Thomas McCarthy-Howe has nineteen years of experience in telecommunications product development. He is currently an independent consultant to service providers, enterprises and equipment vendors in the design and development of next generation communications equipment and services.

Thomas has held senior management and engineering positions at industry leaders such as Comverse, Versatel Networks, PictureTel and Aware. As a member of the PictureTel engineering team, Mr. Howe designed audio and video software of the first PC-based video conferencing system, as well as software for the original version of NetMeeting, and as Aware Inc.'s software architect for the first commercially available ADSL chipset. In 2007, Thomas won the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Mashup Contest.

In addition to his writing and teaching, he currently serves on several technical advisory boards and boards of directors.