Seven Scale Enters Cloudvox in Cloud Telephony Race

Providing voice phone services is getting easier all the time. Developers need merely write a few lines of code in a familiar programming language and pay a few bucks a month for a phone number. The code, running in a Web or other application, tells a hosted service to do things like making, receiving or otherwise handling calls. The developer's company pays a few cents a minute for every call that the service handles for its customers. The availability of such hosted services moves telephony out of the realm of telecom specialists and into the hands of ordinary Web companies. The latest entry in the field is Cloudvox, offered by Seattle-based Seven Scale.

Seven Scale offers developers what it calls "phone building blocks." These provide basic telephony functions such as making and receiving calls, and presenting IVR (interactive voice response) menus. During calls, they can record conversations or responses, play sounds, speak phrases and launch conference calls, as well as asking for and accepting keypress responses. Developers can mix and match the various functions in myriad combinations to build applications as complex and specialized as they wish. Seven Scale claims applications can be up and running "in seconds."

Developers can use the functions to build a variety of common applications, including alerts and notifications, voice comments and posts, data collection, scheduling and search marketing. They can program their apps in a variety of common languages, including C#, HTTP/JSON, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails. The service runs on an Asterisk platform and uses the SIP (session initiation protocol) protocol.

Cloudvox service comes in a range of prices, all of them cheap. A so-called "hacker" package is free, though a phone number costs $3 per month and calls cost 3 cents per minute. The package can work with two SIP phones and handle five concurrent calls. An unlimited package goes for $80 per month, with unlimited phone numbers at $3 each per month, and the ability to access 500 SIP phones and handle 50 concurrent calls at 3 cents per minute each. There are several packages in between the two.

Cloudvox is the latest in a growing list of voice service platform providers that includes companies such as Jaduka, Ifbyphone, Ribbit and Voxeo. All represent a major evolution of telephony. Phone calls used to be discrete actions, initiated separately and unconnected to any other communication method. Now, voice communication is increasingly becoming just a part of larger and more complex Web or enterprise applications, and perhaps not even the most important part. The proliferation of services such as Cloudvox will make such voice-integrated applications commonplace.

Comments

[Larry Lisser]

Always great to see more entrants into this exciting space, yet hard to believe how far the segment has come since early 2007 when Ifbyphone raised it's first round (http://bit.ly/lSRZ7) - and became for real. Back then, people found this stuff 'cool' but the web development community wasn't quite there. Ifbyphpne has gone on to develop highly commercialized and successful packaged services to small businesses. And two years later - with the web development community fully paying attention - companies like Twilio and Cloudvox seem to be gaining traction with the geekier side of life. Even read recently that a new company, Buzzomatic, is launching entirely built off the Twilio platform. Maybe it's time to bring back the term Voice 2.0; it was a little early the first time around.