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...

Chatbots are great. But they are not perfect. Chatbots have been glorified as the next coming of customer service. And why not. The thought of humans interacting with AI to get things done is sexy. Only problem is that level of tech, especially in AI, is not up there yet. I have no doubt we will get there soon. But we are not there yet. So when Facebook announced their send/receive API at their F8 conference we at Ozonetel knew we had to integrate it with our cloud contact center solution, Cloudagent . Luckily, our system is very loosely coupled with clear interfaces and we were able to get the integration done in a couple of days(our engineers are not too happy as they had to pull an all nighter :)) So, when your chatbots get stuck and are not able to answer your customer queries, connect your FB messenger with Cloudagent and provide help from real agents . It works almost like a live web chat system, but over FB messenger and all the regular features like routing to agents, ...

Every startup has an origin story. As the story grows, the origin story changes for PR accordingly,but the basic formula is that 2-3 founders start in garage/room and make it big etc. And it is important that your startup has a story,because stories sell. You will read similar stories about Ozonetel in PR. About how we planned to change the face of business communication etc. We will leave those stories to PR. In this blog, we will deal with the truth. I had been associated with CSN since 2004-2005(thats another story). So in 2007, when CSN and Atul started Ozonetel they asked me if I wanted to be part of the startup. And since I knew both of them and trusted them, I said ok. At that time, we had no concrete idea on what to do. We had a couple of ideas. We knew we wanted to do something in the telecom space. We knew we wanted to build for the SMEs and we knew we wanted to do it in India and "make" in India. So before KooKoo was born, the following were the products we buil...

In this startup ecosystem, the people with the money generally can influence a narrative. So sometimes, we have to use our own publishing space to talk about ourselves :) So this post is about that. It just reinforces some lesser known but important facts about Ozonetel. Fact 1: Ozonetel is the company which first introduced cloud telephony to India. This fact is easily provable, thanks to the Internet web archive :) Fact 2: First to cross a billion calls in cloud telephony in India Fact 3: One of the very few companies in India which has an open API. Though documentation can be improved a lot, at least the API is open to the public. You can sign up today at http://kookoo.ozonetel.com and start building Fact 4: Though we bootstrapped to startup , over the course of our journey, we have raised more than a million dollars of angel money. Mainly from families, friends and customers. Fact 5: One of the few companies which have crossed $4 million in ARR with just Indian cust...

Number masking has become popular now a days because of its adoption by the new startups like Uber , Ola and others. Though its been talked about now, its not new. In fact when we launched KooKoo in 2010, this was one of the first application of the cloud telephony platform along with missed call applications. And a lot of startups including Zomato used KooKoo to build their own virtual number solutions. Since it has become popular now, a lot of customers are asking for this. And since number masking can be achieved in many ways, I thought I will do a blog post on the different models and their pros and cons. Photo Credit : Flickr Multiple models of number masking 1. DID: This is the most popular model. Just take landline numbers and map them to your customer numbers. Advantage: Its simple to implement and works well. Disadvantage: Its harder to get local numbers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as a lot of cloud telephony players dont have presence there. Though ...