Cloud Telephony Experiments

Sorry for the off topic post as this has nothing to do with cloud telephony . Last Saturday 7 hackers decided to get together for a meetup. Nothing special, just to get introduced to new people. This is how it turned out: Surprisingly, the meeting got started at the specified time :). Everybody got together by 4:15 pm at Shabdha's office Agiliq . Since the office was located centrally no one had any major trouble in finding the office. As the office was in an apartment, it had a nice homely feel to it. A real nice place for an informal meetup. Initially discussion centered on iPhone development and how much harder it is when compared to Android development. I guess the general consensus was that Steve Jobs is a prick, but a wealthy prick :) We later on moved to introductions. Sunil explained a little bit about BSD and how it could be better than Linux. I then explained about KooKoo, the product I am working on. Got some very interesting feedback from the participants....

The development paradigm has changed so much in the recent years that all you need to build applications now is an idea. Almost all services now provide an API and this has led to a lot of Mashups appearing. Mashups allow you to build your idea very fast. Earlier, the flow for developing an application involved the following: Get an idea (The most important step :) ) Identify functionality needed to develop the idea (functionality 1, functionality 2 ......) Develop functionality n Test functionality n Repeat 3 and 4 for all functionalities Integrate functionality Deploy and announce to the world. Now, its much easier: Get an idea (This step cannot be replaced) Identify functionality needed to develop the idea (functionality 1, functionality 2 ......) Identify APIs which provide the functionalities Integrate APIs Deploy and announce to the world. Though the number of steps in both cases are almost the same, in the second approach most of your headaches are taken ...

This week I read a really nice article Yoda visits Rodinhood and it had very good advice to entrepreneurs. Other than the advice what stuck me was the way now-a-days bloggers were comparing entrepreneurs to a lot of things. First it was Mike Arrington compar ing entrepreneurs to pirates ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/ 31/are-you-a-pirate/ ) and now Rodinhood comparing them to Jedis. This got me thinking a little bit and I have to say I side with Mike on this if I have to choose one. Obviously I cannot choose both as that would mean Jedis are pirates(or pirates are jedis). Gasp!. :). Actually, I have to say I generally don't agree that entrepreneurs are pirates, as entrepreneurs create value and pirates steal value. But just for fun lets look at the similarities. Entrepreneurs and Pirates are in it for the money and adventure. They go looking for both. They are proactive. Jedis are in it to maintain the balance of the Force. They do not go looking for anything. Only ...

Wow! what a month. KooKoo was selected as a top 10 finalist in Unplggd event in Bangalore and we got to meet a lot of great startups at the event.During the course of discussions at the event it became clear that most startups were trying to create value in the online world. There were not many players in the telecom space. One of the participants, Nikhil of Dialify actually put it quite nicely. He said, people knew only one "use case" of the telephone. And he is right. When we think of a telephone, we just think that we can use it only to call someone. Ever since the phone was invented thats pretty much the only reason we use a telephone.And that was a good enough reason for it to survive for so long. But now it is under attack from the Internet. Since time immemorial voice and data have been at loggerheads with each other. Initially when telegram (data) was king, the telephone disrupted the market and it became king for a long time. The telephone was the preferred m...