Cloud telephony for Gujarat

નમસ્તે ગુજરાત

Well, after almost two years, KooKoo enters Gujarat. We formally entered Gujarat on May 1st. I still don't understand why we took so long to enter Gujarat. Well, that mistake has now been corrected and we are now in Gujarat and all our services are live, including our cloud PBX product BizPhone and our cloud call center product Cloudagent

Gujarat is certainly the land of business men and all the servers we deployed are running at full occupancy in record time. We had to add more servers within two days and now we have more capacity and ready to service more businesses.

A map of the KooKoo service locations in India is given below. The states marked in violet will be live in a couple of months.

So businesses in Gujarat, if you are looking for cloud based call centers, please sign up for Cloudagent. If you want a cloud PBX system for your office to manage your extensions, sign up for BizPhone. and finally, if you want to develop innovative telecom applications and value added services(VAS), sign up for a free developer account in KooKoo and choose a 079 number for your business.

Social media footprint for callers

Update: Try it out at http://kookoo.in/customers/social/search.html. Will be public for a couple of days.

This is the age of social media. Almost everyone has a web presence. In this blog post, we will look at how we are trying to provide contextual information about callers.

KooKoo is the dominant cloud telephony platform in India. We are now expanding our horizons and looking at building the next generation unified communication framework. We have already integrated fax and email. It is now time to integrate social media.

We have started providing this social media in our products Cloudagent and BizPhone. Below we will demonstrate on how we have integrated with Bizphone.

Once you login to your BizPhone account, you can sync your Google contacts by clicking on the Google icon on the dashboard. This feature has been available from the beginning. Now, we have added a new social footprint icon for each contact as shown below:

Just click on the social footprint icon and KooKoo will do the rest. It will find the public details of the contact in different social networks and present it to you in an easy to view format. Now you can view the details of the person you are interacting with as shown below:

This is a paid feature and we are providing this currently only to our existing customers of Bizphone. If you are interested, you can reach out to sales@ozonetel.com

Disclaimer: We get the information based on email and phone number from the public web. Not all contacts may be socially active and hence not all queries may provide rich details.

Create Dashboard for your calls using Geckoboard

Geckoboard is a nifty little service which allows you to create dashboards for your data in a jiffy and host them. Basically, it takes care of the view layer for your data.

When I heard of the service, I thought I would take this for a spin and maybe create a dashboard for the KooKoo calls.

I was actually pleasantly surprised at the speed with which I was able to setup a dashboard and start pushing my data and start monitoring the calls.

I created a simple feedback IVR which takes feedback from callers and pushes data to the Geckoboard. In half an hour I was able to a real time feedback monitoring system which looks like the below screen

This just took some 20 lines of code and 4 curl requests(one for each widget) to get started. If you are interested in creating a similar dashboard you can mail us at support@kookoo.in and we will be glad to help you set it up.

If you want to try on your own, the following are the steps:

1. Sign up for a demo account. The trial expires after one month and after that you have to pay a minimum of $19. I thought this was a little steep, would have gone for $9.99 :), but given that he view layer is completely taken care of, it was good with the speed with which I was able to get started.

2. Choose your widgets and drag and drop and create your dashboards.

3. Note down the API endpoints for each widget.

4. Create your curl requests for each widget and keep them ready. For the above board, I used the following requests:

curl -X POST  https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/29943-da706dad-a01f-441c-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -d '{"api_key":"bb21fc6c6266XXXXXXXXXXXXXX","data":{"item":[{"value": 132,"text": "Did not like Service"},{"value": 13,"text": "Service was ok"},{"value": 3,"text": "Loved the service"}]}}'

curl -X POST  https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/29943-01e143bc-2876-XXXXXXXXXXXX -d '{"api_key":"bb21fc6c6266XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX","data":{"item":[{"text":"Votes Today","value":5733},{"text":"Votes Yesterday","value":4118}]}}'


curl -X POST  https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/29943-2fc46c80-29d2-XXXXXXXXXXXXX -d '{"api_key":"bb21fc6c6266XXXXXXXXX","data":{"item":"23","max" : { "text" : "Max value","value" : "30"},"min" : { "text" : "Min value","value" : "10"}}}'


5. Start receiving the data, for example, from KooKoo calls. At the end of the call, update the data points and push them to your Geckoboard and it will update in real time.

They also have a host of ready made widgets for a lot of services like Google Analytics, Highraise, Mailchimp, Twitter etc using which you can create multiple dashboards for all your data.

Note: I have used some dummy data for the Geckoboard above.

