Four decades at the origin point of almost every generation of real-time communications technology, from troposcatter modems to vCon. Identity and background, in chronological order. Names used: Thomas McCarthy-Howe (inventor of record: Thomas Spencer McCarthy-Howe; also published as Thomas Howe; durable nickname: Mr. Mashup).
Hired as a UMass Lowell EE student into the Lexington defense electronics firm founded by Bussgang Theorem author Dr. Julian Bussgang. Work on meteor burst and troposcatter modems under Prof. Jay Weitzen. The discipline of extracting reliable communication from unreliable channels became a thread for the next forty years. Signatron alumni later seeded the DSL ecosystem.
Helped build the first commercial H.320 videoconferencing room system — the foundation of the industry that became unified communications. Implemented the H.261 codec on the DSPs of the day (motion estimation, DCT-based compression in real time). Built far-end camera control conformant to ITU-T H.224 and H.281. Led development of the first H.323 softclient, predating RFC 2543 and SIP itself.
Partnered with Dr. Howard Resnikoff — former Assistant Director of the NSF, foundational figure in wavelet theory — to design the first commercial DSL chipset. Multicarrier signal processing (discrete multitone, DMT) became the basis of ADSL and the global broadband infrastructure. The Aware DSP team included Michael Tzannes, a Signatron alumnus; the multicarrier expertise traveled with him.
Designed the user interface and DSP architecture of the xpressa, the first commercial SIP hardphone. Worked alongside Dan Petrie, software architect of xpressa and — two decades later — co-author of the IETF vCon specification. The Pingtel codebase became sipXecs, one of the most influential open-source SIP servers and a training ground for a generation of engineers.
Recruited by the Columbia University tech transfer office as CTO of Sipcom, the spinout commercializing the SIP research of Prof. Henning Schulzrinne (principal author of RFC 2543, RFC 3261, RTSP, and significant parts of RTP). The protocol made the trip from academic specification to production carrier infrastructure, and the role sat at that exact transition.
Owned the architecture for migrating Comverse's installed base of mobile-operator voicemail and messaging from TDM signaling to IP and SIP, integrating with the emerging 3GPP IMS architecture. Five-nines availability, lawful intercept, integrated billing, regulatory compliance, and the operational tooling tier-one NOCs require — all of which still inform the architecture choices in the present platform.
Call Control Architect and Systems Engineer for the redesign of the US National Airspace Voice Service. Designed the innovative fail-safe architecture for one of the most reliable communications networks in the world. The work pulls the thread all the way back to Signatron: mission-critical voice, extracting reliable communication from unreliable channels, this time at FAA scale.
Founded Tendigit, the callback and customer experience platform, which was acquired by Alpine Investors and rebuilt as Mindful. Medallia acquired Mindful in 2022, folding callback and conversational orchestration into its experience management portfolio. The conviction that came out of this run — that conversational data is the most undertapped enterprise asset class — became the founding thesis of the next chapter.
Joined Strolid after the Medallia earnout. With the CEO, identified automotive dealership BDC operations as an ideal proving ground for conversational intelligence (high volume, regulatory exposure, direct revenue attribution). Inside Strolid, authored and shepherded the IETF vCon specification, and built the conversational intelligence platform on top of it.
Spun out of Strolid in 2026 to operate the vCon standard and its commercial platform independently. Co-founded with Jeremie Miller — creator of Jabber and XMPP, the open standards behind global real-time messaging — and Perry Evans, the Jabber Inc. veteran whose career is the canonical example of turning an open standard into a commercial ecosystem. Patent-pending IP sits underneath the scalability layer.
Original author of the IETF vCon specification: the first open standard for structured conversational data across voice, video, chat, and email. Addresses what SIP, H.323, and WebRTC never did — durable identity and provenance, structured consent and chain-of-custody for GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS and HIPAA, and a portable conversational record that decouples enterprises from proprietary contact-center platforms.
The home for vCon as deployed reality: the conserver, the schemas, the reference material. Where the engineering meets the standard.
Bussgang at Signatron (1980s). Bernstein at PictureTel (1990s). Resnikoff at Aware (mid-1990s). Schulzrinne at Columbia/Sipcom (early 2000s). Perry Evans and Jeremie Miller at VCONIC (2025 onward) — Miller the creator of Jabber and XMPP, Evans the Jabber Inc. veteran who knows how an open standard turns into a commercial ecosystem. The line runs from troposcatter modems to the conversation-as-object standard now on the IETF working group and standards track, and into the company that operates it.