if the Big Three automakers fold. Millions of people will be thrown out of work, the economy will implode,… read more

My.Gov: How Obama Can Use the Net to Improve Government [GigaOM]

November 13 2008

President-elect Obama promised during his campaign to create a "Google for government." Now that he's on his way to the White House, let's imagine what this might look like, and how such a tool could change the way people relate to those tasked with running our country. The first image this… read more

What Obama’s Text Message Campaign Reveals [GigaOM]

August 25 2008

Barack Obama’s now-famous text-message announcement of his VP pick reveals something about the candidate that should really worry the Republicans. What it reveals is not that he’s a smart technologist. If he was, he would have known that sending 10 million SMS messages at the same time is pretty much… read more

Google Translation Center: The World’s Largest Translation Memory [GigaOM]

August 05 2008

Disclosure: I am the founder of Der Mundo, a multilingual blogging service and translation community that combines human and machine translation (provided in part by Google), and I have researched translation technology for more than 10 years via the Worldwide Lexicon project. Blogoscoped [...] read more

Energy Bonds: A New Financial Market [Earth2Tech]

July 30 2008

One of the most daunting but necessary challenges faced by the U.S. is getting to other side of this energy crisis, both by migrating away from fossil fuel-based energy and building new infrastructure. But this is a challenge that requires billions of dollars, money that has to come from somewhere.… read more

Worldwide Lexicon : Adding Collaborative Translation To Your Site

September 16 2007

The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source project I have led for several years, recently published a suite of collaborative translation tools that enable you or your readers to create, edit and share translations to and from almost any human language.... read more

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