CallFire

 Those who have called into our support line would have heard the familiar recommendation of switching browsers from Internet Explorer (IE) to Firefox.

First, let me state that Callfire.com works effortlessly and seamlessly across all browsers. We constantly test our existing and new feature set against all available browsers, desktop and mobiles, to ensure that all our clients have a consistently excellent user experience. For the record, IE is a great browser in of itself, however, in our experience we’ve found that no two installations are the same. In many cases the browser installation is so tightly integrated with the desktop that it can induce behavior that may be hard to replicate. Firefox, on the other hand, due to its modular design assures a much more consistent, faster user experience. Don’t take our word for it, read about it at The New York Times.

In the mean time, if you would still want to use IE, that’s quite all right as well, as long as all URLs lead to www.callfire.com, the browser itself is of little consequence (or is it?).

The short answer is no.

Our Website runs independent of our dialing infrastructure which is spread across two data centers in the continental United states and is hosted on dozens of servers. Our UI, though our only public face, is but one small piece of it.

Some of our customers may have experienced intermittent issues with their campaigns today (specifically between the hours of 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM PST). Rest assured that the issue was not with CallFire’s own servers. Our long distance carriers were having problems completing calls and our servers detected this issue and put the affected campaigns on stand-by mode. This is a designed feature to make sure that all campaigns are running at optimal levels. So what may appear like a bug is actually a feature. Such is the complicated, dense, and interconnected nature of middleware, we have to be prepared for even the most outlandish of scenarios and do everything we can to keep the system stable and secure.

Quote of the day:

Try not. Do, or do not, there is no try. — Master Yoda

We just released the hosted call center api! For everyone who wants to use the call center connect with agent popup with your own backend, we provide everything you need to integrate straight into Callpeer platform.

You can login your agents and the system will start dialing and connecting calls to the agent. Every time a connection occurs, you get information about it and you can display a popup and peripheral information from your own backend. Collect the data and just let the Callpeer platform know that the agent is ready for the next call and we will handle the rest!

Features

• Run multiple campaigns simultaneously
• Add hundreds of agents per campaign - enormous scalability (Already tested with over 400 agents per campaign)
• Full connection details - so you can display popups and collect information on your own system
• Easy call center api and full documentation.
• Full campaign and agent statistics

CallFire is pleased to announce CallPeer, their application development platform. CallPeer will allow developers to create nifty VoIP applications via hooks into the CallFire infrastructure. Currently, we support such hooks via our API which allows clients to integrate their back end systems with our Voice Broadcast infrastructure. In the future we’ll be rolling out new features and releasing new versions of the CallPeer plaform.

CallPeer is what we would call a true Web 2.0 play for CallFire. There is this misconception that Web 2.0 is all about pay-per-click or eyeball capture. In fact concepts like pay-per-click advertising, high degree of user acquisition and retention are the result of true Web2.0 not the root cause. The whole phenomenon of Web 2.0 is about creating new innovation out of existing inventions. It is about creating new value out of existing technology. If you look at the ‘famous’ Web 2.0 companies, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc, the technology they are using is not new at all. In fact, in some cases their technology is at least a decade old (MySpace was built using ColdFusion–remember that anyone?). What they bring to the table is finding new ways for integrating existing technologies.

CallFire’s play is integrating two existing technologies-the web and the telephone and marrying them to an amazingly intuitive interface to create new value for our customers. Through CallPeer we aim to extend that value proposition to developers as well, giving them the freedom to create their own applications using our infrastructure. As the CallFire team huddles around the drawing board dreaming up new features, do drop us a line if there are cool features you would like to see.

Quote of the Day:

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible–Alan Kay

For an ever growing, rapidly evolving platform like that of CallFire, stability is a perennial exercise. Stability is a cross architectural concern and cannot be slapped on at the last minute like tomato ketchup on spaghetti. Stability is fundamentally hard whose benefits are accrued over time. Nevertheless, you need to plan for it in advance and make it a top priority during system and application development. This is hard because any IT organization, let alone a speedboat startup, is judged by the features it can implement.

Architecting stability is fundamentally tough, but as Grady Booch puts it, you can master complexity, even if you can never make it go away. One way to master complexity is to realize that good design will lead to stable applications. Good design ensures crisp abstractions, clear separation of concerns, and loose coupling. Following these tenets then allow for a degree of componetization that lends itself to a stable, scalable system.

We at CallFire are going through software migration pains for a planned major feature-set rolled out (tentatively 4Q ‘07). As we grapple with the minutiae it helps to pull back and understand why we’re spending so much time on something seemingly mundane.

Quote of the Day:

Ancora Imparo –Michelangelo