For the past several months, I’ve been working with some really great friends of mine on a startup, OpenCNAM. As some of you know, I have a lot of experience doing telephony development: primarily building large back end systems.

Since I started hacking telephony code (almost 4 years ago), one thing that has always bothered me is how hard it is to find (and use) telephony data. As anyone in the telephony industry will tell you: the industry is huge, old, and fragmented.

Even the simplest of all things: getting someone’s caller ID name information given a telephone number is tremendously difficult. The way caller ID works on the PSTN (public telephone network) is insane. Caller ID information is fragmented, stored in huge carrier databases, and there is no simple way to extract the information.

For programmers (like me), this makes building telephony applications a nightmare. Frankly, we were tired of jumping through hoops to get simple caller ID data, and decided to do something about it.

OpenCNAM - Caller ID Made Simple

OpenCNAM is an API company designed from the ground-up to be as simple as possible. The main idea is to make getting caller ID information easy–really easy. No more negotiating deals with telco providers and surfing through endless pages of Google looking for relevant information.

If you’re a programmer looking to use caller ID information in your software, and you can’t get something working within 5 minutes of visiting our website, we’ve failed our mission.

In the spirit of making things as simple as possible, OpenCNAM also has a generous free tier. That’s right. If you’re writing an application that does less than 60 queries per hour, you don’t even need an account with us! All you have to do is hit our API endpoint, and BAM, you get results back. It’s that easy.

Need to do more than 60 queries per hour? No problem. Once we’re out of beta you’ll be able to create an account, add some funds, and pay for exactly what you use (with automatic volume discounts). 

NOTE: If you’d like to give our beta a try, send an email to support@opencnam.com and we’ll get you an API key.

With 17,717,475 successful queries and counting, OpenCNAM is already taking off. If you do any telephony development at all, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Over the coming months, I’ll be spending more time writing about my startup journeys, so be sure to check back!