Twilio

Ecommerce Solutons Provider Cularis Uses Twilio to Save Time & Money

In this blog post, Twilio customer Alan Wizemann talks about how his company Cularis, an eCommerce solution provider, is saving time and money by routing calls, cutting tickets, and transcribing voice messages with Twilio.

Using Twilio at Cularis - by Alan Wizemann

We created a system that uses the Twilio API to handle our support calls. This has freed up several hours a day of time, but also allows us to do the following:

1. Automatically route the call based on the time of day and available support staff
2. Automatically create a recording of the support issue and transcribe the call
3. Import the transcription (through the call back) into our support system (active collab)
4. Track any open issue, phone, ticket, etc through one system!

We created this system to help us scale the release of our new product ShopIgniter - a real-time ecommerce solution. We will have support contracts that provide 24/7 support, and we will expand our Twilio system to automatically route calls to available staff, in different timezones if needed, so issues are addressed according to our SLA's. 

I'm also working on reading the transcription to find the email address to route the ticket further into verified email accounts of our clients (so we can pre-organize the tickets without any human assistance).  Our next step is to use real recordings instead of the voice provided by Twilio - to give it a more human feel.

I have to say Twilio is one of the easiest API's I have ever consumed. Period.

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Do you have a story about how you're using Twilio in your business?  We'd love to hear it, and share it with our customers and readers here on the Twilio blog.  Send your story to help@twilio.com

Congrats John Sheehan - You Won a Netbook with Simple Hotline!

Have you ever tried to organize an event for a large number of people, only to have plans changed at the last minute due to circumstances outside your control?  With Simple Hotline, John Sheehan can alert the members of his softball league when inclement weather hits and a game is rained out. 

As he says in his submission:

I've built SimpleHotline for the softball league that I play in. Most hotline services are expensive and overly complicated. Our league had just a basic set of requirements:

• Provide a number for people to call when the weather is ominous
• Let the Director update it from the fields
• Email voicemail messages left to the Director

Building this service with Twilio was incredibly easy. I put it together and tweaked it in just a single weekend. I also blogged about the technical details here and here.

Twilio's pay-as-you-go model works perfectly for this league. They only pay when there's bad weather which only happens 1-3 times per year. The hotline has help the league save money at a time when money is tight.

This Weeks Category: Deploy Twilio App on Heroku

The category last week was 'Coordinating People' and John's application demonstrates just how it easy it is to implement Twilio for real time communications about events going on in a community of people. 

This week, we've cooked up a special partnership between Twilio and Ruby hosting platform Heroku and we'll be giving a Netbook AND $300 in Heroku platform credit to this week's winner.  Visit the contest page to lear more about all the details for this week's category, and make sure to submit for your chance to win by Sunday, July 13th, at midnight.

Twilio Teams Up with Heroku for This Week's Netbook Giveaway!

Last week's winner to be announced shortly... stay tuned...

This week, Twilio teams up with Heroku to judge Ruby applications built with Twilio and deployed on Heroku's instant Ruby platform.

In addition to winning a Netbook, Heroku is generously adding $300 in Heroku platform credit to this week's prize, to spend on dynos, databases, etc.  Head over to the contest page for all the details; you have until midnight on July 13th to submit for a chance to win!

Need Some Inspiration, or a Little Motivation?

Morten over at Heroku created this fantastic video to demonstrate just how easy it is to create a Twilio application and deploy on Heroku.

How to create a Twilio app on Heroku from Morten Bagai on Vimeo.

QuickSchools.com Embraces SaaS, Uses Twilio for Click-to-Call

Over at the QuickSchools blog, Fariza Amir just wrote a substantial post on how the company is embracing SaaS.  This focus on Sofware as a Service is aligned with their proud claim to be the first fully online school management system. 

Among the service providers they are using to achieve this goal, they list Twilio and Basecamp.  Here's a quote from their blog, describing how they've implemented Twilio for Click-to-Call functionality:

If you’ve browsed to our website www.quickschools.com recently, you’ll notice that we have just deployed an application called Click-To-Call. What this does is that it allows anyone that visits our official site or uses our QuickSchools application to request that we call them, and the call is made automatically. This is a pretty nifty application, which lets us reach out to our customers in new ways. The Click-to-Call application uses a SaaS API called Twilio.

