Here are the TADSummit and TADHack 2025 plans, so you know the big picture.

This post lists the agenda, and links to recorded sessions

Links to Recorded Sessions

Google rejects SMS OTP for QR Codes? I understand the SMS bit, but QR codes?

Kevin Graham, Bohdan Hopanchuck, Noah Rafalko, Johnny, Dennis Kersten (audience), Ahmed Serag (audience). 

From the Trenches, RCS / RBM (RCS Business Messaging)

The presenter is Michael Lamb, President / Co-founder of nativeMsg. Audience includes: Paul Sweeney (potential nativeMSG customer), Mark Hay,  Noah Rafalko, and Johnny Tarone.

Upcoming Sessions

Augnet is ALIVE!

10AM ET, Wednesday March 26th

Daniel Gill, SVP Corporate Strategy at AOT – All in one Telecom! Previously founder and CEO Augnet.

You’ll learn more about what’s happened to Augnet through Mobile World Congress. Their new home no longer needs adoption from the CPaaS industry, rather a category that will shake up the channel centric CPaaS segment, that importantly has full customer knowledge.

• Quantifying the scope and scale of the AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) problem facing the A2P SMS ecosystem today.
• Why in 2025 are we still unable to answer simple SMS governance and certification questions?
• Augnet was created to address the lack of governance in SMS messaging using a vast network of real devices (both SDK in apps and SIM app).
• No certifications in the SMS supply chain mean things like performance measurement are challenging, almost guess work, DLR (Delivery Receipts) can be faked. Hence it’s open to abuse by the industry itself and any bad actor with a little bit of knowledge.
• The bad actors can be a company or an employee within a company, hence the emergence of A2P Revenue Assurance.
• Other industries, e.g. gaming have implemented their version of Augnet. How have they been successful while SMS has not?
• Will RCS change the AIT game?
• Google recently announced its move away from SMS OTP for QR Codes. Stating “rampant, global SMS abuse”. Customers are walking away from SMS, is the messaging industry caught in a monkey trap until its demise?

Simwood’s Potato

10AM ET Wednesday April 2nd

Simon Woodhead, Founder and Group CEO Simwood

Simwood’s Potato needs talking about from the perspective of navigating the future as a carrier in 2025.

When I first came across Simwood’s Potato last year, I thought it was a grand anti-marketing laugh. This post explains it well, the potato is the globally distributed core, no matter where you are in the world, it’s the same stack. That core is wrapped in applications/features (silver foil) like call recording. And skewered with transports like PSTN, WebRTC, SIP. Rather than a nonsense soup of digital, transformation, programable, cloud, and whatever is currently fashionable. Potato works and surprisingly makes sense. Anyway back to Simon’s session.

A bit about Simwood’s history. Simon and his team were there right at the start of VoIP as a software-defined carrier but had to step into the legacy telecom world to get the economics right.

Simwood today is at the end of an industry that risks losing relevance as voice volumes have peaked, at least in major Western markets.

Consumer ‘phone’ use is in decline, the phone is just a conduit for robocalls for many, and generationally many don’t see the point of it.

The voice medium has moved over the top to WhatsApp. How is Simwood still growing without indulging in the dirty tricks employed by some of the bigger operators or indulging in vanity projects – pretending to be global with no infrastructure, no-GAAP accounts, and self-proclaiming being CPaaS.

The answer: The Potato! Simwood grew EBITDA 40% last year and are contributing to other operators stripping out cost while improving their feature set and relevance. Not exciting from a Startup perspective, but revolutionary in the carrier world.

Voice AI status update

11AM ET Wednesday April 9th

Lyle Pratt, Vida.io Founder & CEO

Rob Pickering, Internet and Real Time Communication Software Expert, Innovator, Advisor, Investor.

With 2 of my favorite voice AI experts / innovators, a discussion on the state of the art from expert practitioners. We’ll hear later in the year on their product developments. After all the marcom from a bunch of conferences over the past few months, this is the dose of salts you need to clear away all the BS congestion blues.

Voice AI continues to move at a rapid pace, enabling small technology led organizations to move fast, break things, and deliver innovations first. I’m sure you’ve seen how Agentic AI means less and less. It’s just another fashionable marcom term, often lumped together with gen AI.

Rob and Lyle both possess extensive voice / voice AI experience with deployed services. And as engineers they play with the new tools enabling valuable insights. Think of this session as a dose of reality, not attempting to be 100% correct, rather a little more opinion based, that is ‘in my experience’.

Discussion topics (very rough, more to be added soon)

• Model Status: Open AI, Deepseek, etc.
• Speech to speech: pricing issues, compute, is the pendulum swinging back to TTS?
• GraphRAG and hallucinations
• AI voice cloning lawsuits
• Voice AI use cases and business cases

Completed Sessions

Google rejects SMS OTP for QR Codes? I understand the SMS bit, but QR codes?

10AM ET, Wednesday March 12th

Aaron Birnbaum, Bohdan Hopanchuck, Noah Rafalko

• Why has SMS OTP hung around for so long, given its depreciation by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2016?
• The latest NIST update on Digital Identity Guidelines includes: relaxation of password complexity, continuous authentication, biometric authentication, and lifecycle management.
• Now Google shares plans it will drop SMS OTP for QR codes to reduce the impact of “rampant, global SMS abuse”. Yep, AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) and inflated international A2P charges.
• QR Codes?!? The Verge article claims, “Once the change has been implemented, instead of verifying phone numbers by sending a six-digit code, a QR code will be presented that users can scan using the camera app on their smartphones. It will eliminate the risk of users being tricked into sharing codes since they no longer exist, and it takes security risks introduced by phone carriers, including unwanted SIM swapping, out of the equation entirely.”
• BUT QR fraud is real and growing fast. We’ll review the state of play in QR fraud. And whether you too should copy Google’s lead into QR codes, away from SMS. Given the current lack of details, a rumor is it’s something to do with RCS, we’ll make some WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses) as well as informed deduction based on market experience.

From the Trenches, RCS / RBM (Rich Business Messaging)

10AM ET, Wednesday March 19th

Michael Lamb, nativeMsg

Michael is new to TADS, so a little background. He has 20+ years in mobile messaging, Michael has co-founded and led two companies, driving innovation (multiple RCS Business Messaging patents).

As President and Co-founder of nativeMsg, his focus is revolutionizing communication through seamless, personalized messaging interfaces.

His solutions simplify the creation, hosting, and connectivity required to enable RBM globally. Whether you want to extend your e-commerce store or integrate your existing AI into this new channel, nativeMsg have the no-code and API solution to make it easy.

He’s passionate about advancing business messaging. Striving to make it more accessible, convenient, and engaging, shaping the future of digital interaction.

Bottom-line: Michael is working in the trenches, not the marketing department, so is perfect for TADS.

• RCS on the Global Stage: The Current Landscape. A snapshot of how RCS is being adopted worldwide—who’s leading the charge.
• Burying the MMS vs. RCS Debate (Once and for All). RCS is light-years ahead of MMS. But for those who still need convincing, we’ll briefly cover why it’s the clear winner.
• The Many Faces of RCS Communication. A deep dive into the different types of RCS interactions—how businesses are using rich, interactive messaging to engage customers.
• Global Deployments & Lessons Learned. Real-world insights from successful RCS rollouts worldwide. Being an honest advisor earns trust.
• Show, Don’t Tell: Live Demos of What’s Possible. Experience how companies can use RCS to engage, convert, and delight customers.
• IP Messaging Success: The Do’s and Don’ts
• A roadmap for success in IP messaging—best practices to embrace, pitfalls to avoid, and how to make the most of RCS.