Cloud Telephony Experiments

Internet has changed the way people do business. Internet and associated technologies have made it easy for people to even start new businesses. Right now, it is very easy for anyone to start a business. All it needs is an Idea . For an Internet business to startup, he can get a domain name for Rs.500($10) per year and around 50GB hosting with database for Rs.3000 ($60) and he is set(sometimes, he can get these for an even lesser amount). So with just a base capital of around Rs.1000/2000 ($50) per month any person can publish his idea to the world. This ease of setup and availability of developer resources has made entrepreneurs look towards Internet solutions to start their businesses and publish their ideas. And we have seen the outcome of that. Innovative businesses are coming up every day and changing our lifestyles. Let us say a killer idea for a business has just come to you. What is the first task you do? You check to see if the domain name for your idea is still

In India, there are ~50 million Internet users (source:wolfram alpha). Thats a lot of users and thats why we are seeing a huge spurt in new companies which are coming up to provide services to these users. And thats the reason most of the information is made available on the web. Let us now look at another statistic. There are 700 million telephone subscribers in India(source:TRAI).So basically the Internet users are only 10% of the telephone users in India. I am sure in the rest of the world also the percentages are pretty similar. But the number of telephony companies coming up do not reflect these percentages. The reasons are many and I have already highlighted a few in my previous blog post Return of the telephony apps. The main reason is development complexity. It is really hard for developers to create good telephony applications. Thankfully, because of recent advancements in technology and services like Twilio , KooKoo (for India) and other cloud telephony platforms it is

There was a time during late 90s when VXML was king and telephone applications ruled. Everybody wanted to build telephone applications . But somewhere down the line, telephone applications lost out to web applications. The reasons are many: 1.Closed nature of the telephony applications controlled by a few big telecom companies. 2.New technology stack to be learnt by developers. 3.Large setup costs and costly telephony hardware. 4.Technology gap. Voice based technologies were not upto the mark, especially speech recognition. On the other hand web based technologies did not have these problems and they became the mode of choice for information dissemination. Things started to change with the advent of open source telephony and voip, specifically Asterisk.Points 1 and 3 in the above list were voided by open source telephony stacks. Voip was a major disruptive technology for phone service applications. People were able to setup communication platforms and build telephony applicat

In this blog, I will be talking about my experiences in trying to build a cloud telephony platform , KooKoo . Along the way I will also be talking about different design choices I made, good programming practices and the IVR domain in general. For technoratti: NNFJW8EW86C3