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The Information & Technology Magazine has published an article on Call Graph. Here’s the link to the online version.

http://www.itmagz.com/index.php/organizations-mainmenu/start-ups-organizations-mainmenu-58/469-callgraph-now-record-transcribe-and-share-skype-calls-for-free.html

A big thanks to Vandana for her efforts. Do have a look.

Thanks to Andy for making our day. He ran into some issues with an important podcast and but we managed to salvage his recording. Here’s his post about it.

http://www.speakersite.com/profiles/blogs/great-customer-service-trumps

Call Graph is still a beta software and things can go wrong once in a while. It has however been designed in a way that even if the PC crashes in between the recording, only a few seconds of the conversation will be lost. In case something does goes wrong, please do not hesitate to contact us.

It is truly heartening to see your efforts appreciated. Thanks to Andy for making us feel great about our work.

We crossed an important milestone this month: we made it into the second year! The Call Graph client was launched on March 8th 2008 in the first edition of DevCamp Bangalore. We launched the services part few months later, paid plans in November and since then we have been making revenues. Today Call Graph is mostly a ‘Ramen profitable‘ venture. That is, the revenues are just enough to sustain our operations and meet our living costs. The last year has been an incredible learning experience. We made mistakes, stumbled, recovered and somehow managed to survive. Not sure if we can keep doing that given the worsening economy, but for the time being, here are few lessons that we’ve learnt the hard way.

Its The Business Stupid

A new venture is always about creating a sustainable business.  It is almost never about the product or the service. Its about keeping enough coming in so that you can grow and get better with time. Coming from an engineering background its a very hard lesson to learn. The focus is always more on the product. The product is obviously very important. But never ever lose sight of the business. If the product is not creating a sustainable business then maybe you’re doing it wrong.

You’ll Be Lucky To Have One Percent Conversion Rate

For any internet product or service, its assumed that you’ll have a conversion rate of one percent. It could be number of paid to free users, signed up users to active users, etc. In our case it is the number of downloads to the number of registered users. We haven’t been able to achieve that 1 percent conversion rate yet. There are variety of reasons for that, one of the most important being the large number of international users. Its a simple chicken and egg problem. Support for Internationalization requires effort but we cant do it since we don’t have the resources and so on.

Free == Substandard Product

Its assumed that everything on the internet expected to be free. What we found was, giving it away for free creates this impression that its somehow substandard. This is especially true if your competitors charge. For Call Graph the business proposition necessitated that we offer it for free. But we had a incredibly hard time dispelling this illusion. Adding a purchase option helped a lot. That is in fact our most popular plan.

Turning Cash Flow Positive Is A Moving Target

Its never ever that one single feature or that one plan which does the trick for you. By the time you implement it, things have changed and the potential customers have disappeared. It’s rather a culmination of all those features and plan which add up. What we’ve learnt is to never rely on a single source of revenue. Especially in these recession times. You never know which one is going to earn your bread on any particular day!

Its A Survival Game

Someone once said that the first 3 years of a startup’s life are the toughest. After that you just get used to it! That statement sums it up. The world out there is tough and you need to evolve yourself with the only goal of surviving. Like as it happens in Cricket One Dayers, batting through the 50 overs matters the most. The more you’re out there, the bigger are the chances of making it.

Finally a big thanks to all our users who have helped us reach here. Thanks to all those who tried out Call Graph, pointed out the bugs and deficiencies and helped us improve it. You are simply the best!

All these issues have been fixed in version 1.3.0.0. Please download it here.

On some setups, Call Graph introduces a delay in the Skype call. It keeps on getting worse as the call goes along, ultimately making conversations impossible. As soon as recording is stopped things go back to normal. We are investigating the issue and it seems to be related to sound drivers. If you are experiencing this issue then here are few things you can do.

• Switch to Wave I/O mode instead of DirectSound. This was introduced in our latest update 1.1.1.2 and is available from the ‘Advanced’ panel of configuration. Note that on XP, Echo Cancellation will not be available in this mode. So you’ll have to use a headset and mic instead of the inbuilt mic and speaker of your laptop.
• Try with default recording parameters. Use the preset supplied in the sidebar of the configuration window.
• Try with wav encoding mode instead of mp3. The setting is on the ‘Recording’ tab of configuration.
• Install the latest version of DirectX runtime and try with DirectSound I/O.

If nothing works then please do not hesitate to leave a comment or get in touch with us. We’d be glad to help out.

The following version fixes the delay conversion issues. Please download and install them.

Fox Windows XP and higher

Someone left this comment in our uninstall feedback form.

A very good app. I did not use it so often however. For a freeware it is important to tell the “customers” how it is possible to make money. If the message is not clear one can suspect that the program does “things” with my computer. I dont want to suspect that at all, and therefore want to use FOSS-alternatvies.

First of all, thank you for the feedback and for trying out Call Graph. We appreciate it. Your concern is valid. The term ‘freeware’ is more commonly associated with Malware/Spyware. And since we are not an open source product, we have to answer the questions. Here it is.

The short answer is through premium services of Transcription and online storage. The long answer follows.

Call Graph is all about what happens to your recordings after it is done. Since you recorded the call it has some value for you. If not, then you’d most probably delete it right away. So our business model is built on the fact that for those records which are important to you, we can offer some services to you. Right now the premium services we offer are online storage and backup and transcription. Of course, only 1% of the all our users actually come back to us to use these services. That’s true for any internet venture and ours is no different.

Another revenue stream for us is ads. We have placed ads on the client, when you view the recordings or want to change the config (only in the Browser UI mode) and on CRIMS. These ads help us to cover the costs of distribution (hosting mainly).

