I am happy to report that growth at Lypp is accelerating despite this crummy economy. It would seem as though many are looking to reduce travel costs by making use of teleconferencing and the like, which is good news for Lypp.

While contending with growth, we have been busy readying for the new Lypp 3.0 beta and things are looking rosy. I can’t tell you what we are doing but I can tell you the changes will have a positive impact on conferencing and will add significant value for our users. We should have a beta of the new service out by late fall all current users will be invited to trial the new service and the new price.

It might be a blood bath in the financial markets but the drop in the Canadian dollar has created an incentive for canucks to spend their money locally, which is good for some Canadian business, including Lypp.

Lypp charges in CDN $ which means that our customers not only save money but they can feel good about supporting a local business. This would mean nothing if our service was sub-par but it’s not, we compete with the best and offer features that most providers do not.

If you are a Canadian business and have not checked out the Conference Call Service Provider for Canada, you should.

Vancouver – June 18, 2008: We are happy to announce that Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery has joined the Lypp Advisory board.

“Oren brings significant experience relating to business development, startup management & growth and strategic funding methodologies”, commented Erik Lagerway, CEO “We needed a mentor that understood the value in our API business and someone who could help use grow that business. Oren not only understands how to grow that style of business but has done it successfully in the past and is doing it today via his own startup – Mashery.”

Oren joins the existing members of the Lypp Advisory Board:

Oren Michels, CEO & Founder Mashery
Oren’s LinkedIn Profile

Oren Michels brings more than 15 years of experience to his job as CEO of Mashery. Michels has a proven track record with experience across multiple industries. Previously, Michels was vice president of business development at Feedster, where he negotiated partnerships with AOL, Real Networks and Mitsui, and oversaw the company’s activities in China. Prior to Feedster, Michels was president of Colt HR, a leading provider of outsourced benefits administration software and services to the mid market. He also co-founded WiFinder, an international provider of directory services for wi-fi public access hotspots; served as president of winebid.com, where he managed the company’s growth and helped establish it as a leading online wine auction market; served as COO of two manufacturing companies; and as CEO of The Groundlings, an entertainment production company in Hollywood.

Michels began his career as a software designer for Hughes Aircraft and has been a consultant to companies in the management, financial, marketing and information technology industries. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial studies from UCLA’s Anderson School.

Oren joins the existing members of the Lypp Advisory Board:

Daniel Gibbons, CEO Carrie & Danielle
Dan’s LinkedIn Profile

Daniel is an experienced technology entrepreneur and marketing and social media expert. He co-founded and served as VP of Marketing for Gaboogie, which under the Lypp brand delivers quick and reliable conference call services and provides developers with the simplest and most flexible VoIP API for integrating telephony into existing applications and web services. Daniel is also the Publisher and Executive Creative Director for Shine Media Inc., publisher of the multi-award winning Orange Life Magazine, and earlier founded and later sold sandglassair Inc., which provided online campaign management and analytics software to clients including Mercedes-Benz USA, Sprint, the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority and the Alberta Government.

Daniel currently serves as a Director of Gaboogie Canada Inc. and was recently appointed as CEO for a Vancouver-based stealth startup, Carrie & Danielle a social media application for the LOHAS market.

Bruce Livingstone, EVP Getty Images, CEO & Founder iStockphoto.com, Chairman Paperthinwalls.com, Chairmain Evolvs.com
Bruce’s LinkedIn Profile

Bruce Livingstone has spent his career in the graphic design/marketing and photography industries for over 10 years. The last seven years he has acted as his own entrepreneurial incubator as the ex-President and now CEO of iStockphoto.com, iStockpro.com, Webcorelabs.com and Evolvs.com. In the past decade he worked for Image Club Graphics, Aldus Corp., Adobe Inc. and a handful of advertising agencies and pre-press facilities. Bruce founded his first media company, Frequency Labs Inc. in 1997 (now Evolvs Media Inc.). He spends most of his days in the marketing, editorial and application development departments.

Danny Robinson, Founder & Chairman Peerflix
Danny’s LinkedIn Profile

Danny has served as Chairman since the inception of Peerflix in 2004. Danny provides strategic and technical vision for Peerflix. Danny is a serial entrepreneur with several years of experience in retail distribution, information technology and executive management. Prior to Peerflix, he was co-Founder of iFind Media Systems, makers of large-format, interactive, way-finding and advertising technology for public places. Previously, he was Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Spinway, Inc., a pioneer technology company that developed e-commerce and private-label ISP solutions for leading brick and mortar retailers. Under Danny’s stewardship, Spinway grew to 8 million registered users in less than one year, before being acquired by Kmart’s (NYSE:KM) BlueLight.com in 2000. Spinway investors included Mobius (then SoftBANK), Spectrum Equity, and Deutche Banc Alex Brown.

