Cloud Telephony Experiments

After recently being elevated to the post of Chief Innovation Officer at Ozonetel , the pressure was on me to come up with something innovative soon :) So, it was all too well that Google announced the Gmail API at Google IO around a week back. I quickly scanned through the API  and found that it was reasonably well documented and with easy to use endpoints to play around with my emails in Gmail. To test the functionality of the API, I decided to build a Gmail alternative using the API. I wanted to see how much of a functionality of Gmail I could recreate. I wanted to see if I could build something, using which I could perform my daily email operations without using Gmail directly. Turns out, it is possible to do exactly that using the API. So, in this post, I will give a brief description of how I achieved that. At the end, I will list some innovative ideas that can be built on the Gmail API. 1. Authorize The first step was to get the right authorization tokens to use the...

Kan Khajura Teshan from Hindustan Unilever (HUL) to the Hindi speaking belt is run on Ozonetel's Cloud Communications Platform . Kan Khajura Teshan (KKT) is a mobile radio playing 18 minutes of entertainment content in Hindi. The content has jokes and bollywood songs, which is moderated by a radio jockey. The content is refreshed every Monday of the week. KKT Mobile radio has its reach even in media dark areas where there is no FM radio or television. KKT has 15 million subscribers and is getting a million unique visitors logging on, on a daily basis. KKT resides on Ozonetel's telco grade multi-channel Cloud communications platform , which is the technology partner. The success of running KKT seamlessly has got HUL to bag three awards at  Cannes  this year (2014). How does Kan Khajura Teshan work:  A listener calls on 1800-30-0000-123, the call drop being a missed call , where the caller's number gets registered on Ozonetel, which then calls back the listener pla...

10 That's the answer, up there. The rest of the blog post is going to be gyan from me with some links of our products interspersed hoping some of you click and visit our websites :) Gyan Start: Well each company will have a different number. But for our products  which primarily concentrate on voice products and contact center solutions selling to businesses, this is the number which has worked. For a long time, sales was a process which was alien to us. We first got Rajiv on our team. He has been phenomenal so far in setting up the sales process etc. He started off by hiring the right sales guys in different circles. We followed a top heavy approach. Get the best sales guys with good salaries. It was risky at the time for us as we were facing a cash crunch and it was tempting to go for low end sales guys and take in more numbers. But we wanted to showcase a professional outfit to our customers and we chose to get the best guys to represent us. After all, in many w...

Updated: Removed the confrontational sentences as that were written in the heat of the moment and were not adding any value to the post and were written just to get it out of my system: Based on some bad experiences with Indian VCs, following are some pointers on dealing with VCs. In one instance, we specifically asked a VC if they were in talks with our competition. We did not want to talk if they were speaking to competition. They gave in writing that they were not. But after our discussions, it was clear they were in fact talking. In another instance, VC was said he was interested but actually was just using us to get data points about our industry. Finally he used those data points to help his portfolio company to get direction. Well, there is no point in naming names or crying hoarse. To take something positive out of my experience, I am listing some points you need to remember when dealing with VCs. 1. Don't tell them your client list.  Especially the prospectiv...

After the recent launch in  Gujarat  and Rajasthan, we now enter central India by making our Indore data center completely operational. From this data center we will be able to service Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh So people of MP and Chhattisgarh, you can now sign up for  KooKoo , and choose local numbers for your businesses. In case you are interested in call center solutions, check out  Cloudagent  and give a call at 1-800-200-0820 and our sales guys will get in touch with you. Ozonetel, by far, now provides the most comprehensive coverage in cloud telephony in India . Our complete coverage is captured in the image below.

Recently I saw a post on the Rise of GateKeeping services The author makes valid points from a customer perspective. But as they say, there are always two sides to a story :) Since a lot of companies are using KooKoo  to provide a telephony experience to their customers, I thought I will list out a couple of reasons why gatekeepers may be good, especially if done correctly. Disclaimer: This will be a little biased post as we provide services to a lot of these "Gatekeepers" :) 1. Monetization: As Sinha mentions in the comments of the above post, in India, lead monetization is very very hard. Businesses in general do not want to pay up for leads and these numbers provide a provable lead generation model for these businesses. The more money the companies make, the better service they can provide for you. 2. Quality control: The example given in the above article takes an example of a clinic. If we take personal examples, most of the times I call a clinic I end up ju...

Many theories have been put forth on how to improve the startup ecosystem in India and how we have to move away from a services country to a product country. And just like everyone, I have a theory. I don't think the main trigger for us to become a product country is in having more incubators, more angels, more mentors, more VCs, more funding, more exits etc. Of course, they all help. But the main trigger, according to me, is the CUSTOMER . As long as we the customers are content with the products and level of service, businesses will not innovate. They will not push the boundaries as they think the customers are happy. Customers have to speak out and demand a higher level and Indian businesses will deliver. I want faster delivery of the goods I ordered online and I want to track the delivery. I want more items to shop online. Tell that to the ecommerce store you bought the goods from. I am not happy that I have to wait for the doctors endlessly. I want to setup appointments...