We are also working on a another service which is indexing and search. If you have a lot of records stored, then obviously looking for a particular one can become a big pain. We already provide basic search services which uses the metadata of the record to look for the file. But our long term aim is to use keyword mining from the record itself and use those keywords for indexing the call record. A very rudimentary implementation is present in CRIMS. It still needs a lot of work though.

Right now we have a few paid customers for our services. A big thanks to all of you out there who have used our services and have come back for more. Call Graph is still very young and there are lot of more features planned. The year 2009 is going to be very important for us from the development perspective. So watch this space for more.

Also at some point in 2009, we’ll also apply for the Skype certification program. The test specifications provide us with a basic set of requirements and our intention is to meet them fully. Its a tough ask but we are confident that we’ll make it. After that Call Graph will no longer require manual authorization.

Last but not the least, we are a legitimate business entity and are covered by laws. We are accountable for our actions and we are committed to preserve the interests of our customers and investors. We want to categorically state that Call Graph does not contain any malware or spyware. It does not harm your PC in any way.

If you have more questions, do not hesitate to leave a comment or contact us directly.

If you havent seen this A/V feature on how to use Skype of recording interviews, then go through it right now. Its a must.

Great tips on how to optimize the Skype connection with a visual step by step guide. Here’s some additional one’s if you are using Call Graph.

• Record in the stereo mode and 16 KHz sampling rate. In the stereo mode incoming/outgoing voice data is encoding in a separate tracks which makes post editing a lot less painful.
• Use a headset instead of the inbuilt speaker and microphone of your laptop/notebook. Keeps unwanted noises down to the minimum.
• Keep the stats window open and keep an eye on it. If anything goes wrong during the recording, it will show up there.

And get it transcribed by us once the recording is done! its much easier to read through it than listen to it.

Call Graph supports two User Interface’s, an browser based UI and a minimal UI. The browser based UI launches the default browser and displays all the data there using scripts pulled from our website. The mimal UI consits only of a windows dialog for configuration and a toolbar. A detailed feature by feature comparison follows.

The interface can be switched anytime from the Advanced configuration tab.

Our goal always has been to provide a very simple easy to use Call Recording application. To that end we employed a very simple and sparse UI. It used to look like this.

A simple html window where all the records were listed with the options. Unfortunately this interface was also very restricted. We were looking for an easy and seamless way to integrate the desktop client with our web service.

So in the 1.1.0.0 update we completely removed this in built UI and instead embedded a small web server in our application. This enabled us to present the UI in a browser. And the result was this.

As you can see, this interface is far better than the previous one. Better listing, embedded flash player, search/sort/filter options and more responsive. We firmly believe that its a big step towards making our application and service better for our users.

What enables this UI is Javascript. We have used JS heavily. Whenever the history or configuration menu item is clicked, it launches the default browser pointing to a page on our web server. This page serves JS content which then does a cross-site query using JSONP to the local web server embedded in our client. The embedded web server then interfaces to the Sqlite backend and sends data back to the browser. The JS formats this data as html and the browser renders it.

The end effect is that you seem to be browsing a page on our web server but magically your local data turns up in the browser! Sounds scary right. How did my data end up being on your server? Did we steal it?

The short answer is no. The long answer is that we used XSS. XSS is a technique which which is widely used for phishing and other website related attacks. But has seen growing acceptability in the recent times. Several popular web API’s use it (eg. Twitter, Flickr, Google AdSense). When used for legitimate purposes it can be a very powerful tool.

But as Saul in his comment points out, it can also be used by hackers to inject malicious JS into our application and steal the local data from the computer. The point is valid and its good that someone raised it.

Yes. That is a possibility. And anticipating that we have taken several steps to prevent it from occurring. For starters, the http port of the client is dynamically generated. At each startup this port number changes. The web server also has inbuilt checks on the types of requests it responds to. It processes requests only from the localhost. The query string has strict checks. It does not open up the whole computer and does not serve any files. It is in fact a very limited implementation of a web server. The actual content of the call record, the mp3 content, is not fetched via XSS. The embedded flash player directly downloads it to its its cache. Going forward we also plan to put in SSL and encryption into it.

We have put in all the safeguards that we could think of to prevent such an attack. You are most welcome to have a look at the JS code. Its not minified at this point of time, so you can just browse through it. Please do have a look and let us know if we can improve on something.

On the question of us stealing your data, it should suffice to say that we are a legitimate business entity running a service for which we have paid users. We are fully committed to protecting your data and ensuring that nobody can gain unauthorized access to it.

Embedding a web server in a desktop application is not entirely a new concept. Google’s Desktop Search does that, although it uses static html pages. In the embedded systems programming world its fairly common technique. Using XSS along with it might be new. To be honest we don’t really know if there is a precedent. I am sure others have thought about it. But if we are the first to actually try it out, then allow us to take the credit for it. We think this is a very effective way of protecting the users data, while still delivering services from which add value to our customers. Our service is a hybrid between a desktop application and a web application. We want to provide our users with a seamless experience between the two. And this method allows us to do exactly that.

We hope this post clarifies any questions regarding our update. Feel free to post comments and discuss it here.

A big thanks to Jai Vikram at Desistartups for a comprehensive review of the Call Graph and our service CRIMS. Thank you so much guys. Do hop over and read the review.

Kamla Bhatt has an interview of Rajiv Poddar (that’s me ). Read it here.

Aashish of Pluggd.in shares the news of our service launch in his blog. Read more here.

And finally thanks to Brad about his tweet on Call Graph. You made our day.