In preparation for the 37 Signals Mashup we have been putting some extra effort into bolstering the Lypp Telephony API. Here is what has been added and will be released soon:

Call Recording
Leveraging Amazon Web Services (S3) Conference Call Recording has been part of the Lypp Service for a while now, it's part of the Lypp Telephony API on the next update.

Master User Creation
Master account creation for Service Providers and Private Labeling.

My comments are busted but if you want to see something added not already part of the API let us know.

+

We have had some great early  feedback on this mashup which has motivated us to make a few updates to the API prior to opening the mashup doors . We are improving upon a few things, including…

- Better user creation and management
- Updating conferences with single REST call with multiple variables, instead of multiple REST calls

Due to these and other updates we are pushing back the entry date for the 37 Signals Highrise and Gaboogie Lypp Mashup to April 15th. We will be posting another announcement here on that day inviting everyone who wants a piece of the action to sign up.

In the meantime, go check out the APIs: Highrise, Lypp
The original post.

Building a click-to-call or click-to-talk “call button” application is not hard. In fact, it’s so easy it would likely take you less than a day to build it using the Lypp API but I am saying 7 days, I too can be a lazy-ass.

If you want to go head-to-head with the likes of Google, Jajah, Jaxtr, Jangl, Skype, eStara or anyone else in this game you can literally do it overnight using the Lypp API.

Below is a description of these elements:

scheduled-to-start-at
The time the conference should start at. Can be in many different forms, below are some examples:
Relative Times

* now
* thursday
* november
* friday 13:00
* mon 2:35
* 4pm
* 6 in the morning
* friday 1pm
* sat 7 in the evening
* today
* tomorrow
* this tuesday
* next month
* this morning
* this second
* tomorrow at 6:45pm

If you saw the reference to “conferences” above you will likely have guessed that our API can handle not just click-to -call for a one-to-one callback scenario but could easily serve as a click-to-conference call button. This could be used for weekly team meetings where the same people are in the call all the time but the time for the meetings vary.

Get coding already!

Some may argue that the term “Easy Conference Call” is an oxymoron and the animal is simply not real. Over the past few years I have logged more time on conference calls than I care to admit, and I dreaded the idea of yet another conference call.

It was getting so bad that I was starting to be quite late and miss conference calls completely. At the time, I am certain that my subconscious mind made sure I missed those calls. Let’s be honest, even a good conference call is likely not the highlight of anyones day.

I was on so many conference calls per week that I could not keep track of which dial-in information was to be used for each teleconference. I tried everything. I had Google SMSing me my teleconference information so I would have it on my cell phone just before the meeting. But sometimes I would not see the SMS come through, likely because I was distracted or maybe… working? So I would miss the call again.

It was bloody frustrating and sometimes quite embarrassing, especially if I was the one who set up the call! The whole thing really started to get under my skin.

I started thinking of ways to try and solve the problem. The Christmas before last my family and I went to Hawaii. By the time we landed my mind was full of ideas, I started writing them down. What I came up with was Gaboogie (gah-boo-gee). Half “Gab” and half “Boogie”, as in “talk and get on with it already”. Weird name I know but I wanted something unique and easy to trademark.

So I talked to a few people about the idea. My brother who ran a digital media company in Australia and colleague of mine from Shift Networks said they might be interested in being involved in the project. One thing lead to another and Gaboogie was born.

Together, Randy, Dan and I invested our own cash into the project and started mocking up the first Easy Conference Call service. A few short months later it was launched on Gaboogie.com. Here are some of the flash tutorials from that first service.

The Gaboogie service received quite a bit of press on launch and things were looking rather rosy. We had great traction in the market and companies started signing up and were paying to use the service. The feeling of euphoria didn’t last long, we started having significant problems. The system was a beautiful thing to look at but the usability wasn’t there and the VoIP switching infrastructure we built on was not holding up. Our engineers tried their best but jsut couldn’t pull it off. Both of them left the company soon after launch. The mood at the Lagerway household was not exactly cheery.

Determined not to let the situation get the better of me I started the hunt for an engineer that could lead the charge and make things right. We went through a few consultants but all had plenty of work and none were interested in tying themselves to just one project. I found Michael Deering, a talented Ruby on Rails engineer in Edmonton that showed real interest in taking the lead on re-engineering a solution that would scale.

Michael Deering joined as a consultant himself but just after a few short weeks he was so convinced that gaboogie was solving a real problem he joined full time. Not only did he join, Michael put a good chunk of his own after tax dollars into the company. Things started to look up again.

In and effort to retain some good will with our customers we took down the Gaboogie service and refunded everyone’s money. We started to rebuild. This time things would be much different.

We partnered with strong switching and networking vendors and who had a track record for success. We focused all of our engineering effort on building a robust API that any developer could leverage to build a telephony application. We used the API to build our first new application, Lypp Mobile Conferencing.

