At the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference on Tuesday, Web telephony company Jaduka plans to announce the availability of its application programming interface, which will enable developers to create Web services that interact with the standard Public Switched Telephone Network, sometimes called PSTN.
Jaduka already offers some phone-oriented Web services such as click-to-call and disposable phone numbers, but it wants developers to build Web-based phone applications atop its voice communication platform. That platform is managed by Jaduka's parent company, enterprise telecom infrastructure provider NetworkIP.
Traditionally, "there was a huge hardware barrier to entry for anybody who wanted to just play around with telecom," said Trevor Baca, VP of software engineering for Jaduka.
By opening its API, Jaduka aims to remove that barrier and to bring in some revenue as well, since use of the phone network is metered. "If you want to send traffic over the public network, you have to pay money," Baca said.
For those able to write compelling code, the idea is to create an online phone-oriented service that pays for itself and then some.