We think it's really neat stuff--it basically takes the web mashup power of Yahoo Pipes and applies it to telephone calls. The technology behind it is also pretty impressive. If you have any questions, please send them to me here, and I'll do my best to answer them!
This is absolutely tremendous, and I am already having a blast. Thank you!
Only one point of frustration: There should be an obvious way to get variables from the call row. You can update the call row with the "Update Call Row" module in the "Outbound Campaigns" section, but there should be a "Reserve Variable From Call Row" module, too. Otherwise, it seems the only way to do it is to "Reserve Variable" for every one you want to use, and manually set them as pre-filled every single time you create a campaign, which is a hassle.
Also, $0.05 cents per minute feels kind of steep. You have a very novel and wonderful service, though, so maybe it isn't such a big problem. It was so easy and intuitive to make a demo app, assign it to a number after I registered and watch things coming together. You guys are Doing It Right. Kudos, kudos!
One more thing... it'd be nice if there was an easy way to filter outbound calls on whether the person has already been called, according to whether the "outbound_result" field in their row is populated. There's a filter option "is..." that lets you select between "present" and "not present," but it's not clear whether that means "empty" or "is not even a hash key for that row," or if those two things are even different.
Oh, and for God's sake, make sure you block requests on your site that have "4chan" as a referrer... ;-)
Re: filtering, this needs to be better documented, agreed. "present"==="field exists for row, with any value". There's a distinction between empty grey and empty white cells that we tried to make but it may not be apparent to non-programmers.
Re: price, we are only a couple cents/min higher than what other barebones API providers are charging. But we are obviously much more than an API service. Hosting all apps in their entirety, along with slick web-based tools to build them, is the extra value we are hoping to provide.
Pak, consider using your real name and email in your HN profile. What you're building really is impressive. It's worth making it easy for HN'ers to contact you directly.
Love it. Wish we could make use of it more here in Australia but from what I can tell the dial-in stuff is US only, and out-going calls to mobiles here might get expensive quickly (20c+/min?).
We have some infrastructure for international dial-ins via our overseas datacenters, you might want to inquire via our phone number request form once you sign up. Also on our list is SIP integration to make international outbound cheaper; we are contemplating ways to gainfully monetize that.
Hah, thanks for the link! I just wrote a quick app to flirt with my girlfriend. Multiple choice questions with no wrong answers are hilarious. Punched in her phone number and waited for a callback.
I created an outbound calling campaign to ask all of my friends if they want to hang out tonight, record their results in the database, and call them losers if they say no. It took me less than 20 minutes to do. This is Awesome, with a capital "A."
Making an app was trivially easy and aside from the intro text (due to it being a demo) it was nice to see there weren't extra instructions a la "please select from the following options." Of course in testing this I made the old "orange you glad I didn't say banana?" knock knock joke that switches paths on the third time.
Yeah, sharing links to your apps should work. If you make an app without creating an account, it is publicly shareable for about 1 day. Whoever creates an account to save it will take ownership, and then it becomes private.
This is pretty impressive - especially the part where it highlights which nodes are currently being played when you are on the phone testing the application out.
OpenVBX seems pretty limited in terms of features. The drag-and-drop functionality only extends to simple call routing functionality like a phone system/PBX.
It actually includes a simplified integrated database that is built on top of Amazon's SimpleDB. (Try going to Configure and then the Data tab.) SOAP is currently our best option for external data integration. We are also contemplating the best way to do modules for RESTful services and MySQL/PGSQL. Current concerns include data format/protocol discovery for the former and proper security for the latter.
Wow, what a cool tool! No need to be an expert developer here, someone who has used a Visio like program in the past can quickly and easily build an interactive voice app. I tested it to invite my family to a reunion and collected all responses real time...the Amazon simpleDB is awesome!
We used jQuery UI as a framework, but built a lot of custom widgets for the wires, modules, nodes, receptors, etc. Yahoo Pipes was certainly an inspiration for our design, but we rethought the concepts behind using wires (using them as a control flow mechanism, not a data flow mechanism; e.g., there are no wires for variables, we use them in sort of the way MIT's Scratch does).
We don't know of any framework for this sort of interface, and we did not want to use Flash, so we just rolled up our sleeves and made it ourselves. jQuery and jQuery UI, however, were instrumental; for this sort of new-ish UI, it was useful to have the ability to progressively layer functionality onto HTML elements. We also made extensive use of the $.Widget framework to construct our widgets in the same fashion as jQuery UI's.
Yes, it reminded me of them as well. But while Yahoo Pipes look nice they get over complicated pretty fast. Flow charts for automatic call answering on the other hand have been around for quite some time and might be a better fit for such a representation.
The great thing about QuickFuse is that the application does not require users to have programming experience. Similar services typically require programming knowledge, but with QuickFuse, it's sort of a you dream it, and the program will easily allow you to build it type of application. The program is user-friendly for everyone, from those with extensive programming knowledge, to those with just an application idea!
I tried to look at it with my iPad and was unable to keep screen focus on a part of the window content (i.e. Center). Every second, the top left corner of the screen is moved to the top left corner of the image. Has this function any use ? Please, consider removing it.
We're working on compatibility with the iPad, when we began working on this the only iOS devices were small screened and we had no hope of ever making this useful there... now that the iPad is out, well that changes things, and we hope to support it soon.
Thankfully because the interface doesn't use Flash, that shouldn't be too difficult. We'd have to rework some of the event handlers, but that should be it.
FYI, the reason we periodically reset the scroll position is because the main <body> on normal windowed browsers is meant to never scroll in this editor interface. Even if you disable scrolling in CSS, some browsers like to scroll when you do things like (accidentally) highlight text near the window border, and we needed a way to make sure the interface stayed within the browser window.
I created a simple survey with dynamic questions based on responses using the database. Very impressive considering it only took me minutes. Love the feature that lets you see the call progress to each node as the call progresses. Great Job!
Why the down votes? Its true. I've worked for a SaaS Call Center company before and worked on applications like this. Of course, it was an installed application though. This is actually a pretty neat service. I had always wondered what a web-based one would look like. Perhaps I'll send the link to my old company and rub it in that a startup pulled this off. They'll be jealous :)
The rule of thumb for telephony visual designers: every time a new switch or service gets built, a new visual designer gets built too :). Not sure why the down votes, shrug.
We used a very small team of developers. I wrote the majority of the code; there were a few other auxiliary programmers and a couple testers. It started as a "20% time" concept piece and took about a year to develop into a product.
We wouldn't have been able to develop as fast as we did without the foundation provided by great projects such as Kohana (we used 2.3) http://kohanaframework.org , jQuery, and jQuery UI. For us, these frameworks turned out to be a superb combination.
The homepage is: http://quickfuseapps.com/
We think it's really neat stuff--it basically takes the web mashup power of Yahoo Pipes and applies it to telephone calls. The technology behind it is also pretty impressive. If you have any questions, please send them to me here, and I'll do my best to answer them!