Lypp Mobile Conferencing was a simple offering that allowed users to make phone calls from any IM (Instant Messaging) interface to any phone in North America. All a user had to do was to send a command to their Lypp buddy, e.g. “call 6049741150″. The system would first call the person making the call and then would connect that person with the other party. On launch we again received some fanfare and the userbase climbed enough for us to flush out the bugs and find the potential weak spots in our system.

A few more months and many long days/nights went by and we finally hit pay dirt. Our new conferencing service, “Lypp: Next Generation Conference Calling” and our flagship Lypp API are finally ready for public abuse.

We are pretty excited about this new conferencing service and our revised Telephony API. Now it’s time to put the sales hat on. Let the fun begin!

The term API (Application Programming Interface) has been used primarily by the web application crowd and more specifically the Web 2.0 developers. Wikipedia says: An API is really a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by computer programs.^[1]

SDK (Software Development Kit) is used more by traditional software development shops when describing a software development tool kit for client and/or server software. So what does wikipedia say about SDKs:
A software development kit (SDK or “devkit“) is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar.

So are they really all that different? No, I don’t think so. But for me the API speaks to web services and the SDKs are more a core software tool kit. For now Lypp will stay with the term API, give me some time and you may even see an SDK!

We’re excited to announce that Lypp will be presenting at the Under the Radar Mobility conference, on November 15th at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. We’ll be showcasing our own application and some innovative things people are doing with Lypp’s brand spanking new VoIP API.

Let us know if you’re also attending and would like to meet up with us while we’re there.

VANCOUVER, October 2, 2007 – Lypp (http://lypp.com) announced today the availability of its first API (Application Programming Interface) and wholesale VoIP termination service, decreasing time to market for developers when integrating VoIP into any application.

“We have built a REST-based VoIP API that will fast track VoIP Integration for any developer that understands XML,” said Lypp CEO Erik Lagerway. “Until now the only way developers could integrate scalable and reliable telephony was through acquisition of expensive equipment and infrastructure. Lypp has removed those barriers by building a simple API and allowing our customers to leverage our access to the North American PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) including but not limited to TELUS, Rogers, Bell, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, SBC and BellSouth, through the most trusted interconnect providers in the business including Level 3, Global Crossing and XO. We are working with the best partners to deliver the best call experience in North America and we’re excited that our partners can leverage our API to deliver this experience to their customers.”

The Lypp API enables rapid VoIP feature implementation, including: Click-to-Call and Click-to-Conference, virtual phone booth calling features, and integration of basic and advanced telephony such as embedded email and profile call links for FaceBook, MySpace and other web-based applications and services.

The Lypp API is available online now at http://lypp.com/api. To obtain a username and password for the API developers will need to put in a request by email to api@lypp.com.

About Lypp

Lypp is disrupting the telecommunications industry by using the data
connections and applications that already exist on cell phones and mobile
devices to give users features and pricing that the wireless carriers don’t,
won’t or can’t offer. Lypp also provides wholesale services leveraging its
REST-based API to enable integration of VoIP features with other web-based
applications and services.

The Lypp service is operated and owned by Gaboogie Canada Inc.

For further information: Daniel Gibbons, (778) 998-9543, press@lypp.com

A step by step description on how to make cheap/free phone calls using GTalk and Lypp on a Blackberry.

You will first need a Lypp.com account, get one here.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

You’re DONE! Start making calls!

Invite others to join Lypp!

You can see the entire Flickr image stream here.

Lypp is growing and we need a couple of solid Rails developers to round off our small team.

As a Ruby on Rails Developer you will be responsible for the design and coding of Lypp Web Applications and APIs. If any of the following match your experience, we’d love to hear from you:

* Ruby on Rails (commercially deployed apps)
* Web application / API design and development
* Experience with libraries such as Prototype
* REST, HTTP, XML, microformats, Web API’s
* Languages (in order of importance): Ruby, PHP, Python
* Very good working knowledge of DBs; PostgreSQL, MySQL

Responsibilities:
* Design and deliver Lypp web applications and APIs.
* Execute, test and document as it relates to your every day duties for projects
* Meet or exceed internal deadlines as needed
* Complete project milestones with a high degree of schedule accuracy and quality from requirements to testing and implementation

Attributes:
* Excellent command of English Language plus great communication and interpersonal skills
* Strong enthusiasm / Self-motivation / Can-Do attitude
* Results-driven personality who excels in challenging work and diverse responsibilities
* Experience working in a team-oriented development environment
* Technical degree/diploma (University CS degree preferred)
* 4-5 years of experience programming of software and web applications
* A commitment to upgrading technical skills

Most of all, you must ENJOY what you do. We are in Vancouver, BC., not that you must move here but we would like it if you did.

Send your resume in PDF to erik AT lypp dot com.

So when we told Mike that we were working on this new group calling project, and considering we mentioned that it was to remain undercover, we did not expect to see it posted immediately after on TechCrunch. Since it is I guess the cat is out of the bag.

Lypp will go live in a couple of weeks, until then you can send us an email requesting to get on the beta list.