We love hearing from customers just how easy it is to get started and deploy Twilio, and one of my favorite quotes comes from another QuickSchools blog post over at the LeoLumpy blog, back in April:

This application is just perfect for our click-to-call apps. And you know what, it is so simple to deploy that you may just develop this on your own website or blog, in like 1 hour!

Hear Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson & CTO Evan Cooke Speak on VUC July 3rd

Every Friday at 12pm Eastern Time the VoIP Users Conference call features a thought leader in the voice communications world, and this week Twilio's Jeff Lawson and Evan Cooke will be interviewed for the program.  To sign up for the call, simply fill out this form and you'll receive a reminder call at 12pm Eastern (9am Pacific) on Friday, July 3rd.

Even cooler - the call you receive on Friday will be powered by Twilio!  

Special thanks to Dave Michels from PinDropSoup for connecting us with the folks running VoIP Users Conference.  To those of you who haven't seen it yet, definitely check out his blog on telephony, it's a good read.

If you're planning on listening to the show leave us a note in the comments and we'll try to give you a shout out!

Nathan & Joe Show Hits the Road - Tonight 7:30PM ET at Comix NY

The Nathan + Joe Show is the first live stage show based on the world of the internet, geared toward the tech nerd in everyone.

In addition to being sensationally funny on video, Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa have found one of the most creative uses yet for building an IVR with Twilio.  Give them a call to hear portions of their comedy act in a choose-your-own-adventure style performance:

1-887-JPBUNZZ

See Nathan & Joe LIVE in New York

If you're in New York you can see their act LIVE, tonight at Comix NY where they will be performing with Reggie Watts, John Gemberling, The Apple Sisters, and Max Headroom.  The dynamic duo have created interactive comedy bits featured at the HBO Comedy Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the BBC, NPR, and live on the Vegas strip.

As they say on their website:

The Nathan + Joe Internet Comedy Show isn’t just a bunch of viral videos you’ve seen a million times. It’s a show for lovers of comedy, as well as techno-geeks, featuring all original content about the Internet and the way it has changed the way we experience the world.  And it’s also about how the internet will inevitably teach robot computers how to destroy humanity.

A Little Taste of Awesome

Here's a sample of what you can look forward to from Nathan + Joe.  To see more, visit their website and YouTube channel:

Improve Your Memory with Simolio - Steve Castle Wins a Netbook!

Twilio's usefulness in the business context is simple: save money on the core telephony activities you engage in for business every day with a Twilio-powered PBX, IVR, answering service, call routing or other solution - at a fraction of the cost. 

While we've got many customers using Twilio in their businesses, we thought it would be fun to lighten things up a bit so last week we encouraged developers to explore the possibility of using Twilio for Fun & Games in last week's Netbook Contest category.

Winner Week #6: Simolio by Steve Castle

Based on the popular 1980s game Simon (play online), Simolio is a memory game where you call in and attempt to memorize and repeat patterns of numbers or sounds.

To give it a try, simply dial (866) 583-6913 with pin 1089-3785 and follow the prompts to begin the game.

Level 1 - Numbers

Level 2 - Sound effects

Level 3 - DTMF telephone tones

Week #7 Category: Get Together Now!

Have you ever tried to coordinate a large group of people for a meeting, meal, or other event?  Getting people together can be challenging, but with Twilio you can create all sorts of tools to make that process easier and more efficient.  This week, we challenge Twilio developers to submit applications that help people coordinate their plans.  Here are some ideas to get you started:

• An outbound application that calls all your guests to take a poll of their top restaurant choice, among a set of options.
• An inbound application that consults the calendars of your colleagues and proposes the best meeting times to the group.
• An application that checks your friend's travel plans (Dopplr) and gives you a call when you are in the same city, proposing you dine at places you both like (Yelp).
• An application that polls your CRM for sales leads nearby who you haven't met with in awhile, to help you fill time with cold calls between meetings.
• Automated reminders to employees of when they're scheduled to work, like Twilio customer Juma Ventures
• An outbound application to check with members of community groups, sports teams, and other organizations to confirm attendance for meetings, games, etc.
• Organizing community outreach and political canvassing

If these ideas sound interesting to you, or you've cooked up one of your own, head on over to our contest page to learn more and submit your application when you're ready.  The deadline for submissions is midnight on Sunday, July 5th, and we'll announce the winner the next day!

