Twilio Cloud Communications - Discover Our Web Services API for Making & Receiving Phone Calls & Text Messages, Cloud Telephony

Apply to Present Your Startup at StartupCamp2

Would you like to present your startup to an audience of technologists, C-level executives, fellow entrpreneurs and venture capitalists?  If your startup is leveraging communication technologies like voice, video, or SMS?  You can apply to present here.

Helping Showcase Twilio-Powered Startups

Startups powered by Twilio have some exciting successes this past year, with Precision Polling being acquired by Survey Monkey earlier this year and entrepreneurs from a handful of companies quitting their jobs to work on their new businesses full time (more on that in future posts).

We believe in helping developers and entrepreneurs showcase their work, which is why we have become a major sponsor of this event.  Additionally, we will fly 2 members of any Twilio-powered startup accepted into the final list of presenting startups to Los Angeles and pay for your hotel while you're there.  Make sure to apply!

Meet SayHired - Last Year's Twilio-Powered Startup

SayHired, a company using communications technology to simplifying the recruiting process, joined us in Miami last year as we travelled to the first StartupCamp event focused on communications, at ITEXPO East.

Since then the company has continued to grow, landing several notable clients and partners.  As of this writing, their website claims "4,534 hours saved".  They use Twilio's voice API to power automated phone screens, which remove the recruiter from the process until after the initial screen and allow them to get through many more candidates.

Attend and Discover

Will you be at ITEXPO, or are you local to Los Angeles?  Register to attend this free event and come find out what innovative young companies are doing with our revolutionary cloud communications technology!

Twilio in Your Neighborhood with Meetup Everywhere

Twilio Meetups are happening everywhere! Come show off what you're working on, get help with the API, and enjoy some food and drink with other Twilio developers. Not on the map? Be bold, organize a Twilio Meetup in your neighborhood.

Expect Awesomness

Each Twilio Meetup will be different, but I'm sure they'll all be awesome. You can expect to see demos of cool apps, OpenVBX applets, how-to sessions, mashups with familiar applications, hackfests, and games. One thing is for certain, you'll get to meet smart and interesting people.

Upcoming Twilio Meetups

We've got Twilio Meetups scheduled to happen all over the United States, here's a quick look at the next five events.

• Portland, Oregon - July 22
• Boston, MA - July 22
• New York, NY - July 27
• San Francisco, CA - July 29
• Chicago, IL - August 3

Organizing a Twilio Meetup is Easy

Really, it is. Just find a venue and set a time. Cafés and bars are often happy to host Meetups, just make sure to choose a place that's suited to your format. You won't be able to demo your apps very easily if the music is blaring.

Feel free to experiment. Host a Twilio art party or an app brainstorming session. Whatever you can dream up is fair game, it's important that you make the event your own.

Once you've picked the venue and time, add it to our Meetup Everywhere page and promote it in your 'hood. Tweets, blog posts, and mailing lists are the best way to get your event noticed. You can also tell us and we'll help you promote it.

Capture Your Event

Don't forget to take pictures and notes on what you covered. Video and links are great too! We'd be thrilled to share stories from your events on our blog.

Need help?

We don't want hackers to go hungry, so we're offering to sponsor pizza and soft drinks. Let us know if you have any special requests or needs. We can help you arrange a venue, find supplies, and even connect you to other Twilio developers in your area. If you have questions, or need any help at all shoot us an email.

Join Us for the Social Apps Workshop on Saturday, July 24th

Are you interested in building social apps using Twitter and Facebook?  If so, then the Social App Workshop is the event for you.  Come learn from experts, hack with other developers, and build your next app.  You'll have the chance to show off what you've created and give and receive feedback.

Speakers:

• Matt Harris, Twitter
• Matt Kelley, Facebook
• Jeff Lawson, Twilio
• Oren Teich, Heroku
• Sam Ramji, Apigee

The event is being held at the Heroku offices in San Francisco on Saturday, July 24th from 9:30am to 6pm and is free to attend.  Space is limited, so please register today

Event Recap: Greater SF LAMP Meetup

On Tuesday night, Adam and I took a trip to Sunnyvale. He was invited to talk about the Twilio API and our recent launch of OpenVBX, the web-based open source phone system for business. The Greater SF LAMP Meetup takes place regularly and covers a wide range of topics related to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

The talk focused on how open source has driven innovation on the internet and the key characteristics of successful open source projects. The specific discussion points for the evening were community, modularity, and solving problems for the 80% use case. Adam articulated an interesting parallel between viewing the source of a web page in a browser, and viewing the source of a phone call (TwiML).

