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Twilio Open Sources Stashboard, the Status Dashboard

Some of you may have noticed Twilio's shiny new API Status page at http://status.twilio.com.  We're excited to announce that Twilio finally has a modern status page and not only that, we open source it!  Yup, you too can download the code and host your own SaaS or API status page. Learn more at http://www.stashboard.org.

Introducing Stashboard

Stashboard is a status dashboard for APIs and software services. It's similar to the Amazon AWS Status Page or the Google Apps Status Page. Businesses and individuals have come to rely on hosted APIs and cloud service providers for email, CRM, sales, phones and more, however, many have poor or non-existent status pages.  Enter Stashboard!  

Stashboard is designed to provide a generic status dashboard for any hosted service or API. The code can be downloaded, customized, and run on any Google App Engine account.

     • Manage the status of many API or SaaS services

    • Set custom status messages and icons such as Up/Down

    • Show historical status for each service

    • Runs on Google App Engine so it's independent of your in-house infrastructure (unless your app is on GAE)

    • Full REST API for both getting and setting status information

    • CNAME to http://status.yourapp.com

    • Rich client or basic rendering architecture

Stashboard is written in Python and hosted on Google App Engine.

Head over to stashboard.appspot.com to try the latest version.

It's Got APIs, Too

 Twilio's new status page and Stashboard also support a full REST API to let you both push and pull events and service status information.

(1) Getting status data: using the REST API you can request status data and integrate realtime data into your web application.  For example, at Twilio we use the REST API to add a banner to the top of our internal intranet to inform all employees about the status of our APIs.

 (2) Putting status data: you can also add new events and change status information using the Stashboard REST API (using the authenticated methods).  For example, you could wired up your Nagios, PagerDuty, or internal application alerts to automatically update your status page.

We hope you enjoy Stashboard!  Drop us a line if you deploy it for your app or have any questions.

 

WordPress.com Launches Twilio-Powered Blog by Phone Feature

In a blog post this morning Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, shared the latest feature for WordPress.com users who have hosted blogs with the service: the ability to phone your blog.

Update: This feature has picked up some press today, which is pretty cool.  Check out the news stories covering this feature:

• Mashable: WordPress Now Lets You Phone In Your Blog Posts
• Mobile Beat: WordPress Lets You Leave a Voice Message on Your Blog

As Matt explains:

The future is now, folks. You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you’re done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)

So now you can post to your WordPress via the web, email, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, desktop clients, and now any telephone in the world. Of course when you post it can be pushed to Facebook, Twitter, and more using the Publicize feature. What more could you want?

We're excited to be powering a feature that is sure to bring joy to thousands of bloggers, and we can't wait to see how it will be used.  Nick Momrik, who developed the feature, summed it up nicely on Twitter:

We're so happy to see this feature out there in the wild for WordPress users to play with, and several of us here at Twilio are avid WordPress users so we can't wait to add this to our own blogs.  For now, WordPress.com is offering the service for free, and you can record up to 60 minutes (!!) per message, and they say that limit might go down with a paid upgrade in the future.  Pretty sweet!

OpenVBX is Launched - Now Hack It, Skin It, Sell It

Yesterday, amidst a whole lot of media fanfare, we launched OpenVBX to the world.  OpenVBX is a web-based open source phone system for business and it launches with a full set of APIs for controlling the UI, calls, and a plugin architecture for sharing functionality build on top of OpenVBX.  OpenVBX relies on the Twilio voice and SMS APIs to power telecommunications, and beyond that it is up to developers and end users to get creative with how they'd like to see it used in their organizations.

Community Involvement Made OpenVBX a Success

We've been pretty secretive about the product leading up to launch, and we want to extend a special thank you to a small group of about 50 developers who worked closely with us to bring the product to market with the kind of functionality that we believe will make it a game changer for businesses looking to set up phone systems. 

Some of you traveled across the country to give us feedback, others hung out with us at locations around the world, and others we've never met in real life.  However you are connected to us, we want you to know how much we appreciate you.

To see some of the early plugins being released by OpenVBX developers, check out the OpenVBX Plugin Directory.

TechCrunch Turns 5 Years Old, Celebrate with Us!

