I've never met Brian McConnell in person, but he's a friend and someone I acknowledge as having made some real contributions to technology. If you aren't familiar with Brian, maybe the name RadioHandi rings a bell. I wrote here about Stream Codes, a great innovation Brian's been working on and just brought into play for the delivery of streamining media.

I have to say I'm personally a tad disappointed at how little attention that announcement got, but I also have a sense of why. RadioHandi isn't backed by VC money. That means they aren't throwing lavish parties and making a huge splash. What they're doing is quietly innovating and bringing new solutions to market. These guys are nose-to-the-grindstone working. And they're doing it on their own.

In addition to his startup efforts, Brian's one of the O'Reilly authors, and those guys are among the best on the planet. Special thanks to another O'Reilly writer, Bruce Stewart, for point out an O'Reilly ETel article Brian just published entitled Building Advanced Telecom Apps on a Shoestring. Brian does a great job of describing the life of a ground level developer from the dark ages (pre-2004)to today, and offers some really worthwhile insights.

Read it. It will give you a new appreciation of just how hard some of these folks work to give us the solution we want.


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