About the Authors

Anthony Minessale II is the primary author and founding member of the FreeSWITCH open source softswitch. He has spent almost 20 years working with open source software. In 2001, he spent a great deal of time as an Asterisk developer and authored numerous features and fixes to that project. Anthony started coding a new idea for an open source voice application in 2005. The FreeSWITCH project was officially opened to the public on January 1, 2006. In the years that followed, Anthony has actively maintained and led software development for this project.

Michael S Collins is a telephony and open source software enthusiast. Having worked as a PBX technician for 5 years and the head of IT for a call center for more than 9 years, he is a PBX veteran. He is an active member of the FreeSWITCH community and has coauthored FreeSWITCH Cookbook, by Packt Publishing in 2012. Michael lives in Central California with his wife and two children.

Giovanni Maruzzelli (available at OpenTelecom.IT) is heavily engaged with FreeSWITCH. In it, he wrote interfacing with Skype and cellular phones. He's a consultant in the telecommunication sector, developing software and conducting training courses for FreeSWITCH, SIP, WebRTC, Kamailio, and OpenSIPS.

An Internet technology pioneer, he was the cofounder of Italia Online in 1996. It is the most popular Italian portal and consumer ISP. Also, he was the architect of its Internet technologies (www.italiaonline.it). Then, Giovanni was the supervisor of Internet operations and the architect of the first engine for paid access to ilsole24ore.com, the most read financial newspaper in Italy, and its databases (migrated from the mainframe).

After that, he was the CEO of the venture-capital-funded company Matrice, developing telemail unified messaging and multiple-language phone access to e-mail (text to speech). He was also the CTO of the incubator-funded company Open4, an open source managed applications provider.

For 2 years, Giovanni worked in Serbia as an Internet and telecommunication investment expert for IFC, an arm of The World Bank.

Since 2005, he has been based in Italy and serves ICT and telecommunication companies worldwide.

For my first book, first and foremost I want to thank my late guru, Marco Amante, who taught me to work, to write, "computerism," the most important things in life, as well as their order. Thanks, master!

Also, I want to thank Gisella Genna for her continued, incredible, and precious support and love. Thanks, my beloved!