Taking Cloud telephony main stream in India

When we first launched KooKoo at Unpluggd, there were no cloud telephony companies in India. We knew that it would be an uphill battle as we would have to almost create a market. But we believed in the potential as the business communication market was untapped in India. We believed that cloud telephony could close that gap by providing easy to use tools for businesses to build their own communication channels. But we knew that business communications cannot be uniform. Each business would have their own need. Some would need innovative ways of reaching their customers(like missed calls), some would need a PBX kind of systems for their offices and some would need full featured call centers. So we decided to do both a platform play as well as a product play to provide communication solutions to businesses.

Platform:
We started off with a platform approach with KooKoo. We wanted to show the world what can be done. Innovation followed. Companies built new communication channels. Revenue started coming in. Very soon, KooKoo was powering the telephony channel for major companies. They were developing telephony applications with the same alacrity as developing web applications.

Products:

After the success of KooKoo, we decided to try our hand at a product play. We built two very specific business communication products, one for the PBX/EAPBX market and one for the call center market.

BizPhone pushed the PBX to the cloud. All the functionality of a PBX was now available for businesses on the cloud. They could visit the BizPhone website, sign up online, choose a phone number for their business and start receiving calls. BizPhone integrated email and became a unified communication product and was the first to introduce innovative communication tools like and Android app to provide caller detail pop ups, integration with Google analytics etc.

Cloudagent redefined what can be done with a call center on the cloud. This has truly replaced full fledged on premise call centers. Over 20 verticals have adopted Cloudagent and in some verticals it has even become a monopoly. Majority of food ordering, cab booking, online grocery shopping and bus ticket booking happens over  Cloudagent. Cloudagent has also become a standard for Ecommerce businesses to run their call center operations.

So, with this 3 pronged strategy, Ozonetel has been able to take cloud telephony main stream. More innovations are on the roadmap. Watch this space to be amazed :)

Photo courtesy: http://www.veganmainstream.com/taking-it-mainstream-commiting-to-activism-in-2011

The MakeSense Story-Gets Acquihired by Naukri

Almost two years back, when we had launched the KooKoo platform, we were evangelizing the platform waiting for some innovative company to come along and build cool telephony apps. The real power of a platform is realized only through awesome developers.

It was at this time that we got a mail Vivek Arya from Makesense to our support mail id(support@kookoo.in). He was asking some questions about whether KooKoo can do this and KooKoo can do that. So, to answer his questions, I got on a call and heard about his application. I just loved it the first time I heard about it. They had developed algorithms for semantic search using NLP and wanted to add a phone channel to automate the candidate screening process on an IVR. I said, go ahead and we will try to help you in whatever way we can. Incidentally, after the call with Vivek, I had remarked to my colleagues that very soon Makesense would be a prime candidate for acquisition by Naukri. Who knew that it would be so prophetic :) 

Last month we got the wonderful news that Makesense was acquired by Naukri. I reached out to Vivek to get some comments from him about his journey. I am posting his answers below. It has been a real pleasure working with the Makesense team and I hope they go on to build more innovative stuff.


1. Can you explain a little bit about your semantic search technology and how it can be useful?

This is explained in a summary form on our webpage: http://makesense.in/technologies

2. What was your team size?

Our business went through various pivots so the team saw changes as well. On an average we were a team of around 5 - 6 people.

3. How long did it take for you to build this?

We spent the first year doing hands-on placement consulting to get a deep understanding of the current process and technology. This was the time when we started conceptualizing our product. Subsequently it took us around 3 years to build the entire tech though we kept releasing it in parts to test the impact. This we did via our placement services business where we deployed the technology as well as via clients who we signed on for our alpha and beta.

 

4. What specifically interested Naukri?

The quality of our semantic search platform and the ability it provided to be able to increase the efficiency as well as user experience for recruiters and job seekers is what interested them most.

 

 5. Any advice to people starting up

Every startup has its own journey and set of learnings. These are obviously not applicable for everyone. In our case if we look back and reflect, the ones that come to mind are:

Know the problem you are solving thoroughly, if possible experience it firsthand.

Question every assumption in your business plan, it's very easy to get carried away by your ideas and ignore the ugly parts.

If it's clear that a particular path is not working, pivot quickly, don't stay stuck.

Keep your team as small as possible.

Have at least one hacker-founder (This only applies to tech companies of-course).

 6. How are you going to spend your money :)

Mostly on investments. A little on parties. And some on trips with friends & family :)

 

7. How did you like to work with KooKoo?

We found the KooKoo team to be really supportive of startups. We can recall the number of times you provided us great prices when we were in tight financial situations. In terms of the technology as well as tech-support I'd say you guys rank out there with the best :) We don't recall it taking more than a few hours to resolve issues or even setup custom features. Plus the fact that you guys were always accessible over call was a great advantage as well.

