#opencnam

 Hello everyone! Several months ago we completely redesigned our CNAM service ([OpenCNAM](https://www.opencnam.com/)), wrote a new backend API, and started a public beta program. Through the duration of our beta program we signed up several hundred users, did hundreds of millions of CNAM lookups, fixed a lot of bugs, and made a lot of system improvements. Over the last few months we've been working to close our beta program and publicly launch OpenCNAM. We (the entire OpenCNAM team) are extremely happy to introduce you to the new OpenCNAM website: https://www.opencnam.com/ We've redesigned the site from the ground up to be simple, usable, and quick. You can now create accounts automatically, make one time deposits with either typical debit / credit cards OR bitcoin, and even configure automatic billing to prevent your account balance from running out. We've also rolled out our two new public OpenCNAM plans: - Our Hobbyist Tier, which allows you to do 60 cached CNAM lookups per hour, and requires no account, no registration, and no signup. - Our Professional Tier, which returns only real-time CNAM information, and costs $.004 (four tenths of a cent) per successful query. We'd love for you to check out the new site, play around with things, and let us know what you think: https://www.opencnam.com/ - The OpenCNAM Team

 While our blog has been quiet for a while now, I'm hoping to change that. To get things kickstarted, I thought I'd share some of the neat things we've been working on over the past several months here at Telephony Research. # Growing OpenCNAM Since we launched [OpenCNAM](https://www.opencnam.com/) a few months ago, we've been lucky enough to see an enormous developer response. From day one, we've been inundated with beta requests, private contracts, open source integrations, and essentially--more business than we could handle. To our complete surprise, even months after launch, we're still signing up a handful of beta users every day. Since we received such an enormous response, we've been working hard over the past few months to: - Launch a public developer portal with integrated billing, API metrics, and other standard stats. - Completely rewrite our API documentation to make OpenCNAM even more accessible to new users. - Develop a large amount of high-quality OpenCNAM plugins for various phone systems, programming languages, and hardware devices. - Decrease API response times as much as possible. - Scale to support increased developer demand. I'm happy to announce that to date, we've already made significant progress in all these target areas, and are quickly approaching a public launch! Not only have we completely rewritten our API backend for speed, but we've made several other internal optimizations which will have a large effect once deployed. Our number one concern is still to make OpenCNAM the simplest, most elegant, and most affordable way to get accurate caller ID name information. Watch out telcos, **we're coming for you**! # Building a General Purpose API While OpenCNAM is currently our only public API service, we've actually been hard at work on another API company behind the scenes as well. While I won't divulge too much information at this point, we're in the process of building a general purpose telephony data API that will allow you to (among other things): - Get CNAM information. - Get location information. - Get carrier information. - Get email-to-SMS domain information. - Get equipment information. - And much more. This process has been ongoing for quite some time now, but we're doing our best to finish things up, and get a beta online. Our hope is that our soon to come general purpose API will be a one stop telephony data service. # Building our Brand Since we currently have a variety of active services and products, one of the things we're in the process of is unifying our brand, and getting all our design in order. This includes redoing the design for a majority of our web properties, this blog, and building an official company site. Our goal in the future is to have a developer friendly company site which fully explains our goals, ambition, purpose, and provides plenty of information for curious developers looking to see what we do. We're hoping this will allow us to more easily manage our services in the future, and provide a home base for our product news, blog, open source contributions, and a variety of other things. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed for future updates!

 The Free CNAM Project was launched less than 10 months ago, in response to a large number of requests for access to the API backend used by [http://tnid.us/](http://tnid.us). In the months since its inception, FreeCNAM.org has grown in popularity, becoming the de facto source for Caller ID Name in the PBX developer and hobbyist communities. Expanding demand, coupled with requests for high-availability, carrier-grade service, led to the need for a complete ground-up rebuild of the entire system. We, at Telephony Research Services, are proud to announce that this rebuild is complete, and that this high-availability, carrier-grade service has entered beta testing. Tomorrow, the Free CNAM servers will be switched off. With a few simple keystrokes, this project will come to a close; an end to an era, and the beginning of another. Like the phoenix emerging from its ashes, FreeCNAM is reborn as OpenCNAM. OpenCNAM is **completely free to most users**, allowing 60 dips per hour without registration. For those requiring higher volume, an API key is required. Although pricing has not yet been established, once the beta period is over we expect to charge around $0.001 per successful query. We invite former FreeCNAM users to participate in our beta. Beta participants will be allowed unlimited free CNAM dips during the entirety of the beta period, and will be offered discounted rates should they decide to become customers at the end of the beta period. Please contact [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) to request an API key for OpenCNAM. - OpenCNAM Project: [https://www.opencnam.com/](https://www.opencnam.com/) - Documentation: [https://docs.opencnam.com/](https://docs.opencnam.com/) - Sample Code: [https://github.com/telephonyresearch](https://github.com/telephonyresearch)

