Jim Van Meggelen is a founding partner of ClearlyCore Inc., a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has nearly thirty years of enterprise telecom experience, and has has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP technologies.

Leif Madsen is an Asterisk consultant living in Toronto, Canada. He has been an avid enthusiast of computer networking since he discovered a 2400 baud modem in his computer at the age of 12, and was soon communicating with his friend Angela over the modem to her Mac, where they would type back and forth to each other.

He then discovered the power of long distance when he was given the phone numbers to several BBS's, some of which were located in Las Vegas (Leif was living in southwestern Ontario, Canada at the time). This foray into the long distance BBS scene soon died approximately a month after upon the arrival of a phone bill.

This however did not stop Leif's passion for the BBS scene. He soon discovered the numbers to several local BBS's, and eventually ran his own. It all started with the Grapevine BBS software, and running a BBS on his parents phone line during the night hours. It was called "Leif at Night" (a takeoff on his name, which is pronounced 'Life'). Leif would then call BBS's during the day, and after several months of this, his loving, always encouraging, and parents of infinite patience gave him his own phone line! The BBS soon became a full-time hobby.

After a break from computers during high school where Leif pursued music, and was eventually given the opportunity to go to Japan to perform in the 22nd annual Japanese High School Music Festival, he had to make a decision for college of which avenue to take.

A discussion with his mom led him to a decision when she said, "You could pursue computers, and make enough money to happily do music as a hobby, or you could potentially struggle as a musician, and not have the ability to do computers as a hobby". It was here that the decision was made to go into computers, as Leif had been using them since grade 2, and thus had a wealth more knowledge and experience in that field than in the music field.

Leif then went to school for telecommunications technology (computer networking and protocol analysis) where he discovered an early version of Asterisk (pre 0.9) after asking around on IRC for some free software that would allow him and his friends to all talk to each other at the same time. This stemmed from their current fascination of being able to speak with each other over MSN messenger while playing video games, but didn't like the restriction of only being able to do point-to-point communication when what they really wanted was a conference server.

The power of Asterisk was awesome, and during his 2nd semester of college, he showed his professor the power of this software, who then immediately had 20 TDM400P cards with 1 FXS and 1 FXO port ordered and sent to the college. Leif then spent the rest of his time at the college using his spare time to work on Asterisk, learn about it, and eventually start "The Asterisk Documentation Assignment", which then became "The Asterisk Documentation Project" after meeting Jared Smith online.

Soon Jim van Meggelen joined the project, and a surprising amount of documentation was then made. O'Reilly Media then became interested in having a book written on Asterisk, and after speaking with Mark Spencer (creator of Asterisk) who recommended us, we put together an outline and proposal for a book, which was eventually accepted.

Leif then worked full-time on the book just after college finished, and after 8 months, the book was ready, and was then released to the public. Since that time, Leif has been working as an Asterisk consultant under his business name of LeifMadsen Enterprises, Inc., and is an active participant in the Asterisk community as the Asterisk Release Manager and primary bug marshal on the Asterisk issue tracker.

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