Google Voice Launch Imminent: Witnessing A Milestone in Telephony

by Evan Cooke, Twilio Co-Founder & CTO

This week is a big week for telephony.  After years of development, Google Voice is preparing to launch to the general public.

The launch is a milestone, in many respects:

1. It demonstrates that there is still innovation in the phone 130 years after the first telephone call.
2. It illustrates the benefits of tight integration between the web and the traditional phone network.
3. It introduces IVR concepts to a broader customer audience.  The idea that anyone can provision phone numbers (like DNS names) and route calls between them with user-defined logic is incredibly powerful.

While Google Voice isn’t explicitly extensible, you can route your Twilio calls to and from your Google Voice account.  Imagine you want to add a more complex routing function that depends on your local database; you could route certain calls from your Google Voice account to your Twilio provisioned number and handle the logic with Twilio.

Build Your Own Google Voice with Twilio

Twilio also offers all the basic building blocks needed to create your own mini-Google Voice:

•     Inbound/Outbound calling
•     Keypad Input and conditional call routing
•     Call screening
•     Voicemail recording
•     Speech-to-Text transcription

If you have cool mashups you’ve build with Google Voice and Twilio, please let us know: help@twilio.com

Alex Polvi Wins Twilio Netbook Contest Week #5 - Open Source It!

Congratulations to Alex Polvi, winner of this week's Netbook Contest in the Open Source It category!

Alex built Twilio + Nagios, an open sourced tool that integrates Twilio with the popular monitoring tool Nagios, which notifies webmasters when site and web services go down.

How Twilio + Nagios Works

As Alex describes on Github:

When nagios determines it is the time to send a notification it sends data to the nagios_twilio_pager.py script. This will fire off a request to Twilio, telling it to hit a specific URL for the host that had the problem. Twilio will then hit a url on the twilio_nagios responder, which will parse the nagios config and objects file to look up the current state. It then returns that information in Twilio XML, and the sysadmin gets alerted by a robot voice. Success.

Announcing Week #6 Category: Fun & Games

We've seen many examples of how Twilio can be used to support core functions of business, and now it's time to loosen up a little bit and have some fun!  What, you were already having fun because creating telephony apps with Twilio is so dang easy?  Good!

This week we challenge you to come up with a creative new use for Twilio that will entertain, delight, or amaze us.  Jokes, games, scavenger hunts -- if you can dream it up, you can do it and we're looking forward to featuring ALL the submissions on our blog over the coming weeks to share the joy and light-hearted good times with the entire Twilio developer community.

As always, there is a Netbook at stake here.  If you've been looking for the motivation to play with Twilio and create your first application, now is your chance to jump in and have some fun!

All the information about the contest can be found here, or if you're ready to submit head over here.

Ahoy Hoy Seattle! Join Twilio at nPost Networking Tomorrow Night @ Columbia City Theater

Come say hello, grab some Twilio stickers, and hang out with us tomorrow starting at 6pm at the nPost Startup Networkig & Demo event, at the Columbia City Theater.  Not only will you get to hear from our CEO Jeff Lawson; come check out presenting startups including: Mpire, Gist, eVenues, and ViaFo.

The event is organized by Nathan Kaiser, who writes the popular Pacific Northwest startup blog nPost, and we're excited to be a part of it.  To register, add yourself to the guest list.  The first 150 attendees to arrive also get a free drink ticket.

Other Happenings This Week

Can't make it to the nPost event in Seattle? Twilio is going to be at two other events focused on cloud computing this week in San Francisco.

 Wednesday, June 24th - CloudCamp San Francisco

CloudCamp is a cloud computing "unconference", that offers an unstructured format where individuals contribute their thoughts on various topics, and gather attendees to their sessions based on topical interest.

Thursday, June 25th - GigaOm's Structure '09

Structure is a conference for cloud computing and infrastructure, and this year's focus is on Putting the Cloud to Work.  Come find us at our table right near the front door to say hi and learn more about Twilio firsthand from the founders.

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Do you know of an event you think Twilio should be attending?  We'd love to be a part of your tweetups, conferences, and events - let us know at help@twilio.com