This Friday we're co-hosting the San Francisco TechCrunch 5th birthday celebration along with SocialGold here at 501 Folsom Street, and we're looking forward to hanging out with fellow TechCrunch readers. 

This event is one of over 300 meetups taking place around the world in celebration of TechCrunch's 5th anniversary, and we anticipate the San Francisco event will be one of the largest. A big thank you goes out to Rob Ross, who stepped up as the SF event organizer and reached out to us to provide a place to party - we can't wait to have you in our office!

RSVP for the event here

Update: Now with Sponsors!

A huge thank you to these companies for stepping up to help us make the event a success and supporting the community.

IMVU

IMVU is an online destination where adults and teens meet new people in 3D. Members of IMVU have fun meeting new people with similar interests and expressing themselves through personalizing their 3D avatars, digital rooms, music, and home pages. IMVU offers the world’s largest digital goods catalog with over 1.8 million items.

Mashery

Mashery is designed to make it cheaper and easier for companies to build and control channels for web services than it would be to do everything in-house.  Mashery offers all the ingredients needed to get APIs widely distributed and successfully used – an API marketplace, tracking, metrics, usage/access management, commerce, security and performance tools.

Charles River Ventures

Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that takes a value-added, hands-on approach to support its portfolio companies. 

Portfolio companies include Blippy, Yammer, Zendesk, Twitter, Scribd, and many more.

Triple Point PR

TriplePoint is the leading agency serving the interactive entertainment and digital lifestyle industries. Founded in 2002 as Kohnke Communications by Erica Kohnke Kain, the agency has grown to be the market leader in public relations, marketing, business development, and product consulting within the games and digital media market.

TriNet

We help you, the small business entrepreneur, realize your ambitions by being your essential HR partner. Our unparalleled customer service, technology, and industry expertise have already made a measurable difference to 8,000 small businesses. As your Trusted Advisor, we help you contain your HR costs, minimize your employer-related risks, and relieve the administrative burden of HR, thus helping you focus on your number one priority – your business.

Battery Ventures

Battery Ventures invests in technology-driven companies run by exceptional individuals and management teams. For more than 25 years, we have partnered with great entrepreneurs across stages, sectors, and geographies. Our mission is to support these entrepreneurs as they build extraordinary companies. The firm’s current portfolio includes such Internet & Digital Media innovators as: Angie’s List, Bazaarvoice, BlockChalk, BlueKai, FreeWheel Media, Exact Target, Groupon, LiveIntent and TrialPay.

Ignition Partners

Ignition Partners is a premier venture capital firm dedicated to helping entrepreneurs seize opportunity - from turning their early stage idea into a business, to hiring the right team, providing industry and functional insight and connections, and growing their business strategically, globally, and financially to realize the best ultimate outcome. Ignition invests in emerging and future leaders in communications, internet, software, and services across business and consumer targets. Ignition brings together an unparalleled combination of domain focus, technical expertise, and global operational experience. Ignition's partners are proven business leaders who have built some of the world's most successful businesses of the last two decades, including Microsoft Windows and Office, McCaw Cellular Comunications, AT&T Wireless, and Starbucks. Ignition is based in Bellevue, WA.

Announcing the winner of the Alerts & Notifications Twilio Developer Contest!

Last week, for our weekly developer contest, we challenged Twilio developers to build applications using Twilio voice and SMS that power up alerts and notifications, and it's time to announce the contest winner.  

If you are looking for the new contest category, please scroll down.

Airplane Booking System by Carl Tyler

Carl’s Airplane Booking System uses Twilio so that users can book a plane using their phone, and receive notifications to booking changes through SMS.

The flying club had been going for 40 years, and had been using a paper based system. With some club members not being particularly computer literate, it was key that those folks could still book the plane over the phone, which is where Twilio came in.

Whilst moving to an online booking system, Carl also wanted to add other capabilities, such as notifying interested members if a booking was canceled or changed.  Using Twilio, this capability was expanded from e-mail to also include SMS notifications.

The response from the flying club members has been great, with all the members finding it easy to use.  The application is currently used by only by Yellow Bird Flying Club,  but Carl has plans to productize the solution so that other flying clubs can use it.

