Sigapy: a failed attempt to create a product in Paraguay

A little more than a year ago, I created a service which main intention was to provide my fellow Paraguayans living abroad, an easy way to call home using their smartphones. It was not like Viber or Tango app, you couldΒ actually call to land lines and mobile phones, and of course between Sigapy users.

There’s no specialized service like this in Paraguay, and I wanted to fill that void with something new and easy to use, and so Sigapy was born. It was conceived as an academical project but soon it started to appear exploitable as a commercial service, but the environment for this kind of business in Paraguay isn’t the best (actually, it’s horrible) and I had to shut it down for my own juridical sake.

Today, I decided someone else can give it a try, because it’s a more or less mature product and can easily be adapted to someone else’s needs.

Check out the videos and the landing page I created. The videos are in Spanish, but the flow can be understood by anyone.

NGS

NGS

UPDATE: with this project, I won a place in the 4th generation of startups of Wayra Mexico. More updates to come in the future posts :).

NGS, or Next Generation Support, is a project that I created to participate in the TADHack event. It is about improving the user experience we have when we call to customer support, and it takes advantage of the new telco technologies we have today, to create a product that tries to fix a rather common issue which is the bad quality in customer support systems.

What NGS has to offer?

  1. Everyone has a smartphone, and there’s an app for everything, why not for a specialized customer support?
  2. It’s really annoying to navigate through the IVR menus. It’s easier to directly go to the option you want, with a click.
  3. It can be completely free, the only thing you need is an Internet connection.
  4. The customer would be able to call from literally anywhere in the world, using Internet, no toll-free numbers at all.
  5. Call center agents can know exactly who’s calling, where is he located, and what does he want, and with this info a better customer experience can be offered.
  6. The customer can take advantage of the current technology, with HD voice quality, chatting, video calling, screen sharing, etc.
  7. The customer can know exactly who is behind the phone, with a picture, an email, a full name, and he can rate the experience he had with the agent.
  8. In summary, improved customer experience from every angle you can think of.

Opensource communication technologies I used

  1. Kamailio
  2. rptengine: this one belongs to the Kamailio project but deserves special mention because it powers the media relaying. Extremely important
  3. SIPjs
  4. Freeswitch
  5. CSipSimple: compiled in library mode, it allowed me to use PJLIB to create SIP apps for Android.

I posted below, a few screenshots of the software, and I’m planning to add more and release the code during this month.

This is a work in progress. The project has only 3 weeks of being alive, at the time this post was written.

Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-33-52 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-34-00 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-34-17 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-34-21 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-34-32 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-34-39 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-35-59 Screenshot_2014-06-05-20-36-15 Screenshot Screenshot-1

 

 

Install mediaproxy-ng on Debian based systems

This is a variation of my original post on how to install mediaproxy-ng on rpm based operating systems.

This one goes for the Debian/Ubuntu users, which are a plenty out there.

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/sipwise/mediaproxy-ng.git

2. Install compilation dependencies

apt-get install build-essential iptables-dev debhelper libcurl4-openssl-dev libglib2.0-dev libglib2.0-0 libxmlrpc-c++4 libxmlrpc-c++4-dev linux-kbuild-3.2 linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common linux-headers-$(uname -r) module-assistant

3. Go to mediaproxy-ng directory and build the Debian packages

cd mediaproxy-ng/ && dpkg-buildpackage -d

4. Go back to the parent directory. It should contain a series of .deb files. Install them all

dpkg -i *.deb

5. If everything went OK, a message similar to this should appear on the console:

DKMS: install completed.
mediaproxy-ng not yet configured. Edit /etc/default/ngcp-mediaproxy-ng-daemon first.
Setting up ngcp-mediaproxy-ng-kernel-source (2.3.5) ...
Setting up ngcp-mediaproxy-ng (2.3.5) ...
Setting up ngcp-mediaproxy-ng-dbg (2.3.5) ...

That is pretty much it, quick and straightforward, maybe because the Sipwise guys love Debian more than any other Linux distribution πŸ˜‰