April 2011 Summaries

Gary Vaynerchuck, author of The Thank You Economy, partnered with ADstruc to create an outdoor billboard ad campaign that utilized Twilio's API for real-time communication with his fans. The campaign was a success, receiving over 250 personal phone calls in just a few weeks as users called a phone number on the ad and were forwarded directly to Gary's cell phone. Integrating Twilio into the campaign made it easy to enable instant communication between advertisers and their customers, providing new metrics for outdoor advertisers to measure ROI.

Music Hack Day San Francisco is approaching, and this year it will coincide with the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, making it an exciting event for music enthusiasts and developers alike. The previous Music Hack Day event in New York City was a success, resulting in 72 hacks presented, including Callaboraoke, a karaoke app created by VEVO team members Marvin Li, Antonio Melis, Leon Yu, and Plushcap using Twilio's API to enable real-time singing with friends over phone calls. The app went through rapid prototyping on .NET, showcasing the power of collaboration and innovation during the event, and even received recognition from MusixMatch for one of their prizes.

I was working on an interactive movie / choose your own adventure FMV game for the iPhone and wanted to give players who made it to the end a fun way to stay engaged with the story line, so I used Twilio's phone menu functionality to create a call-back system. The idea was to have players dial in to continue playing the game on their phone, using a dial pad layout that included search commands for numbers in the corners and movement commands for numbers arranged like a controller or compass. To make the game more complex, I used Twilio's API to store variables in the URL, but also implemented safeguards such as limiting player progress to prevent abuse. The game was submitted to the independent gaming subreddit for beta testing and is now available to play by dialing (775) 573-4288.

The Red Dirt Ruby Conference featured high-quality content on various topics, including Omniauth for multi-provider authentication, reimagining Rails messaging systems, and best practices for fat models in Ruby on Rails applications. The conference provided a platform for attendees to meet community members from around the country and learn from experienced speakers such as Gerred Dillon and Jeff Casimir. The event showcased the importance of authentication, identity, and message passing in modern web applications, highlighting the need for flexible and scalable solutions like Omniauth.

The Twilio Developer Contest aims to help new developers get started with Twilio by challenging them to create tutorials, screencasts, or presentations that showcase an interesting and useful Twilio app. The contest encourages creativity and community engagement, and the winner will receive prizes including an Amazon Kindle 3G, $100 in Twilio credit, and Twilio swag. This is not a traditional coding challenge, but rather an opportunity for developers to share their knowledge and help others get started with Twilio.

Aaron, a frustrated Comcast customer, was inspired to create FastCustomer, a voice app that uses Twilio's Voice API to make waiting on hold more efficient by automating tasks such as holding times, phone number lookup, and appointment scheduling. The app was built in an afternoon using Rails, MySQL, Apache, Passenger, and served from Rackspace Cloud. With plans to expand to Android and other iPhone versions, FastCustomer aims to reduce customer wait times and improve the overall customer experience by leveraging AI technology.

Amazon Web Services experienced several service problems at one of its east coast datacenters, impacting major sites across the Internet, but Twilio's APIs and services were not affected. The company's experience highlights the importance of solid distributed architectural design when building cloud services, with key principles including unit-of-failure, short timeouts and quick retries, idempotent service interfaces, small stateless services, and relaxing consistency requirements. By following these best practices, developers can minimize the impact of occasional issues in underlying infrastructure, ensure high availability and performance, and build scalable systems that can handle failures and retries without locking up or consuming resources.

We built an application for Good Dog Design using Shopify as the online store and a custom-built Rails application that integrates with Twilio's API to enable phone calls to be made to Wendy's stores in Australia, allowing customers to order cakes online and pick them up at their preferred store. The integration with Twilio enables staff to confirm receipt of orders via phone, ensuring timely cake delivery. Our goal is to expand the application to include all of Wendy's cake selection within the next few months.

We are excited to share the Twilio engineering blog, which will cover unique challenges of bridging old realtime telecom with modern web technologies using cloud infrastructure. Building a highly automated, self-healing distributed platform has required us to develop an engineering organization and processes for telecom-grade scale and availability. We'll be covering topics such as no-downtime philosophy, asynchronous programming at scale, high availability in the cloud, and designing great APIs. As an engineering-driven company, we'll also share our software development lifecycle for the cloud, DevOps practices, and continuous integration and deployment for APIs.