Carl put together a YouTube video demonstrating how the booking system works:

Interview with the Developer: Carl Tyler

How did you come up with the idea for your submission?

I own a share in a plane.  The booking system was paper based, where you would either visit the airport to book the plane, or phone someone that had access to the calendar at the airport.  I wanted to move to an online system, but some of the older members don't like using the web, so still wanted to call, Twilio gave me that capability.

What technologies, tools, etc. did you use to build it (feel free to get into the details, our readers are technically minded)?

I used Lotus Domino, not the first choice for many I know, but as someone that has been using Notes and Domino for close to 20 years it made it easy for me to build it.  Combing Domino with the Scheduling UI found at www.dhtmlx.com made it easy to build a booking system in a weekend. 

How long did it take to build?

The Calendar/web UI took a weekend, the telephone integration using Twilio for notifications and IVR took another weekend.

What problem does it solve?

It allows members of the flying club to book and check bookings over the phone.  Combined with the SMS notifications sent through Twilio and users can more easily book the plane.

What did you think of the experience of working with the Twilio API, any feedback for us?

I'm not a professional programmer by trade, tending to be more of a project manager working with developers, so for someone like me to be able to use the Twilio API and build something in a weekend was fantastic.  I found the experience to be great.  Debugging could be a little tricky, but once I found the debug info on the twilio site life was much easier.

This Week's Developer Contest

Would you like to build Twilio apps for a chance to win prizes and be featured in the Twilio blog? We host a weekly developer contest and would love to have you involved, so please take a look at our contest page for more details. This week’s contest is Powering Up Customer Service and you have until midnight on Sunday June 13th to submit your apps.  Happy coding!

Announcing the Winners of the Twilio Google Chrome Extensions Contest

A few weeks back we let you know that Twilio was hosting a developer contest encouraging developers to build Google Chrome extensions that use the Twilio API, and Will Tran from the Twilio team even built our own Google Chrome Extension as an example to get things started.

Now its time to announce not one, but TWO winners of this contest.  The winners will receive $100 in Twilio credit and some awesome gadgets as prizes from both Twilio and Google teams.  Without further ado... the winners are:

• * Chro-wilio by Brad Berkin
• * Notwifications by Timothee Boucher

Read the post about our contest on the Google Chromium Blog as well!

Chro-wilio by Brad Berkin

chro-wilio tells you the number of notifications, calls, and messages your Twilio account had in the last day, week, or month.

How Chro-wilio Works

1. Get a Twilio account.
2. Install chro-wilio
3. Go to chro-wilio's Options page and give it your Twilio AccountSid and AuthToken. Click Save then Close.
4. A Twilio button now now appears in your extensions bar. Click it.
5. Clean up the mess cause your mind just got blown away.

Notwifications by Timothee Boucher

Notwilfications is a Google Chrome Extension that shows you when a call comes in and allows you to either ignore it (hanging up) or send it to voicemail (from the browser), without ever having to pick up your phone to know who's calling. If a voicemail is recorded, a badge shows you the number of new voicemails and allows you to play them in the browser.

It would be used in a context similar to Google Voice: one phone number redirecting to one (or more, though the backend is not setup for that at this point) phone number. The idea behind it is to be able to stay in your browser to filter your incoming calls.

How Notwifications Works

1. Get a Twilio account
2. Install Notwifications
3. Once installed, go to the options page to set the phone number towards which all phone calls need to be forwarded to (again, think of it like Google Voice, with only one phone number because, well, I didn't build the whole backend that would go with multiple numbers and what not). Also note that only one phone number, thus one user, would work at one time.
4. On the Options page, you'll see the sandbox phone number and PIN to use. Call this (preferably from a different phone number to avoid confusion) and dial the PIN.
5. You'll see that the icon lights up when there is an incoming call. Click the icon to see the options of ignoring the call (=hanging up) or send to voicemail. If you want to pick up, just pick up your phone, you now know who's calling.
6. When a voicemail is recorded, the icon badge shows how many unread voicemails there are: click the icon again to see who it is from and listen to it. Clicking "Archive" removes it from the list.

