Greetings! Happy tax day to those in the USA - we hope all is well with your business. Speaking of business, I thought I would relay the interesting news<http://www.cnbc.com/id/100637184>about Dish Network making a bid for Sprint. Many here in North America will be keeping a close eye on this one. Whether or not this is just a big mess<http://www.zdnet.com/softbank-sprint-clearwire-dish-figuring-out-this-merger-mess-7000014012/>or an opportunity for Sprint to become a "real" competitor to AT&T and Verizon remains to be seen. Regardless of the outcome, most of us here are hoping for a healthier Sprint so that we can avoid another duopoly. On last week's conference call<http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2013_04_10>we decided to have a preliminary discussion so that we can prepare for this week <http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2013_04_17>. Dave Kompel will be showing us how to build rapidly FreeSWITCH applications in MS Visual Studio 2012 and have those run under mod_managed<http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_managed>. Be sure to consult this document<http://download.drknetworking.com/MeetingPreparation.pdf>so that you can get all the prerequisites installed in time for our call on Wednesday. In other news I would like to let everyone know that I spoke with Kashif Kahn over at Vestec <http://www.vestec.com>. We are gearing up for the automatic speech recognition application building contest. The winners will be announced at ClueCon 2013 <http://www.cluecon.com>. The official contest page will be posted on the ClueCon website shortly. Stay tuned for more information and be ready to start building your ASR applications! The ClueCon 2013 call for speakers recently went out and we've had a number of submissions already. We look forwarding to hearing more talk ideas, so please send those in right away. In the meantime ClueCon registration<http://www.cluecon.com/register/>is now open so be sure to get signed up, and don't forget to book your room at the Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile <http://www.cluecon.com/hotels/>hotel for only $169 per night. Have a great week! -- Michael S Collins ClueCon Team http://www.cluecon.com 877-7-4ACLUE