Cloud Telephony Experiments

The short way: Register for an Issueburner account Register for a KooKoo account Download support.zip and unzip it in your web server root. Update your KooKoo URL in the settings page after you login. The URL should point to support.php on your web server. So if your webserver is at http://www.mycompany.com and you have unzipped support.php in the web server root directory, then your URL should be http://www.mycompany.com/support.php Publish the KooKoo phone number and your pin and your support email id to start interacting with your customers. If you do not want the pin number, just upgrade your KooKoo account to get a phone number for your business. Login to Issueburner to start monitoring your support calls and emails.  The Shortest way: Send an email to support@kookoo.in and we will set it up for you :) The long way: You have setup a business and you have acquired your first customers. They start using your product/service and most of them are happy....

For users who just want to try twitter voice instead of building one, you can visit http://www.kookoo.in/twittervoice and try it out. Go to twitter apps page http://twitter.com/apps/new and register a new application.Enter application name, description and choose Client as the application type. Also choose Read & Write as the Default Access Type and choose to use twitter for login. Note down ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret Download TwitterAuth java application ,unzip and run java -jar TwitterAuth.jar [ConsumerKey] [ConsumerSecret] Follow on screen prompts and enter pin and get the [Access token] and [Access token secret] Download Twitter OAuth PHP library and extract it in your web root. The original version of this library is at https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth . This is the awesome Twitter OAuth library developed by Abraham. Create KooKoo page kookoovoice.php in your web root with the following content require_once("twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php");/...

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...

Techcrunch today published a post "Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children" . Well, though I sympathize with the woman in the post,I do not agree with the tone of the article. She takes her experience and generalizes it to all women, which is just taking it to the extreme. I think ultimately what she wants to say is that, "Its tough to be a woman, and its tough to run a startup". Big deal. Its tough to run a startup. Period . Does not matter whether you are a man or a woman. And she seems to assume that bringing up a child is just the woman's job. It's not. And thats why we humans have created a family structure.So that both parents take care of the kid. If I start to write about how difficult it has been for me to both be a young dad as well as drive a startup, it would become a novel :) Actually, in the middle of the post she writes "It’s hard to not be the center, but I want to be the center of my family ....