How do you go about building a complex sales system in 24 hours? When we set out for this ambitious project at 24 hour business camp, we figured we would need a lot of work being done in advance, so we took advantage of a number of open source projects and open APIs.
We knew we wanted to record, store and annotate phone calls. We wanted to let our users play back phone calls. To be able to do this, we used VOIP and a voice communication server called Asterisk. Asterisk lets us record calls, as well as notify our system of when a call is being made, and when it’s hung up. As a bonus, we can also control Asterisk via it’s powerful REST API, so we can place calls, record and play back voice memos, and a whole lot of other goodies.
In order to be able to notify our system that a call is being placed, and immediately notify the user that the call is taking place, we used the powerful Tornado web server. Tornado is the technology that powers FriendFeed, and the friendly people at FriendFeed and Facebook open sourced Tornado just a few weeks ago. Tornado is special in that it’s non-blocking. That means that our client, written in JavaScript, can keep a connection open to the server at all times, and notify the user whenever something happens in the system.
For building the client, we used the almighty jQuery for server communications, and jQuery Tools for the UI. The rest of the user interface is built and served with Django, the best tool available for rapidly building complex web applications.
A big thank you to Ted Valentin and Maria and Nils from SSES, without whom we would never have met all these talented and creative entrepreneurs and business people at the 24 hour business camp.
Kudos & thanks
How do you go about building a complex sales system in 24 hours? When we set out for this ambitious project at 24 hour business camp, we figured we would need a lot of work being done in advance, so we took advantage of a number of open source projects and open APIs.
We knew we wanted to record, store and annotate phone calls. We wanted to let our users play back phone calls. To be able to do this, we used VOIP and a voice communication server called Asterisk. Asterisk lets us record calls, as well as notify our system of when a call is being made, and when it’s hung up. As a bonus, we can also control Asterisk via it’s powerful REST API, so we can place calls, record and play back voice memos, and a whole lot of other goodies.
In order to be able to notify our system that a call is being placed, and immediately notify the user that the call is taking place, we used the powerful Tornado web server. Tornado is the technology that powers FriendFeed, and the friendly people at FriendFeed and Facebook open sourced Tornado just a few weeks ago. Tornado is special in that it’s non-blocking. That means that our client, written in JavaScript, can keep a connection open to the server at all times, and notify the user whenever something happens in the system.
For building the client, we used the almighty jQuery for server communications, and jQuery Tools for the UI. The rest of the user interface is built and served with Django, the best tool available for rapidly building complex web applications.
A big thank you to Ted Valentin and Maria and Nils from SSES, without whom we would never have met all these talented and creative entrepreneurs and business people at the 24 hour business camp.
We would also like to thank the following people:
Björn Falkevik
Caroline Swärd at Pink News
Daniel Erkstam at Voice Corp
Daniel Gren at Sales Garden (another 24hbc project)
Fredrik Björck at Visente
Hans Grindal
Joakim Jardenberg
John Airaksinen
Linda Waxin at SpotlightPR
Magnus Hultman at Video Plaza
Nikolas Laios at Laios Webb & Analys
Ola Bengtsson at Hi-Media
Tomas Seo at Logotyp.se
Tomas Wennström at Vackert väder
Oskar Holmlund at OHdata
… And everybody who participated in 24hbc cheering us on and giving us help when we needed it!
Taken together, these people and technologies enabled us to create Goldfish CRM in 24 hours.