Cloud Telephony Experiments

This blog has so far has mainly talked about KooKoo  and its features and events related to KooKoo. Starting today we will also write about startups who are using the phone in innovative ways to solve different problems. After all, one of our main goals is to disrupt telecom . Introduction: In their own words, " NextDrop , is a social enterprise that provides water delivery timing information via mobile phone to residents in urban India How we make a difference:   “Will I get water today?” Hundreds of millions of people around the world ask this question everyday. In cities with intermittent water (90% of the cities in South Asia)—where piped water is available only for short and unpredictable intervals—people spend hours waiting next to dry taps, and are forced to buy water from private suppliers at high cost or use water from unsafe sources.  NextDrop leverages the ubiquity of the mobile phone and delivers water delivery information via SMS and voice, thereb...

Another Startup Weekend is here, this time in Delhi and as usual KooKoo, Ozonetel is proud to be associated with the event. I will be attending the event and will be around to help the participants to build stuff on KooKoo  if needed. Startup weekend has certainly come a long way in India and it is really pleasing to see the ecosystem slowly building up. Recognition to Startup Weekend and the teams participating in the event has certainly gone up with more and more partners joining the event. And this time, the prizes are just awesome. It makes me want to do another startup :). For teams participating in the Delhi Startup Weekend, the following are a sampling of the prizes: KooKoo - 3 months free Silver egg plan. CPBX - 3 months free One India plan. Directi - Free domain and hosting for winning team Morpheus - Direct entry to a selected team to the new Morpheus batch. And I am not even counting the prizes which will be revealed at the event. Suffice to say, that a...

It has always been our vision to be the platform of choice for telephony application developers. Now that the core platform has stabilized over the past year we are looking at improving the ecosystem by providing more services on top of the telephony platform. Payments have been a big problem in India. A lot of transactions in India actually end with cash on delivery. An innovative new startup called Gharpay  has come up with a solution for the offline payment collection problem. In their own words Gharpay is a doorstep cash payment network. Accepting cash payments was painful before we started with the mission of making it easy for you and your customers. Most of your customers don't want to or can't pay you online. Accepting cash through Gharpay means more people can pay you and you don't have to change any process flow.  Please visit their site to get more information on how they work. We at KooKoo immediately saw a synergy and thought that it would be real...

It has always been the goal of KooKoo to marry the web world with the telecom world. If you look at the web world, there are a host of services which analyze user behavior on websites and this helps in user retention, reducing bounce rates etc. But the same is lacking in the telecom world. Wouldn't it be great if we could just use the web analytic engines and apply them to the telecom domain. That's exactly what we plan to do in this blog post. We will show you how you can link your KooKoo code with Mixpanel so that you can do call analytics using Mixpanel . For our example, lets take a simple scenario. Let's say we are a deals site and we are providing deals on phone. Every day we offer 2 deals and we want to track. If the customers choose a deal, they can either buy directly or talk to an agent. The code for this in KooKoo can be found at ( Initial Code ) As you can see, this is plain vanilla KooKoo code which asks the user to select a deal and processes the...

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.