To wrap up the evening there was a live coding demonstration of how to create an OpenVBX plugin. It's very easy to do, so why not give it a go?

View the slides on Slideshare

Live Blogging from Cloud Camp San Francisco Tonight

Tonight we are at Cloud Camp San Francisco, where Evan Cooke is speaking about cloud communications in a lightning talk and we will be helping to lead a discussion around how cloud communications can help solve business problems.

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6:55PM -- I am here at The Box SF for Cloud Camp SanFrancisco and things are about to get underway, beginning with the lightening talks.  Instead of bombarding you on Twitter, we thought it would be fun to try one of those pre-Twitter activities which seems to be a lot less common these days.

7:05 PM --  There are a number of events coming up, including Big Data Camp in Santa Clara... working on getting a complete list.  The agenda for the nigh is the lightning talks, the unpanel, and then open spaces.

Lightning Talks

Jesse Andrews (@anotherjesse) from Nasa Ames is the first up to take about Nebula Cloud Computing Platform at Ames.  He's talking about how unpredictable things can be, and his slide deck is proving unpredictable as well but he's rolling with it.  Nasa's requirements are elastic because they deal with things that come up.  Nebula started in 2008 with Chris Kemp, who was the Ames CIO at the time. They wanted to empower scientists, developers and researchers to fail fast - but in a safe way.

They're using Rabbit MQ and Redis for their data store, because it is something that is easy to modify.  They went to Goddard and found that their scientists had different requirements, based on a different scale of data.  Flexibility is important.

 7:10 PM -- Now up is Lennart Franzel, who is an IBM Senior Technical Consultant.  He feels the app store is the most important aspect of his model for the cloud (picture coming) and that devices are the access point for the average consumer.  Social networks, realtime data stream (Twitter, video, etc.) 

Inside corporate data centers, 3 years ago there was a ridiculous approvals process for getting servers.  Today, people use an internal portal and provision servers completely self servers.  Release management goes from weeks to minutes, standardization becomes much simpler and now the consumer way of thinking is leading to the standardization of large images, which become re-usable and shareable.  Metered billing allows for variable cost, and storage.

Lennart feels that cloud computing is not for everyone, and goes on to discuss HIPPA compliance even being possible in public clouds.

7:15 PM -- Guy Harrison of Quest Software is now up, they just released Toad For Cloud for relational databases in the cloud.  "You might think we're a database company, and that we're somehow

Places like Twitter are pushing their relational databases much further than they were intended to go.  Memecache, sharding, etc... basically we have a database on crack but we can't do important things (like joins) anymore.

Best part of this talk: introduction to Fail Whale Ale

7:20 PM -- Uri Budnik of RightScale is now up, and he is going to share some insights.  Right scale has 30,000+ users and they've powered some of the biggest scaling technologies on the web - this is really infrastructure-as-a-service for companies like Zynga.

He has noticed that utility pricing is becoming more and more popular, and references Amazon DevPay as an example.  It doesn't even have to be hourly either, it can be by usage.  Utility-pricing is also running in private clouds, which he thinks is exciting and has interesting implications for open source projects.  It isn't just download it and let us know how it goes, and if you need support, it is more in depth than that.

7:28 PM -- George Reese, CTO of enStratus is now up.  Their focus is on governance issues in the cloud, and their customers base tends to be enterprise types.  IT departments have checklists related to security and governance, their technology ensures that you can check off the items on their checklist. 

7:35 PM -- Next up is a segment that is new to cloud camp, Dave Nielsen is on stage.  They've noticed some changes happening in the cloud world.  At first it was just people talking about "what is cloud computing?" and there was a lot of argument over what it actually meant, and people became more comfortable with certain definitions.  Now there is more specialization, and other people are focusing on things that happening within the cloud.  First there were talks about managing the cloud, like what we heard from Rightscale and Enstratus, which has evolved into something we call "Dev Ops" asking: how are we going to manage things that are cloud-like?

We also saw, evolving out of that, other use cases that were very common like Hadoop.  That was one of the best use cases for high performing computing in the cloud, so this concept of big data evolved.  Now another one he is starting to see in the telephony space.  Using telephony services has always been very difficult, it requires not just specialized hardware but connections to the internet and providers (telco carriers).  Now we're seeing that treated as software, and tonight we have two companies.

Cloud communications is now here, and one of those things we should treat as code.

