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

Discover Job Opportunities at Twilio - Interview with CTO Evan Cooke

Andrew Lee from One Third of My Life dropped by Twilio HQ to speak with Evan Cooke, CTO and cofounder of our company, about some of the job opportunities we have available.  In this candid 9 minute interview, Evan discusses Twilio's culture, organizational structure, and other things that make us unique and a great place to work. 

Check it out, and if you like what you hear please visit our jobs page to learn more and apply.

Twilio Founders Discuss Cloud Telephony on the Web 2.0 Show

Twilio co-founders Jeff, Evan, and John joined Adam Stacoviak (@adamstac) for the 63rd episode of the Web 2.0 Show last week to discuss cloud communications.

As Adam mentions, the topics covered include:

• Where the idea of the Twilio service came from
• How we remain connected and communicate with the Twilio development community
• Netbook Mondays, our weekly developer contest
• where we blog about the Twilio developer community
• How their LinkedIn Network for developers and helps devs stay in touch and get new business
• Our Google Map of Twilio Applications: Apps on a Map
• The various services they use to keep their business lean and agile
• • Zendesk
  • Get Satisfaction
  • Salesforce
• Other great resources for entrepreneurs
• • Startup Weekend
  • the Lean Startup Blog by Eric Ries

Check out Episode #63 - Twilio: Telephony in the Cloud and let us know what else you'd like to know about Twilio - and thank you to Adam for having us as a guest.

Month in Review: Looking Back at August

We're already well into September, but for those who've just joined Twilio or only recently started reading the blog I thought it would be fun to give you a rundown of August - which was a busy and exciting month here.

Customer Profile: The Kingdom app adds Twilio to their alternate reality game for the iPhone, and Derek Neighbors from Held demonstrates how it works in this video

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson speaks on the Cloud Computing Show with Geva Perry and host Gary Orenstein about cloud telephony, the platform-as-a-service model, and more.

John Tegen Wins Netbook Week #12 with Onsite Clarity using PHP and Adobe Flex to build this sales management tool.  (watch video)

Customer Profile: Ylastic announces that Twilio-powered voice alerts for their cloud services management platform are now available. (watch video)

Feature Update: International Oubtound Calling enters private beta for a select group of Twilio developers to test and provide feedback

Robert McLaws Wins a Netbook for the .NET Framework with his WCF Client for .NET 3.5

Feature Update: HTTP Authentication Twilio users can now access password protected URLs with the Twilio API.

Zeus Software publishes an article on how to voice enable their traffic manager tools using Scala and Twilio.

Customer Profile: Valley Curbside Recycling  Ryan Stewart tells us how he uses Twilio to power the company telephone with 20 lines of code.

Twilio Winners Announced for Interactive Advertising Contest Category ExcitementLivesHere.com and AdGames each take home a Netbook for their fantastic interactive ad creations

Pivotal Labs welcomes Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson to speak on cloud telephony and we streamed live on TwilioTV

Twilio-powered EscapeMyDate (lead by Danielle) wins most votes at Startup Weekend San Francisco for their integration of Twilio and Twitter for getting out of awkward social situations

Two winners awarded Netbooks for the Twilio + Amazon Web Services contest category: Email Center Pro by Evan Coonrod & Ask-a-Human by Eugene Osovetsky

Netbook Contest partnership announced with Microsoft Windows Azure with extended deadline of September 13th, giving developers two weeks to win a Netbook with a Twilio app built on Azure

September - Off to a Great Start!

Twilio exhibits at ITexpo West in Los Angeles, CA where we had a chance to mix and mingle with professionals in the telecom industry, and learn more about the vision for unified communications, which was the resounding theme of the event.

Highlighted Events in September

Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase & Summit

GigaOm's Mobilize: Future of the Mobile Web

SF NewTech

Seattle 2.0's Startup Day

Twilio Office Hours

Join us every Thursday from 4-7pm on IRC at at Twilio HQ to learn more about what we do, ask questions, and meet members of the Twilio development community.  We almost always on IRC, but this is a time dedicated to support from the Twilio team.

