Next week is the O'Reilly ETel Conference at the San Francisco Marriott. It's a few days I'm really looking forward to. Great sessions with some fabulous presentations, lots of briefings and conversations with people doing really creative and interesting things, and a chance to enjoy some time with friends old and new.

I started out with a pretty light schedule, but it hasn't stayed light at all. I'm sharing it here so anyone who wants to hear about a particular session or get news from any particular company has a chance to drop me a line. And yes, if you represent a company at the conference and want to meet for a briefing, I can still find a bit of time to spare.

Here's my planned schedule:

Monday - Pre-conference
Planning on dinner with Alec Saunders from iotum and John Todd from TalkPlus. We might be joined by our mutual friend Andy Abramson if he's free of other meetings

Tuesday
I'll be meeting with someone from Jaduka (think Trevor Baca); Craig Walker from GrandCentral; and David Beckmeyer from PhoneGnome.

From a session planning view, I plan on going to Communication Overload and Peoples Patches (Stowe Boyd), Design and Prototyping of Telco Network APIs (David Beckmeyer), Blackbag VoIP Security Briefings (Dan York), and I can't miss Launch Pad with Om Malik as the major evening event.

Wednesday
I'm meeting with Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and have at least two other tentative meetings that are still firming up.

It's heavy session day. I'm trying to figure out how to get to The Business of VoIP (Om Malik); Putting the Internet in Your Pocket (Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Nokia); Social Networks Need Social Networks (Ndiata Kalonji, Director of Research, Network Architecture, France Telecom) ; Empowering People and the Coming Identity Layer of Everything - (Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID / Internet Identity Workshop); FreeNum: Phone Numbers are Dead. Long Live the Phone Number! (John Todd, CTO, TalkPlus); and a hot panel discussion -  Telephone 2.0 for Real?

Then in the evening is the ETel fair and a bloggers and friends dinner that has 34 people planning on attending at the moment (expect picture, perhaps video, maybe a round of podcast greetings).

Thursday
I'm meeting with Aron Rosenberg from SightSpeed, and again, have a couple of other meetings that aren't quite confirmed yet.

Thursday sessions include Wake-Up Call to Telcos - Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst, STL; another Black Bag Security Review  - Dan York; Making Video Telephony Work - Aron Rosenberg, Founder and CTO, SightSpeed, Inc.; and The Future of Asterisk - Mark Spencer, President, Digium.

Then there are people I hope to bump into and maybe grab a few minutes with but don't have time scheduled, like: Surj Patel, Jeff Bonforte, Brian McConnell, Stuart Henshall and blogging friends that I've already met and new ones I'm anxious to meet in person. I'm looking forward to meeting Pat Phelan who's coming over from Ireland. I don't know for sure yet if Luca Filegheddu is coming in from Italy, but I sure hope so. It's a chance to chat with a lot of great people and not get enough time with any of them.

There certainly isn't enough to to talk to everyone I'd like to spend time with or make it to every session I want to sit in on. During the week I'll be blogging, posting pictures (at least to my Flickr collection), podcasting and video posting/blogging. That's as best I can around all the other activity. If you've ever tried doing all that at a conference, you know what a challenge that can be.

I'll be around here until Monday, posting and updating, but for most of next week, that's the flurry of activity I have ahead. If I've missed someone you think is really important that I need to make it a point to see, let me know.


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