Jordy Blog

Custom Communication Apps

My brother and business partner Gabe will be helping to lead a discussion on FreeSWITCH and Asterisk at the the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow.

Gabe is the CTO of our small startup company (Izeni), and our team has built, and continues to build, some pretty cool projects based on these (and other) open source telephony technologies.

Some of the recent FreeSWITCH customization projects we’ve built for our clients include a custom call center that can handle up to 100 concurrent agents on commodity hardware, and a distributed SIP load tester that’s capable of pushing thousands of concurrent SIP calls (suitable for stress testing extremely large telephony infrastructures).

But those are just 2 examples of the many ways a company can customize a free software phone switch to enhance their current products or services with open source telephony. Whether you need a hosted IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution, or just some method to bridge phone calls, record calls, make outbound calls, etc; FreeSWITCH and Asterisk are up to the task.

Anyway, if you’re in Utah and are interested in learning more about Open Source telephony, you should come by tomorrow to check out the discussion. You can also can review the (expansive) FreeSWITCH and Asterisk feature sets. And if you need some phone-related development done for your company, that kind of work is highly specialized, easy to outsource, and right up our alley. We’d love to help!

Along those same lines is something that’s been on my mind lately: I’d be interested in starting a Utah FreeSWITCH Users Group, originally meeting in only in Utah Valley, but hopefully spreading as the FreeSWITCH project comes into more common usage. If you’re local and would be interesting in participating (or leading), please let me know.

And if you think of some way you’d like to have your product interact with phones, text messages, even IM –that’s just what we do. We’d love to help you work through it –even if it’s just to help you see what’s possible.

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Got Contract Work?

Gabe and I want to be sure that our start up company, Izeni, has a cash runway that’s long enough to ensure that we can have a proper lift off. To that end we’ve been doing some consulting and contract work (mostly low-hanging fruit) to slow our burn rate, and it’s worked fairly well because we’re in bootstrapping mode and our expenses are relativity low. So, although we’ve never really sought contract work, we do like it; and I thought I’d do a quick post officially soliciting it.

So without further ado, Izeni will be accepting all kinds of technical consulting and contract work. Our specialities are Python coding; website development (particularly using the Django framework); Linux systems administration (Apache, *SQL, Postfix, Mailman, IPtables, Samba, Bash, etc.); and VoIP-based telephony (Asterisk and Freeswitch).

We can also do general computer and network support, online marketing, and a myriad of other technical and business odds and ends.  :)

Izeni is based out of Utah, but we can also telecommute.

Please let me know if you have any contracting and consulting opportunities or know of any companies looking for web guys, programmers, or other technical contractors. Otherwise, feel free to repost this (pass the word along), or just keep us in mind.

Utah Asterisk Users Group Formed

From their post:

“We will have our first Utah Asterisk Users’ Group meeting January 11th at 7:00 pm. it will be held in the conference room of the executive suites at Willow Creek Plaza. The address is 8160 S. Highland Drive, Sandy UT.

“We will be giving out free DID’s to all in attendance. We will also be giving out a few paperback O’Reilly books.

“Here is a tentative schedule for our first meeting:
7:00 refreshments
7:05 welcome
7:10 discussion about pronunciation of UTAUG
7:12 vote
7:15 Dave Packham! (Author of config Edit)
7:34 refreshments
7:40 more interesting speaking
7:45 raffle and games
7:46 Jared Smith! (Author of IAX2 Trunking )
8:00 refreshments
8:06 determine UTAUG objectives
8:15 mystery activity
and more!

UTAUG map and driving directions

This is great news for open source fans in Utah. Asterisk is an open source PBX that totally rules.

Update:

My company now does contract and consulting work to support Asterisk, OpenSIPS (OpenSER), FreeSWITCH and other VoIP / telephony servers and applications. We have a lot of experience and a broad industry knowledge, so if you need some paid support, please let me know and we’d be happy to help!