Since we launched last year we have handled more than 200 million calls and have around 1500 registered developers.

A lot of developers are building voice services on our KooKoo platform. Most of them have a problem of discoverability. Also, we were talking to several telcos and though most of them provide short code VAS services, remembering the short codes is a pain. One other problem was that building location based voice services currently is tough.

So we were trying to think of some innovative way in which to solve these problems and we came up with the idea of building a simple android app which provides a clickable icon for all these services. Though the idea is simple, we hope that this solves some major problems.

So we went ahead and hacked up "KooKoo Voice App Directory", an android app.(https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ozonetel.kookooappexchange).

This app is specific to India as the services listed work in India. But the concepts in the app can certainly be used anywhere and maybe companies like Twilio can make use of the concepts to come up with their own voice-mobile apps showcasing all the apps built on the Twilio platform.

We will be open sourcing the android app next week.

Details:

KooKoo Voice App Directory at its heart is a contact directory app and it mainly tries to solve 3 problems.

1. Discovery: KooKoo has been a very popular platform for developers to build telephony applications. There are more than 1500 registered developers with a lot of innovative apps being built on the platform every day. This creates a problem of discoverability. Users do not know what services are available and also do not remember the phone numbers for those services. The mobile application provides a generic solution for this problem. Install the KooKoo mobile app to access all voice services without remembering the phone numbers. The service list will be updated regularly. We believe this provides a solution to all service providers also where there is a problem of finding and remembering the short codes of value added services.

2. Innovation: Voice services are limited by the fact that they do not get enough information about the caller. All we get to know is the caller id and there is very limited information that we can extract from that. But in a mobile app we can get much more information about the caller including their location(with their permission, of course). An example of this is the weather app in the KooKoo app exchange. When the user dials the weather app, we playback the current weather based on the user location. The data channel is not used at call. So location based services can be enabled for voice services. This innovative use opens up the door for a whole host of location based voice services.

3. Monetization: Currently, all apps on the App exchange are free. But in the future we plan to enable paid apps as well. Developers can charge per minute credits to access their content. Users can buy pre paid credits from the KooKoo website and use the credits on the paid content apps.

If you are interested in having your app phone number listed here please send an email to [email protected]