Cloud Telephony Experiments

Youth ki Awaaz , is a very popular youth site where you can voice your opinion on a variety of topics. Change always starts by someone noticing a problem and talking about it out. So in that regard, YKA, is trying to create a platform to talk about issues. We at Ozonetel , have always believed in the power of youth and are very happy to be associated with YKA in partnering with them for the Youthline (Go ahead, call and voice your opinion). In the normal customer series , that we do on our blog, this week we had a chat with the Anshul Tewari(website wallah), the founder of YKA. Following is the gist of our Q and A session with him. 1. What made you start YKA. What was the one thing which inspired you? Even though youth is a demographic dividend in the country, the views of young people are never taken seriously. You are at best naive when it comes to the crucial issues we face. Back in 2008, I felt the same challenge. I realized that as a young person, I have very mi...

It has been more than 2 years since we started KooKoo and more than 4000 developers have signed up for the platform and develop telephony applications . Michael Jastremski  for  openphoto.net All kinds of developers are on the platform. We have freelance developers, development teams from MNCs working on major projects and startup teams building the next big thing. Since communication is such a core component of any business, almost all well known companies and startups have developers on the KooKoo platform. Most of them are KooKoo customers(because of NDAs and stuff, I will not be able to reveal the names), and some of them are on the free developer account. I wanted to find out what are the most popular programming languages on the KooKoo platform. Which languages were the developers using to build telephony applications. I just did a perfunctory analysis based on the URL format and support queries from developers. Initially, I wanted to do a fun infographic wit...

We started Ozonetel in 2007 with a vision to build voice services . We have always been involved in voice services and even had a hosted VXML platform which we used to power voice services for the automobile industry. We also developed self service IVR applications for Telecom companies on Avaya.  During this time, we were building our own platform. Our experience with different vendors led us to believe that the only way to approach this problem was to own the whole stack. So while we were doing services, we started designing our own PRI card, the hardware which receives the calls. Finally, in 2010, we had a good and stable hardware design. Building hardware is real hard work. There is very little scope for mistakes. In software, you make a mistake, some one raises a ticket, you checkout the source code, patch the code and check it back in and everything is fine. In hardware, you make a mistake, the whole batch of fabricated hardware is gone. There is no way to recover it....

નમસ્તે ગુજરાત Well, after almost two years, KooKoo  enters Gujarat. We formally entered Gujarat on May 1st. I still don't understand why we took so long to enter Gujarat. Well, that mistake has now been corrected and we are now in Gujarat and all our services are live, including our cloud PBX product BizPhone and our cloud call center product Cloudagent Gujarat is certainly the land of business men and all the servers we deployed are running at full occupancy in record time. We had to add more servers within two days and now we have more capacity and ready to service more businesses. A map of the KooKoo service locations in India is given below. The states marked in violet will be live in a couple of months. So businesses in Gujarat, if you are looking for cloud based call centers , please sign up for Cloudagent. If you want a cloud PBX system for your office to manage your extensions, sign up for BizPhone. and finally, if you want to develop innovati...

Update: Try it out at  http://kookoo.in/customers/social/search.html . Will be public for a couple of days. This is the age of social media. Almost everyone has a web presence. In this blog post, we will look at how we are trying to provide contextual information about callers. KooKoo is the dominant cloud telephony platform in India . We are now expanding our horizons and looking at building the next generation unified communication framework. We have already integrated fax and email . It is now time to integrate social media. We have started providing this social media in our products Cloudagent  and BizPhone. Below we will demonstrate on how we have integrated with Bizphone. Once you login to your BizPhone account, you can sync your Google contacts by clicking on the Google icon on the dashboard. This feature has been available from the beginning. Now, we have added a new social footprint icon for each contact as shown below: Just click on the social footp...

Geckoboard  is a nifty little service which allows you to create dashboards for your data in a jiffy and host them. Basically, it takes care of the view layer for your data. When I heard of the service, I thought I would take this for a spin and maybe create a dashboard for the KooKoo calls. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the speed with which I was able to setup a dashboard and start pushing my data and start monitoring the calls . I created a simple feedback IVR which takes feedback from callers and pushes data to the Geckoboard. In half an hour I was able to a real time feedback monitoring system which looks like the below screen This just took some 20 lines of code and 4 curl requests(one for each widget) to get started. If you are interested in creating a similar dashboard you can mail us at support@kookoo.in and we will be glad to help you set it up. If you want to try on your own, the following are the steps: 1. Sign up for a demo account. The tr...

When we first launched KooKoo at Unpluggd, there were no cloud telephony companies in India . We knew that it would be an uphill battle as we would have to almost create a market. But we believed in the potential as the business communication market was untapped in India. We believed that cloud telephony could close that gap by providing easy to use tools for businesses to build their own communication channels. But we knew that business communications cannot be uniform. Each business would have their own need. Some would need innovative ways of reaching their customers(like missed calls), some would need a PBX kind of systems for their offices and some would need full featured call centers. So we decided to do both a platform play as well as a product play to provide communication solutions to businesses. Platform: We started off with a platform approach with KooKoo . We wanted to show the world what can be done. Innovation followed. Companies built new communication channels. ...