Skip to main content

KooKoo-Year In review

By C Chaitanya
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.

  1. Paying customers:100+
  2. Developer community:1200+
  3. Calls handled on the platform: 220 million
  4. Features added to KooKoo: 50+
  5. Recognition: 4(unPluggd, mBillionth, Red Herring, Nasscom Emerge 50),20+ paper articles and 1 TV appearance
  6. Locations: 7 states
  7. Internal products launched: 2 (CPbx, Cloud Agent)
  8. Sleepless nights: 480 man days(accounted for, not sure how many are unaccounted)
  9. Partnerships: 4(more will be announced soon)
  10. Fun we had: Immeasurable
Special Thanks:

  1. Startup community in Hyderabad, especially Startup Saturday and Ramesh Loganathan.
  2. Startup weekend and Pankaj. We had great fun sponsoring and volunteering for Startup weekend in India.
  3. Startup blogs: pluggd.in for giving exposure at Unpluggd, yourstory.in, medianama and all the other blogs for carrying our stories and giving constructive feedback.
  4. Hacker and developer community: Mainly from http://hackerstreet.in and events like Yahoo Openhack.
  5. And finally our customers: You know who you are, because of NDAs and stuff we will not be able to put all your names on this blog, but you have been the biggest source of strength for us as you trusted in us and used our products.
Sample positive tweets we got:

 KesavaReddy 

 support is really marvelous. I recommend their services.  # CloudTelephony
25 Oct 
»
 Vivek Singh 

Evaluated IVR providers in India. KooKoo seems to be the best by significant margin. CloudIVR is just OK. TCL feels 10 year old architecture
13 Jul Unfavorite Undo Retweet Reply
 pjain 

@ 
   KooKoo.in is awesome & sponsored  and .  is built on it. /cc 
3 May 
 MockInt 

Thanks to KooKoo, Ozonetel for making our dream of Telephone Interviews a reality. No special charges for calling 040 - 30512885.
17 Jan 

 Shivakumar Ganesan 

Buckle up .  is taking over your market in . Awesome company. Beautiful product. Hack friendly.


Please follow this blog to get updates about more exciting things coming up on the KooKoo platform. You can also follow us on twitter @kookoo_ozonetel.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

By C Chaitanya
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...
Read more

Telugu ASR speech data collection

By C Chaitanya
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...
Read more

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

By C Chaitanya
Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...
Read more