Comment: Yes, I remember the requests :) We had to do a couple of night outs to make sure the deadlines were met.

 

8. Would you recommend KooKoo to other developers

Absolutely. For us, integration with KooKoo was a breeze. The documentation was nice and the entire API structure very intuitive. I code in python and combined with the KooKoo wrappers, we could churn out major features in a matter of hours.

 

9. What next.

Right now the focus is on integrating our technology across all parts of Naukri.com. We had a vision of how we could change recruitment and with the availability of the resources of Naukri, that vision is close to realization.

 

Apigee Hackathon-Couple of KooKoo apps developed

Last week, we were privileged to be associated with the Hackathon organized by Apigee in their offices in Bangalore.

It was a very well organized event and we had a lot of fun. The good part of the event was that Apigee asked the hackers to use at least one API developed by an Indian company. KooKoo, Redbus, Zomato, Cleartrip and Data Weave exposed their APIs and the developers used those APIs to build some innovative stuff for the weekend. This was a good way to promote local APIs and we are thankful for Apigee for providing us the opportunity.

After the event we reached out to a couple of developers and asked for their feedback. We are posting the responses below. Hope they go on and build more innovative stuff.

1. Febin John James

I find kookoo very simple to use.I am a student and i don't have much experience. But i could integrate kookoo with my app very easily. The time i worked to integrate KooKoo with my app is very very less compared to other API's.

My hack was SmartChat. SmartChat provides user a natural interface. Which makes the user love to use it. It is a intelligent system which can take input from the user in a natural way and perform tasks or return information which the user requires. Ex: I can ask the system "Call Jacob and say "Hi"". The smartchatsystem does the job. This provides a chat interface where the user can input the task he want to be completed or the information he need to know . As This is a web app it can be used anywhere . It can be an Ipad,PC,Smart-Phone,Phone,Tablet Anything.. The data is stored online and user need not worry about that too. The user can get service from multiple providers at one place

The SmartChat System Can Provide Following Functionalities 

                  All these are inputted by a natual language.

•    Call people and say specific messages to them . Ex: "Call Jacob and say "Hi" .
•    Store contacts into web service and acess them on any device Ex: "Contact of febin is 9986819581" .
•    To Find Bus Trips from a source to destination and information about its locality,seats,depart timeor furtherly booking it up .Ex: " Trips from bangalore to hyderabad on 2013-03-06"
•    Specific Information Price of Cars,Bikes etc in particular locality Ex: " Price For Car Maruti In Bangalore"
•    Best Price For A particular book or device or anything  Ex: " Best Price For Nokia 5233"
•    Alternative for a software platform or a webservice etc  Ex: " Alternative to PHP"

Follow me on Twitter @heyfebin

2. Ritwik Saikia

It was really easy and fast to develop in KooKoo. Even conceptually. Products with great possibilities can be developed.

My hack was 

on(Social}.{io} - Automate your social life.

It follows a very simple programming paradigm.

on(Social) . {

io

}

"on some social activity of mine, do some IO to the social network I own"

It is a scripting framework with all kind of social apis available (as part of the hack Kookoo, Zomato, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Location and Weather apis were available), 

and one can write their requirements in just 10 lines of javascript recipe.

The framework takes cares of polling for users activities, executing the custom javascript recipe. It also provides a market place to share

recipes among your friends, and rate them / use them.

An example recipe would be 

on("foursquare.myCheckin").

    fire(function (values, result) {

        kookoo.sendSms("999xxxxxx1", "Hi buddy, I am at '" + result.address + "', come soon if near by.");

    });

As simple as that. The hack is hosted in readonly mode at https://onsocial.io/, you can take a look.

Follow me on Twitter @RitwikSaikia

We think both the hacks have a lot of potential and would love to help them out in the future as well.

Savdhan, group alerting telephony app

We found an innovative use case of telephony by Savdhan.in We spoke to the founders about their idea and got the following responses:

1. What was the main reason for building this?
Deepankar:  To enable 100% women to utilize those important minutes without letting the surroundings know.

2. How are you planning on monetizing this?
Deepankar: Currently it is free and we will take a call if the SMS cost is unmanageable.

3. Any new features that are forthcoming?
Deepankar:  Lots of features in terms of audio playback, sirens, location etc, but only if we get some good traction.

Overall, its a pretty neat service and has some good use cases. Coming on the heels of the Delhi rape case, the use case may resonate with users.

We think, the app has a lot more potential than the main use case. It could be a good group communication app. Just like we can create a group for alerting in case of emergencies, maybe we can create groups for different scenarios(office meeting, weekend cricket match, office bus etc) and utilize the same format for alerting. This could open up different possibilities for Savdhan.