Interested in seeing more events where we'll be speaking or attending?  Check out our events calendar for a complete rundown, we keep it updated and you'll find everything from conferences to hackathons to networking events.  Check it out...

Jeff Interviewed About Twilio at GigaOm's Structure 2009 Conference

Jeff had a chance to speak with Derek Harris of GigaOm for Structure 2009 back in June, and we've just dug up the video from the vault of YouTube to share with you.  Jeff talks about thoughts on the cloud model applied to telecom, the evolution of cloud computing in general, who he feels the leaders are, and some upcoming features for Twilio.

During the interview, Jeff mentions international service is imminent, and we're pleased to tell you that you can sign up to join the beta now.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on the Cloud Computing Show with Gary Orenstein

Last week, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and cloud computing expert Geva Perry sat down with Gary Orenstein on the Cloud Computing Show to talk about industry news in the cloud space and explore what Twilio is all about.

Listen to the full podcast here...

As Geva says in the wrap-up on his blog:

We discuss some of the latest news around cloud computing (OSCON, Rackspace API, Microsoft Azure pricing and more) and of course talk about Twilio, which I have written about in the past as What's Really Exciting About Cloud Computing.

Geva Perry is the author of the cloud computing blog Thinking Out Cloud, and co-hosts the podcast Overcast: Conversations on Cloud Computing with James Urquhart.  He also does some work with us here at Twilio, and we look forward to featuring his work and ideas here on the Twilio blog in the future.

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!

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

Ahoy Hoy! Meet Jeff Lawson - CEO and Co-Founder of Twilio

Just dug up this great video of Jeff speaking at a Seattle Tech Startups monthly meeting back in September.  Jeff speaks about his background with previous startups, and the founding of Twilio.

Watch Twilio Presenting LIVE at Under the Radar Today

This afternoon, Jeff will be presenting Twilio at Under the Radar to a panel of judges moderated by Rafe Needleman of CNET.

 The panel includes:

• Rob Hayes - First Round Capital
• Adam Gross - Salesforce.com
• Bipin Sahni - Wells Fargo
• John Foley - Information Week

His session begins at 3:45 in the Galileo room, he will join Heroku, RunMyProcess, and New Relic to talk about development and platforms.

Watch the Galileo Room sessions live:

Twilio to Present at Under the Radar on Friday, April 24th

On Friday, April 24th Twilio will present at the Under the Radar conference, where startups gather each year to share their early stage innovations with technology and business leaders in Silicon Valley.  The event's theme this year is focused on the power and usefulness of cloud computing, which is a perfect fit for our cloud telephony platform.

How Cloud Telephony with Twilio Simplifies Business

In this post on the Under the Radar blog, there is a great example of how Twilio can help companies create voice applications simply and affordably:

Say I’m a product company. I make tasty fizzy bevvies that give consumers the burst of energy they need to dance all night, code all night, study all night… I want to build a really cool voice application as an add-on to a mobile marketing campaign I’ll be rolling out.

Problem: I don’t have access to one of the few specialized (and expensive) app developers who have the skills to build it for me. But I do have a web development team… They don’t know any crazy telecom programming languages, but they do know PHP, Ruby, etc.

Solution: Twilio’s in-cloud API for voice communications leverages my existing web development team’s skills. In a few minutes and a few lines of code, they can create a custom voice application for us - hosted in the cloud.

Talk about taking a lesson from the easy bake oven. Twilio launched in 2008 and since then has been used by BP, Tumblr, Sony BMG and more. I think they’re on to something…. (emphasis added)

It's All About the Easy Bake Oven

We think we're on to something too, and we can't wait to share it with conference attendees!

Are you going to be at Under the Radar?  Let us know so we can be sure to connect with you while we're there.  You reach us through the comments, an email to help@twilio.com or a message to @Twilio on Twitter.  We're listening.