During the second half of 2005 we started a number of different projects within Millenigence CBU. We wanted to leverage what we were doing on the other side of the house (EBU - Enterprise Business Unit) on VoiceXML and what we call the Device Abstraction Engine (DAE) - which is a core component of our DashPhone technology. I remember that a couple of these projects never really took off due to lack of APIs from other consumer services we wanted to connect to, namely Skype, which was very disappointing. While the messaging APIs and device APIs of Skype were well developed, they had virtually nothing on the voice side.
But what we were calling "a VoiceXML/DAE interface to RSS and Web Services APIs" went pretty well. We could get news feeds as well as item specific information from Amazon and deliver them to converged communication devices. So we started thinking in terms of making it a service, initially focused around shopping, which is one area that is - by nature - highly mobile.
The reaction within the engineering team and also the marketing team was very good. We had built an early "working" prototype, which we showed to different people within friends and family circles. Everybody liked it, which is partly due to its simple concept - it does not take a genius to understand how to use it.
People who saw it asked for it and were asking if they could keep using it. We took the results to the Board of Directors. They liked it too (the reaction from BoD was very positive in fact - we were not expecting such a warm reception).
So that's how Frucall became an official Millenigence CBU project - and the rest is, as they say, history...
Posted by nasser at March 6, 2006 08:45 PM