This Week's Developer Contest

Would you like to build Twilio apps for a chance to win prizes and be featured in the Twilio blog? We host a weekly developer contest and would love to have you involved, so please take a look at our contest page for more details. This week, you have until midnight on Sunday of this weekend to submit apps that involve alerts and notifications.  Happy coding!

-----

Do you have an idea for a future developer contest category?  Please let us know on our forums or drop a note to help@twilio.com.  Thanks!

New Developer Contest: Alerts & Notifications

This week for our developer contest we're challenging you to use Twilio voice and/or SMS to enable alerts and notifications.  You could win a Netbook and $100 in developer credit from Twilio if you come up with the most unique, powerful, creative submission. 

Bonus points for putting together helpful materials (screencasts, blog posts, etc.) that demonstrate the value of what you've built, or explain how it could become a business someday.

What's This Developer Contest All About?

Each week we announce a new category to encourage developers to try Twilio for different use cases, industries, and integrations.  As a language-agnostic platform for cloud communications, we want to see developers from all backgrounds find success and solve problems with Twilio.  To fire your imagination and reward your efforts, we've run this developer contest for over a year.

How To Get Involved

Submissions to the contest are due by Sunday night, at 11:59pm Pacific Time and can be submitted here.  If you need any help or want to bounce ideas off our Twilio developers, please join us on our forums or drop a note to help@twilio.com

IMPORTANT: Everyone who has submitted previously and did not win is eligible to resubmit (we love that we make the rules!) so if you built a Twilio app in the past that includes alerts and notifications but weren't a winner we hope you'll consider sprucing up you old app for another chance at winning a Netbook.

Photo credit: JohanL on Flickr

New Developer Contest: Mashup Twilio & Open311

On Thursday evening last week we brought together over 300 people passionate about open data and the future of government 2.0 to hear from thought leaders in the space.  Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson was the MC for the evening, and joining him onstage where luminary speakers including Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, and Craig Newmark.  Special guests included Chris Vein, the CIO of San Francisco, and Philip Ashlock from OpenPlans.org.

Among the thoughts shared and announcements made, we launched a new developer contest challenging software engineers to build mashups of Twilio and Open311 and submit them for the chance to win a Netbook and $100 in Twilio credit.

As announced at our event at San Francisco City Hall last Thursday, Twilio has partnered with the City of San Francisco for a developer contest focused on innovation using the Open311 API and Twilio API to build apps and new functionality.  We are challenging developers to combine our APIs for the chance to win a Netbook.

About Open311

Open311 is a form of technology that provides open channels of communication for issues that concern public space and public services,and refers to a standardized technology for location-based collaborative issue-tracking.

By offering free web API access to an existing 311 service, Open311 is an evolution of the phone-based 311 systems that many cities in North America offer.  Learn more here...

If you want to bounce ideas off of someone, leave a comment on this page or feel free to drop us a line at help@twilio.com.

We've also got a conversation going on the contest in our forum, so feel free to chime in.

How to Enter the Contest

Developers have until 11:59pm on Sunday, May 23rd, to submit an application that uses Open311 and Twiio to Twilio for the chance to win some sweet prizes.  Developers may submit as many entries to the contest as they wish, but can only win one prize.  In the case that several submissions from a single developer make it to the finalists circle, only the highest ranking prize will be awarded.

Submit now!

Prizes

The first place winner will receive a Netbook from Twilio and $100 in Twilio developer credit.

Explore Open APIs for Government with Twilio & Open311 on May 6th

We are excited to invite members of the Twilio developer community to join us, along with government leaders, for an evening focused on open data and open government at San Francisco City Hall. 

The event takes place next week in the evening on Thursday, May 6th and will highlight thought leaders at the forefront of the conversation around the vision for open government and open source technology.  We will also hear from Chris Vein, CIO of the City of San Francisco, on progress being made around Open311.

RSVP TO ATTEND THIS EVENT

Speakers Include

Tim O'Reilly - Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc.

Tim O'Reilly is thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community.

Craig Newmark - Founder, Craigslist

Craig Newmark is an internet entrepreneur well known for creating the popular free online classified service Craigslist.  Craig is a vocal supporter for keeping the internet free, a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and a San Francisco resident.