 Hello fellow programmers. As you may know, here at Telephony Research, we like to build cool things. Several weeks ago we [announced](http://blog.telephonyresearch.com/making-caller-id-more-accessible) a new project we've been building ([OpenCNAM](https://www.opencnam.com/)) that we hope will make getting caller ID data as easy as possible. Since we're all programmers, I won't bore you with the non-technical details about why we built OpenCNAM. All you need to know is that OpenCNAM now has: - A beautiful REST API ([read our docs](https://docs.opencnam.com/)). - A brand new Python API that makes getting caller ID information a piece of cake. Here's some python code below (using our new [python-opencnam project](https://github.com/telephonyresearch/python-opencnam)) that loops through 60 US phone numbers, printing out their caller ID name information: As you can see, all we're really doing here is importing the **Phone** class, and then building **Phone** objects, and printing off both their **number** and **cnam** (caller ID name) attributes. I challenge you to find a simpler way (in Python) to get caller ID name information. Anyhow, if you're building an application that could benefit from caller ID--why not give [python-opencnam](https://github.com/telephonyresearch/python-opencnam) a try? In addition to it's insanely simple usage, here are some other benefits: - It's getting data straight from the public telephone network. This means you're getting REAL caller ID name information. The same stuff that your telephone company sends all over the world. We don't modify or taint the data at all. - It supports almost any imaginable format of US phone number. You can do lookups for '+1 222 333 \\\\\.....4444', and it'll handle it just fine. Why even bother parsing input? Don't waste your time! - [OpenCNAM](http://www.opencnam.com/) has a generous free tier. No API key needed. You can make up to 60 requests per minute (for free). Once the paid version is available, you'll be able to register and optionally specify an API key so you can make unlimited queries without throttling. Seriously though, if you're looking to build any sort of telephony related project, give us a try! Furthermore: if you're using our API, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to send us an email ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])). We're planning on writing some featured articles here on our blog, all about projects that programmers have built using us as a backend. And if you have any questions or comments, leave a comment.

 Since the BETA launch of our company, [opencnam](https://www.opencnam.com), I've been thinking of fun apps to build that use the API. In the off chance you haven't heard, opencnam is an API company for programmers (like you and I) that provides caller ID name data. opencnam lets you build cool data applications, phone applications, and pretty much anything else that can benefit from knowing more about a person given their phone number. The other day I had an hour or so to hack on something, so I quickly brainstormed a CLI app that will take in a phone number and spit out the caller ID associated with that number. The app is called [cnam](https://github.com/telephonyresearch/cnam), and is available on our public [GitHub account](https://github.com/telephonyresearch). To install cnam on any debian-based OS, install the python-pip package, and then run the command `sudo pip install cnam`. Once you've got the package installed, you can lookup any caller ID information by running the command `cnam phone_number`. Here are a couple examples: The cnam command accepts 10-digit phone numbers in almost any format. Any characters you use in defining the phone number are stripped out, so you can represent it in almost any form imaginable. If you're a python programmer, be sure to check out the cnam source code. It's a great example app that shows how to use the opencnam API in a simple manner. As usual, be sure to follow our RSS feed! Although we don't have many posts here yet, over the coming weeks and months we'll be writing about our startup journeys and technical escapades!

 As I mentioned in my [last post](http://telephonyresearch.tumblr.com/post/25205944976/caller-id-sucks), caller ID sucks. Here at Telephony Research, we're continuously looking for new ways to make telephony more accessible for developers. To this end, we're currently building a new API company for developers, [opencnam](https://www.opencnam.com/), that will make getting caller ID data a breeze. I've talked about this before, but the fact remains: if you're a programmer trying to get / use caller ID data--you're out of luck. Caller ID data is typically expensive, hard to get (there are no API companies around that provide this data in an easily consumable format), and ugly. opencnam will change this. # opencnam: Caller ID Made Easy While opencnam is still in BETA mode, it's already improving the telephony data landscape by providing accurate, up-to-date, and cheap (free!) caller ID information for programmers like you and I, who want access to telephony data without the bullshit. To make getting started with opencnam easy, we've specifically architectured the API to be as simple as possible. Here are some of the cool features you'll notice right off the bat: - You don't need to register on our site to use the API. - You don't need an API key. - You don't need to give us money (we do have a paid plan coming, but that will be for serious production application usage). - We support all the popular serialization formats: plain text, JSON, JSONP, YAML, and XML. - Our responses are FAST. - Our free tier is generous: you can make 60 requests per hour before throttling kicks in. That's more than enough for most small applications. - We do everything over HTTPs to keep your data safe. - We have awesome [documentation](https://docs.opencnam.com/). - We're available in [IRC](irc://irc.freenode.net/#opencnam) to help with questions / implementation. And when I say the API is easy to use, I really do mean it. Don't beleive me? Give this a try right now: `curl https://api.opencnam.com/v1/phone/2024561111?format=text` Easy, right? # Our Goals Our goal with opencnam is to make caller ID easy. We're tired of going through hoops to do things that should be simple. As with all our projects, we want to modernize the telephony industry. We want to make the entire telephony world simpler, more accessible, and most of all--**more fun**. Despite the bad reputation telephony has for being impossible to learn and use, there are a lot of awesome things telephony lets you do. As programmers and hackers ourselves, we want you to be able to have as much fun writing telephony code as we do. If you're interested in learning more about our adventures to revolutionize the telephony world, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed!