Cloud Telephony Experiments

Hard to believe, but its been a year since we publicly launched KooKoo at Unpluggd 2. And what an year it has been. So this post will be a look back on what we have done for the past year. Our biggest success has been the forming of a developer community on the KooKoo platform who have been creating innovative apps and pushing what can be done on a normal phone. Rather than write a long boring post about how much hard it was and how much fun it was, let me just list 10 facts and figures of what we have done for the past year. Paying customers:100+ Developer community:1200+ Calls handled on the platform: 220 million Features added to KooKoo: 50+ Recognition: 4(unPluggd, mBillionth, Red Herring, Nasscom Emerge 50),20+ paper articles and 1 TV appearance Locations: 7 states Internal products launched: 2 ( CPbx , Cloud Agent ) Sleepless nights: 480 man days(accounted for, not sure how many are unaccounted) Partnerships: 4(more will be announced soon) Fun we had: Immeasurabl...

So, the Indian government went ahead and did something which only it can do best. It setup a new regulation which certainly made it much harder for people running a honest business :). Whether the new regulation will stop SMS/Voice spam is yet to be seen. More information and discussion about this can be found at  http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-the-impossibility-of-trais-sms-spam-regulations-anonymous/  and  http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-what-mobile-marketing-sms-cos-think-of-trais-sms-spam-regulations/ From KooKoo 's perspective it does not affect us too much as most of the KooKoo (http://www.kookoo.in) apps are inbound apps . But we do have certain apps which allow subscribers to register for alerts and sms/voice alerts have to be sent to them. For now, we are not allowing any outbound calls/sms to NCPR registered numbers until things clear up a bit and we are really sorry for the inconvenience. For affected businesses we suggest the following work aro...

As a next step to provide pan India coverage, Ozonetel launches KooKoo services in 3 new locations,  Kolkota, Delhi and Pune. With this, KooKoo is now present in 7 locations: Hyderabad Bangalore Chennai Delhi Mumbai Kolkota Pune KooKoo users can now get local numbers from all these locations and build their voice services like IVR System and PBX systems . Please let us know in the comments where would you like to see KooKoo service next and we will try our best to provide the service in that location at the earliest.

Well, its finally here. SMS integration. This was one of the most sought after features on KooKoo and now we have enabled this as a beta feature. KooKoo has always been able to send SMS using the <sendsms> tag. But receiving sms by applications was a problem.Now, your applications can receive SMS as well as send SMS. The following are the steps to enable receiving of SMS for your application. 1. Login to your account, go to settings and assign a keyword to your application( Only for gold and silver eggs, normal eggs do not have this feature) . Do this fast as keywords are unique and you may not get the exact keyword you are looking for if someone has already acquired it. 2. Ask your users to send an SMS to 0-922-750-751-2 with "your_keyword <space> message" as a message. That's it. You have now enabled a data channel for your application. When KooKoo receives the SMS, it checks your keyword and forwards to your application URL with the following ...

So Startup Weekend is coming to Hyderabad.   Hyderabad Startup Weekend will be held from September 2nd to September 4th in ISB. In this blog post I will try to answer the what,how and why questions about Startup Weekend and in that process try to shed some light on what this is all about from my perspective. What is Startup Weekend and What is its purpose? For the uninitiated, from the Startup Weekend website: Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups So, Startup Weekend is a "global network": Once you take part in a Startup Weekend program, you tap into a global network of like minded people who share common interests and you will get valuable feedback about your product from everyone. Startup Weekend's mission is to "inspire, educate and empower": During the course of the 54...

At Ozonetel, we are constantly working on fun stuff which sometimes makes it to the final KooKoo build. In this post, I will share some example applications which we have been working on which have not yet made it to the final build. Lately, we have been working a lot on speech and we have built the following applications. 1. Google Places over Voice Process: Dial 040-30512839 and say things like 'hotels' in 'koramangala'  after beep and it will send SMS with hotels list. It could be anything. What I have given is an example. Of course, Google places should support data you are requesting. Google places search code without speech can be found here. 2. Voicebuzz:  We have added speech transcription to the voice buzz application. Process: Sync up Facebook with KooKoo by visiting Voicebuzz app in Facebook at  http://apps.facebook.com/voicebuzz/?ref=ts . After Sync up, dial 040-30512834 and speak your status. KooKoo will transcribe your voice input to the ...

Got a confirmation for Yahoo open hack. So I will be attending the event representing KooKoo . Hope to meet a lot of developers and maybe come out with some cool mashups involving KooKoo. There are just so many Yahoo APIs, I can't wait to get started. I had already mentioned some telephony ideas for startup weekend here . I will add some more ideas below: 1. Local search over phone: We should be able to use the Yahoo local API for this. 2. Answers over phone: Use yahoo Answers and KooKoo playtext to dynamically play answers 3. Phone reviews: Maybe use Yahoo Updates API 4. Astrology/News etc over phone 5. Stock alerts over phone If you have some ideas of integrating with yahoo, please leave them in the comments section.