Mitchell Kapor - Visionary Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

Mitch Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, angel investor, and activist. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s.

Chris Vein - CIO, City of San Francisco

Chris Vein is Chief Information Officer for the City of San Francisco, leading up the Department of Technology and supporting open government initiatives aimed at increasingly the accessibility and utility of government data, such as Open 311.

Philip Ashlock - Organizer, Open Planning Project

Philip Ashlock crafts civic technology and coordinates municipal open governance initiatives at The Open Planning Project. His current focus is Open311 and OpenMuni.

What is Open311?

Open311 is a form of technology that provides open channels of communication for issues that concern public space and public services,and refers to a standardized technology for location-based collaborative issue-tracking. By offering free web API access to an existing 311 service, Open311 is an evolution of the phone-based 311 systems that many cities in North America offer.  Learn more here...

Twilio Kicks Off Nationwide Sponsorship of Startup Weekend

We're excited to share the announcement that Twilio is now a sponsor for all Startup Weekend events in North America.  Startup Weekend is a combination hackathon and business plan competition.  It is comprised of an intense 54 hours, starting with pitches on Friday night and wrapping up with presentations and live demos on Sunday evening.

Over the past year we've been proud to be a part of Startup Weekend as a participant and later as a sponsor, and over 20 Startup Weekend projects have already launched with Twilio integration in cities across the United States.  In addition to announcements here, make sure to check out the Twilio Startup Weekend blog.

Startup Weekend was founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde of TechStars, and is now run by Mark Nager and Clint Nelsen.

The event has already met with success in over 52 cities, 12 countries, and growing! Read more about Startup Weekend here...

What This Means for Startup Weekend Attendees

As part of our sponsorship, participants of Startup Weekend will receive discounts on Twilio's services if they elect to use Twilio APIs as part of their startup weekend project.  We'll also be attending events nationwide to share our skills and startup experience.  

Finally, we are launching another Startup Weekend contest for any participants who use Twilio as part of their projects.  The winning team(s) will receive various prizes from Twilio, and more information can be found on our Startup Weekend sponsor page.

Kicking Things Off at Startup Weekend Boulder

We officially got started last weekend at Startup Weekend Boulder, where John Sheehan attended to spread the word about Twilio and also worked on winning team Twelp.me, a Yelp-like service for brands on Twitter.

John's Reflections on Startup Weekend Boulder

I didn't know what to expect going into my first Startup Weekend this past weekend in Boulder, CO. What I discovered is a 48-hour startup crash course where developers, designers, entrepreneurs (and those that are both or all three) get together to go from idea to reality in one weekend.

If you've never attended before, it goes like this. On Friday the attendees vote on the best pitches, form teams and start brainstorming how to make it happen. Saturday is spent building the startup and, not uncommonly, finalizing the hardest part: naming the product/service/company. Things wrap up on Sunday with a race to the deadline and presentations from the companies that survived the weekend.

I was immediately drawn to an idea pitched by Kipp Chambers. Kipp wanted to find the companies providing the best customer service on Twitter. My first thought was "Yelp for Twitter" so I approached him during team formation and said I wanted to help him build it. Over the weekend our team grew to six: two developers (me and @ornstwitt), two biz dev (@cliffrosell and @tricisco) and two marketing people (Kipp and @corichavez) that doubled as designers. I worked on harvesting tweets and Orn worked on the front-end Twitter integration and UI, while the others did their thing. By Sunday we had a demo-worth prototype and Cliff and Kipp rocked the presentation to the rest of the group.

When it came time for the judging we were fortunate enough to be selected as the winners. Kipp has decided to run with it and is going to be using the prize money and other prizes to further refine the idea and turn our prototype into a working service. I'm excited to see where he takes it next.

Even though our team won, as cliche as it is, there really are no losers. You can't attend a Startup Weekend and not get something out of it. The very nature of the event forces you out of your comfort zone. You are working with people you've never worked with before on something that's probably never been built before. And somewhere in there, you've got to find time to sleep. It's more than challenging, it's a rush.