7:40 PM -- Evan Cooke, CTO of Twilio is on stage now (slide deck will be available later) explaining how cloud APIs fit with open source, and how Twilio is helping developers reach customers and end users in their specific verticals with OpenVBX, which is our recently released open source product that lets you build voice applications simply and easily.

Raising the bar is a solution that can help developers make the gap between their skills and by providing an open source layer that works with your cloud API, you are making it easier for developers.  Hosted solution and the service model (Redhat) have been the two successful

7:45 PM -- Jason Goecke of Tropo is on stage now to talk about how telecommunications is the original cloud.  Even today, it is tough to deploy telecom solutions, and we're seeing a trend now to take these networks and open them up.  We're seeing the use of voice in very innovative ways.  They run a private cloud where they host their telecommunications infrastructure.

Unpanels

So that wraps up the lightning talks, now onwards to the "un-panel" -- there aren't any panelists, and we don't have any questions.  So how does this work?

Questions:

• What is a private cloud?
• What is a good starting design pattern?
• What's in it for the individual developer?
• Does the cloud need better virtual networking capabilities?
• What are the main security issues?
• Is it true that big enterprises willl only use private cloud?
• Which key value stores are people actually using?
• How are people provisioning resources?

59 Days of Code Uses Twilio to Vote For a Winner

When Irma from 59 Days of Code contacted us to find out if we'd help them with a voting app for their competition, we were thrilled!  With Twilio SMS, they were able to build a simple custom text message voting application so that thousands of people could weigh in on who they thought should be the winner.  Votes were texted to a Twilio number, with a maximum of 2 votes per Caller ID.

Twilio is also offering $133.70 of Twilio developer credit to anyone who participated in the competition and would like to integrate Twilio into their project.  Please contact help@twilio.com to claim yours!

What is 59 Days of Code?

59DaysofCode was put together by the Central Valley Business Incubator and a select group of individuals, with the goal to provide a catalyst for the next generation of entrepreneurs in Fresno, CA.  Clocks started on April 24th, and the event culminated yesterday with a event and voting for the winner.

Who Were the Winners?

The prize was awarded to Post Echo, a product that tracks new events for the PR industry.

postEcho from Mark Royce on Vimeo.

Read more:

ABC Local: Valley Geeks Compete

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Are you hosting an event and looking to build a simple app?  We can help!  We're happy to trade developer credit for a sponsorship, just drop a note to danielle@twilio.com and I'll set you up with everything you need to get started in just a few minutes.

What's New at SF New Tech?

Hello, I'm Ben McKinley, one of the new additions to the Twilio team. I'm the marketing intern helping Danielle with events and working behind the scenes. I'm very excited to be working at Twilio with the chance meet new people. I last worked at another startup that does cloud based sales software. I've always been a huge fan of new technology so it is awesome to get a chance to work at a company that is offering some of this new tech. It was also why I was eager to go to the SF New Tech meetup.

I recently went to the SF New Tech meetup at MIGHTY in downtown San Francisco. New Tech is a monthly meetup with socializing, cocktails, tacos and of course, new technology demos. I went this month with a new colleague of mine, John Britton who should be writing an introductory post soon. I was excited to go to my first meetup representing Twilio and so, track jacket on, John and I headed out. The meetup was all about French companies and six of them presented, 5 minutes each with 5 minutes for questions after each presentation.

avob Wants Every Computer to Save Energy

Avob strives to help other companies and consumers become greener by cutting costs in their IT infrastructure. They deal with putting computers to sleep when their users are away and watches real time power-consumption to allocate computer power as it is needed. They say that through their technology battery life on laptops can be increased about 20%

Laster Makes Augmented Reality Look Good

Laster Technologies has really cool eyewear technology with augmented reality. I tried some of the augmented reality technologies at CES this year and I found it to be clunky and not particularly cool. Most augmented reality has you looking at a screen that has both a video feed of what is ahead of you and the augmented reality. Laster is completely different. You look through the glass and the augmented reality is projected onto the glass which means that you can see even when the glasses are turned off. These are really awesome pieces of technology, sleek and beautiful that can easily blend in to whatever the user is doing.

AlphaUI Gives You Screen Space by Putting the Keyboard on the Back

AlphaUI offers a “Back-Typing Solution” which is a proof of concept that allows smartphone and tablet computer users to save screen space by typing on the back of the device. It works pretty well in general but is a little clumsy for the english language with only 24 keys. We'll see how it pans out especially as any problems could probably be solved by remapping some of the keys.

