Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days, outstrips competition

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/13/plivo-makes-it-to-50-countries-in-30-days-outstrips-competition/

by yabbadabbadoo • 14 years ago

88 45 14 years ago

fufulabs• 14 years ago

At least list out the 50 countries. After reading the blog post and hunting on their site for 10 minutes, i still cannot find the countries Plivo is compatible with.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Hey,

We are working on a blog post to do that as we speak you should have something within next 10 mins. Thanks for the patience.

sry_not4sale• 14 years ago

Except your blog is down!

kondro2• 14 years ago

The pricing page lets you discover pricing for inbound/outbound/messaging/numbers in the countries you are looking for.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

List is here on the blog: http://blog.plivo.com/post/29375534048/international-launch-...

Sorry for the delay.

manveru• 14 years ago

You list Europe as country?

eitland• 14 years ago

List of countries from the blog:

Americas: Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic, Peru, Puerto Rico

Europe & Middle East: UK, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland

Asia & Africa: Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa

casca2• 14 years ago

Twilio is the 800lb gorilla in this space in terms of buzz, but it's fantastic to see that there's strong competition offering a wider set of countries and better pricing. We're using Twilio because they meet our requirements and the great sign-up promo, but phone numbers are not very sticky.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Give www.plivo.com a roll and let us know your feedback :)

HorizonXP• 14 years ago

I'm actually going to try Plivo really soon for my PlayBook/BB10 app. I was going to use Twilio, but I ran into issues with their voice client. It doesn't seem like they want to resolve it. A pity, because it's likely a small issue with their Flash implementation.

With Plivo, it seems that I can get all the benefits of Twilio, at a better price, and it seems to be more open. Moreover, I can connect to it via SIP. And there are OSS libraries available to help me with that part.

hboon• 14 years ago

> phone numbers are not very sticky?

Can you elaborate on that?

casca2• 14 years ago

It's usually possible to move phone numbers between providers within the same country. In the past, phone number prefixes were used by telcos to route the calls meaning that it was very difficult to change your provider and keep your number. Great for the incumbent, not for customers and competitors.

kondro2• 14 years ago

I really like where Plivo is heading and Venky (bevenky@HN) is very helpful.

I love that Plivo is concentrating on features and functionality that make building a scalable product easy. It's one thing dealing with the pain of scaling telephone infrastructure, but Plivo is allowing us to more easily scale our backend control infrastructure too (primarily though callbacks).

Not to mention that we are based in Australia, a country that is generally ignored by this type of service.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Thanks kondro for the nice words. Happy to help :)

gabaix• 14 years ago

Why does this article feel like a YC ad?

"Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days". and "In many countries, setting up a phone solution is challenging and involves negotiations with carriers, hardware, and network configuration." Wouldn't that mean the startup has been working for some time to reach that scale? no offense for the startup, but the article sounds biased. I do not trust an article overly emphatic with few details.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Gabiax, the details are here at: http://blog.plivo.com/post/29375534048/international-launch-...

Honestly, we are just trying to make telephony easier across the globe. Its not a YC ad :)

jacques_chester• 14 years ago

> Why does this article feel like a YC ad?

Because it'll be a lightly-edited version of a press release that was sent to VentureBeat by Plivo.

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

Hi Plivo,

Can you guys work on the documentation? It's unclear after a few minutes how the SMS API works other than sending a text.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

We are working hard on this stuff. Any specific questions would request you to shoot us a mail at support@plivo.com or live chat on the site.

taf22• 14 years ago

You probably should try twilio than - their documentation is amazing provides web based interface to try any API call.

jdangu• 14 years ago

The business of adding a friendly web service on top of these SMS and IVR aggregators is already commoditized: Most aggregators will give you 10s of countries in a single integration.

Then it's a question of volume to reach higher tiers / lower costs, and/or getting enough funding to sustain low margins at launch.

Twilio has both the volume and the funding. Hopefully Plivo can differentiate through innovation.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Jdangu, glad you mentioned that. We already do. Our focus is not just reselling minutes. We allow you to bring your own carriers if you already relationships, and we support SIP if that matters.

Think Cloud hosting for telephony :)

rdl3• 14 years ago

I ended up not using Twilio because they didn't support SIP (I mean, JFC, that's like building a mail product which doesn't support SMTP, just because SMTP is kind of crappy).

Plivo supporting SIP out of the box means I'm a lot more interested, independent of price. Supporting wideband (G.722) would be my other requirement.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

we already support wideband and g722 specifically :)

welcome to the party

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

This may not be particularly useful information and maybe it is just me but I have a serious case of word aversion to the name Plivo.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.h...

http://www.good.is/post/why-do-we-hate-the-word-moist/

ad93611• 14 years ago

Sure, you may like this, http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml

rdl3• 14 years ago

Is Plivo hosted on AWS like Twilio?

bevenky17• 14 years ago

Not at all. AWS is a bad technology choice for Voice/Media servers. We run on 100% dedicated boxes for our Voice /Media servers which span multiple Data centers to ensure uptime.

And we can still scale as its needed.

corin_4• 14 years ago

I can see why one could argue against using AWS in a generic situation, but what specifically makes it bad for voice/media servers?

corin_4• 14 years ago

Seems that for some of these countries (at least the UK), Twilio is still some way ahead, in that Plivo can't do outbound SMS or freephone numbers.

Noticed an interesting price thing with Twilio while comparing, which seems misleading to me... The big numbers on https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing for the UK state 10c/min for mobiles, but lower down the smaller print shows that this price is only for a few prefixes (44751, 44754, 44759, 447500), and that most mobile numbers (all other 447) are 32c/min.

bevenky17• 14 years ago

we are working on adding freephone and outbound sms soon :)

corin_4• 14 years ago

While you're here, I just created an account, on your login form it says "Username/Email ID" but it only seems to work with username, not email.

Also, I'm sure you've already considered it so probably no point me mentioning it, but would be interested if you could share your reasoning for not offering the free credit like Twilio do. As a single point of data, I signed up for Twilio and started playing around because of that offer (even though it meant putting a little in myself), despite having no use for it at the time. Without it I probably wouldn't have bothered, whereas now I'm someone who, while never had the need to spend more than a few dollars here and there with them, am happy using their service as my go-to whenever I need any voip/sms stuff.

RileyJames• 14 years ago

Can someone port the Burner app to Plivo? or add the option to the original app.

Josh2600hz• 14 years ago

So you guys inked with Voxbone?

Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days, outstrips competition

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