Cloud Telephony Experiments

So we have just completed 2 years since we launched at Unpluggd 2. Startup Weekend's "The Entrepreneur's Journey" gives a snapshot of a startup's journey. In general, every startup will have the following phases: Get an idea Decide to startup Startup Build a team and product Validation of the product Scale Conquer the world :) As per the above resource, we did the 'I got an idea', 'I want to startup', 'Startup', 'Build a solid team and product' phase in our first year . The second year was all about 'Validation' and 'Scale' So without further ado, some of our numbers this year. Calls handled : 600 million+ Clients : 350+ Registered developers : 4000+ Phone numbers managed : 30000+ Servers managed : 124 Locations : 8 Audio Data managed : 6 TB with 25 GB getting generated everyday Average Database queries per day : 20 million ( max of 70 million in a day, yeah our Mysql clusters are gett...

I have always believed that you won't get the right answers if you don't ask the right questions. For example, if your question is "How do I make money?", then your answers(and hence your actions) will be different than if your question is "How do I make my customers happy?". Also, different roles in a startup/company will have different "driving questions". A sales guy may be asking himself: "Which new vertical should I look at?" "What new use cases should I come out with?" "Who needs my solutions?" A CEO maybe asking himself: "What new partnerships should I make?" "How do I motivate my employees?" "How do I break even?" Disclaimer: I am not a CEO or a sales guy so my example questions maybe wrong :) So currently, the following are some of the questions that drive me being involved in the technical aspects of the cloud telephony domain. "How do I reduce the n...

KooKoo  as most of you know, is a cloud telephony platform using which people have built innovative telephony applications like call and update your Facebook status , call to update your twitter stream etc. As you might be knowing, BITS Pilani conducted a hackathon called as Desert Hack( http://www.deserthack.org/ ) sometime last week and KooKoo, Ozonetel was a part of that. We announced a bounty of Samsung Galaxy Tab2 for the best KooKoo hack. We got the list of hacks last weekend and we were really surprised at the quality of hacks. So we analysed the list of hacks based on the following criteria: 1. Innovativeness 2. Amount of code written 3. Presentation 4. Correctness 5. Aligning with principles of KooKoo and 6. Ability to become big And though it was really hard, we had to select one winner and that is "KIRI". Congrats team "Kiri". You will get your Samsung tab at the earliest. Kiri is an Apple Siri cl...

Sorry for the delay in writing a blog post. I have been caught up in too many things since last month(we are growing, so its all good :)) Anyway, this week I thought I will look at how we can use the latest rockstar startup from India, Freshdesk . Freshdesk, as most of you know is one of the best "Social Helpdesk" systems out there. I am sure most of you are already using Freshdesk to support your customers. In this blogpost I will explain how you can add telephony to the mixture. In particular I will show some code which you can use to : Welcome the caller by name Ask him to enter his ticket id Play out the ticket status Connect the caller to the correct agent handling the ticket. Luckily for us, Freshdesk has a very well defined API and it was a pleasure to work with it. The engineers were also very supportive and answered all my queries quickly. So lets get into the code directly. 1. First we need to get the caller information. For this we need to a...

We hacked up a small speech recognition demo app using KooKoo and Google docs spreadsheets. Just call 040-30952097  011-30908697 and say the name of your favorite IPL team. It should recognize your speech and update your vote in a Google doc spreadsheet immediately. You can view the Google doc at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0At93eg1xO6iadF9vUHY0OEQ0TzV0UkdZTGZub2tDV3c&gid=4 This also shows how we can upload IVR data to google spreadsheets for analytics. Note: We are using an unreleased recognize API for this app. This is a very basic fun app and if KooKoo does not recognize your team, then maybe you said it wrong ;)

This time, its a personal blog post. One of our star developers, Rajesh Ganji is getting married on April 14th. Working in a hacker culture makes people do interesting things. This time Rajesh took his job too seriously and ended building an IVR using KooKoo for his wedding invitation :) He then wrote a program that pulled contacts from his gmail contacts and called them programmatically and played out the IVR wedding invitation. Finally, he hosted the code on github so that future grooms and brides can use it for their own weddings if needed. You can find the code at the end of the post. So go ahead, please call 040-30247070 and listen to the IVR wedding invitation of Rajesh Ganji and wish him the best(you need to press 3 to leave a voice greeting) And though we know that from next week onwards, Rajesh will find it a little bit more harder to concentrate on KooKoo, we wish him all the best in his new adventure. As a side note, another one of our star developers, Sudhakar Gup...

Problem: Customers call your sales people directly. There is no track of these calls. Customer conversation history is not maintained. Customers cannot call a single number for your organization and get connected to their agent directly. Solution: Customer information is present in your Salesforce account. You can manage your calls using KooKoo . We can mashup these two to create a simple customer call management solution in 10 mins. Allows customer calls on a single phone number. If the caller  is already associated with a RM, KooKoo plays the customer name and connects him directly to RM. Customer case history is updated for the call automatically. If there is no customer records, KooKoo identifies the available RM and connects the call and creates the case history for the caller automatically. How to do it? Requirements: Salesforce account with Force.com sites enabled. You can get one here KooKoo account. You can get one here Steps: Create a Visual Fo...