Unsexy CEO Profile

Currently in India, its sexy to run a startup. But there is a small catch. You have to fit the narrative.

1. The younger, the better. In fact it will help if you are a drop out.
2. You should be building something in the B2C space.
3. You should have raised VC money(loads of it) and should be burning it like crazy.
4. You should have a pedigree. IIT, IIM etc
5. You should be brash and it helps if you scold your VCs publicly(Well this is not exactly true, but I am trying to make the narrative spicy :))

Our CEO, Mr. CSN Murthy is the anti thesis of all the above. He is above 50, building a startup in the B2B space,bootstrapped and one of the most mild mannered and humble person you will find.

So dont worry if you are above 50
Dont worry if you are doing something in B2B space or NGO or social service
Dont worry if VCs cannot see your vision and are not buying into it.

You can put your head down and build a company the best you can and in 3-4 years you can build a profitable multi million dollar company.

And someday, CSN will tell his story. I will make him tell it :)

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Google's approach to business communication

Google has been making silent moves in the business communication space. Google has mostly lost the instant messaging wars. But it does not want to lose the business communication war. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been making their own moves to enable businesses to reach their customers through their channels. Its all about who has control over the communication channels. Especially communication which leads to business. That's where the money is. Currently, Google is the king of search and most online transactions start with a Google search. FB, Amazon, Apple and others want to change that. They want the search to start on their properties. And they have started making the moves. WhatsApp business allows small businesses to conduct their transactions on WhatsApp. FB and Instagram have long supported small businesses to manage their business on their channels. Apple has also made some nice moves with Apple business chat. They have integrated a whole shopping expe...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

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