Lexip has a 3D Mouse They Want to Bring to the United States

Lexip demoed a “3d mouse” which is very, very impressive. There are currently 3d devices on the market but they are stand-alone the idea of simply integrating a joystick on the side of the mouse and having the device serve both 2d and 3d functions is simple elegance. At the end of the presentation people were all asking how they could get one and for how much. Lexip currently sells in France and is looking for distributors to bring it to the US. At the end of the night, our very own John Britton won one of these 3d mice in a raffle and is now the proud owner of one of the very first 3d mice in the United States. Pics to follow.

Building an app in MLstate is more secure

MLstate showed off their solution for building and deploying secure SaaS applications. They understood the audience and jumped straight in to the code. They showed us a simple chat application and talked about MLstate's main driving point: security. Apparently anything written in MLstate is virtually immune to a vast array of attacks and buffer overflows. When asked why people should develop in MLstate as opposed to any other environment the answer, simply, security.

Build a Mobile app once, port it to any smartphone with Mobile Distillery

Mobile Distillery helps companies to develop mobile applications. The strength of their platform is that a developer can write code once and port it to any smart phone with virtually no tweaking of the code and with native UI elements and using native libraries. Potentially very cool.

I had a wonderful time at the meetup. It was a chance to interact with people that I have not had as much time interacting with as I would like. I was really impressed by each of the presentations. It takes guts to go to a completely new country with a different language and present your great idea and I admire all of the presenters for their ideas and how they have built their companies. I look forward to seeing many of these ideas coming to the United States in the near future. As for the meetup, I hope to get the chance to go to many more in the future. Hopefully I will see you all out there!

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.

Recap of Cloudcamp and Gluecon2010

Last week in Broomfield, Colorado hundreds of people from across the cloud computing and API industries gathered for the second annual Glue Conference.

CloudCamp Denver

Over 150 people turned out for CloudCamp Denver at Gluecon. Highlights included over a dozen unconference-style breakout sessions that discussed the issues and challenges of running a cloud-based infrastructure and un-panel consisting of self-selected cloud computing experts answering questions from the group. Overall, CloudCamp was a valuable time to learn from other's experiences and expertise before the Gluecon main event.

Gluecon Hackathon

In partnership with BlankSlate and PayPal, Twilio was honored to be a sponsor of the first-ever Gluecon Hackathon on Wednesday night. Teams had until Noon Thursday to submit apps that used one or more of each sponsor's APIs. Each sponsor then picked the best use of their API. Over $750 in cash and prizes were awarded to the winners.

Twilio Winner: "Stenotype" by Mick Thompson and Jack Moffitt from Collecta

Stenotype is a real-time conference call transcription service that publishes audio from the conference call into an online chat room via XMPP. 

BlankSlate and PayPal Winner: TextItOff! A Social Punishment/Reward System for Meal Tracking by Clay Loveless from Mashery

TextItOff! is an app designed to help you stay accountable while on a diet.  Each time you eat you send in a text message with the contents of your meal using USDA codes. If the food isn't good for you, you're penalized with a small payment made to your accountability partner. If the food is good for you, you're rewarded likewise. Payments are handled via PayPal and the app was built on BlankSlate. The SMS functionality was built using Twilio.

Honorable Mention

Two other entries also took advantage of Twilio. Eugene Osovetsky (former Twilio contest winner) from WebServius wrote a simple phone survey app that collects responses from conference attendees about their experiences and stores the data in BlankSlate. Dusty Candland from Red27 Consulting also built a SMS broadcaster that lets you forward incoming messages to any number of other numbers.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the hackathon!

Twilio Speaks!

In addition to CloudCamp and the hackathon a couple Twilio-ers also presented to the conference attendees.

"WebHooks" by Jeff Lindsay

Jeff Lindsay is a recent addition to the Twilio team. In this talk, Jeff gives a brief overview of WebHooks, a cause he has been championing for the past four years.

"APIs That Make Things Happen - WebHooks and the Evented Web" by Jeff Lindsay

In this talk, Jeff expands on his earlier talk and dives deep into WebHooks and the effects and benefits of the evented web. 

"Hacking Cloud Communications" by Jeff Lawson

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson also gave a talk on how you can utilize cloud communications to add real business value to your applications. In this talk, Jeff talks about the types of problems that can be solved with cloud communications and goes through a number of real-world applications including use cases from 37signals, Democratic National Committee, Avvo, Duke University Medical Center, Washington State Department of Transportation and more.

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!

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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!