Cloud Telephony Experiments

When we started with KooKoo , it was just a cloud telephony platform. It solved a specific need of allowing developers access to the telephony stack to build telephony apps using web programming languages. But as it matured, we knew that just voice would not be sufficient. We already integrated with email and social media for specific customers based on their requirements. But it was not at a platform level. So when Facebook launched their API we knew it was a perfect fit for KooKoo. We went ahead and integrated FB messenger API in KooKoo. Since Telegram, Slack and others also have well defined bot APIs, it was easy to integrate those also. Though we completed the integration in a couple of days, the FB review process took forever and finally they accepted our bot :) So today we announce an early release version of our KooKoo chat bot API. Using simple XML tags you can now build your chat bots on KooKoo. All the 10,000+ developers on our KooKoo platform now have access t...

Tl;Dr: Its Lonely When we started KooKoo in late 2009, APIs as business was sort of new. Twilio was just picking up and new API businesses were coming up. Fast forward to 2016 and we have learnt a lot about running an API business in India. 1. Its lonely. An API is an endpoint. An endpoint by itself is not so useful. Its usefulness grows exponentially when it can integrate with other endpoints to create mashups. Unfortunately, I cant think of one API business in India other than us. So the only mashups we create are with APIs from startups in the US. But what is surprising is that we are still,after 6 years, the only public API platform in India. 2. Developer ecosystem is not too big. We had reached almost all active developers in India in 3 years. But since new developers are created every year you need to continue with your evangelism. 3. Conducting hackathons and other developer evangelism is a must. But after conducting 4-5 hackathons, we started getting repeat hackers. ...

We have almost never bid for our company name, Ozonetel, in Google. Our reasoning was that since anyway we show up as the first link it would not matter much. We have also never bid for a competitor's name. Comparison Some of our competitors have been bidding on our name for the last few years. We are ok with it. Not too concerned because we know we have a better product. And we would want the customers to know our competition. We have enough confidence in our product and do not want to win a customer just because he does not know about our competitors. But this time, one competitor went a step ahead. He started using our name in the ad copy ( as shown below) which is against Google rules and also put some falsifications in the landing page. Some falsifications can be put down to ignorance, but some were clearly purposeful, like we not having a Salesforce integration . We informed Google and also the competitor concerned and they have now apparently removed our...