The article describes the process of building a simple raffle app using Twilio, WebMatrix, and AppHarbor. The author generated unique entry codes for attendees to text in to enter the contest, handled incoming messages using Twilio's REST API, and updated the database with email addresses associated with each entry code. The app was deployed on AppHarbor, a service similar to Heroku, and ran smoothly at an event, drawing in a large number of participants and resulting in a successful winner. The author also created a mail merge to print out the generated codes on business cards and handouts.

Twilio is hosting a developer contest called "Save the Planet With Twilio" which encourages developers to try Twilio for different use cases and solve problems with the platform. The contest aims to promote language-agnostic cloud communications and reward successful submissions. To participate, developers can submit their projects by 11:59pm PT on April 24th, and can seek help from Twilio's forums or community team via email. The winner will receive an Amazon Kindle and $100 in Twilio credit, among other prizes.

Save the Planet With Twilio The Twilio Developer Contest is a weekly contest that encourages developers to try Twilio for different use cases, industries, and integrations. The contest aims to help developers from all backgrounds find success with Twilio and solve problems using its cloud communications platform. To participate, developers can submit their projects or ideas by the deadline of 11:59pm PT on Sunday April 24th, and the winner will receive a prize package including an Amazon Kindle 3G, $100 in Twilio credit, and more. The contest is open to all developers, and they can get help or feedback from other Twilio developers through the company's forums or by emailing `[email protected]`.

CallCongress is a simple tool that allows users to easily call their senators and representatives by dialing a single phone number. The application uses the Sunlight Congress API to retrieve information on elected officials, including their phone numbers. It then connects the caller directly to the office of the selected official for a conversation about important issues. The application was built using Ruby, Sinatra, Builder, Heroku, and Twilio technologies, with just 35 lines of code. CallCongress is open source and easy to use, allowing users to run it themselves and connect it to their own Twilio numbers. The Sunlight Foundation provided the Congress API used by the application, which can be used by anyone to obtain basic information on Members of Congress.

TextIn is a new product developed by Sudeep Yegnashankaran as part of LinkedIn Labs' internal hackathon. The feature allows users to search, invite, or update their LinkedIn account using their phone number, providing a convenient solution for those on the go or without access to mobile applications. This initiative is seen as a positive development for LinkedIn's culture and work environment, fostering innovation and passion among its employees.

TastePlug is a social music experience built by students at UPenn in just one weekend, leveraging Twilio for its backend capabilities. The app uses PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL to provide a basic yet useful tool for users to keep track of the music they want to listen to or that is recommended to them. With plans to rapidly add features, TastePlug aims to foster a network and community among its users, with the goal of eventually creating a robust platform that can support growth through user engagement.

The event `CodeConf` was a two-day gathering of developers where speakers shared their expertise on various topics such as space exploration, documentation for open source communities, and the importance of diversity in teams, with Wil Shipely's closing speech being particularly notable. The attendees also got to socialize at dinners, including one hosted by Engine Yard, which featured a whisky tour. `Tech@NYU` held its Spring 2011 edition of the HackNY college hackathon, where students from various universities competed to build projects using APIs and coding skills, with winners receiving prizes for their efforts, including Etsy Shopping Network and WebGL Filters apps. The event also showcased the potential for students to gain experience through internships with NYC startups after the competition.

This developer contest is a 2-week challenge where participants must create an awesome project using the Twilio API and hardware hacking skills, with entries due by April 17th. The contest aims to encourage developers from all backgrounds to try Twilio for different use cases and industries. Participants can find resources such as tutorials and sample code on the Twilio website to help them get started. The contest is part of a larger initiative to reward developers who use Twilio for innovative projects, with additional resources available through the Twilio Docs, Resource Center, and developer community hub.

The TapGuest team won the Build a Business on Twilio Developer Contest with $100 in Twilio credit, an Amazon Kindle 3G, and Twilio swag. The team built their service over 6-7 months, initially entering it into the 500Startups contest to win funding. Despite not winning, they remained committed to bootstrapping and persistence. TapGuest aims to solve the world's restaurant waiting problem by replacing traditional pagers with a digital solution. The team is driven by a desire to provide the best features and benefits for restaurants.

Sundrop Mobile successfully integrated Twilio's voice broadcasting and IVR services into its platform, achieving a sales record-breaking day for one of its customers, Little Caesar's, with revenue exceeding four years' worth in a single day. The integration took Sundrop approximately 4 hours to complete, with the actual process being faster than researching FCC Do Not Call regulations. Using C# ASP.Net, integrating Twilio's API was found to be relatively straightforward. With this new feature, Sundrop aims to enhance its mobile loyalty program by offering customizable IVR surveys and personalized messages to loyalty program members.

The Twilio Developer Contest is a competition that encourages developers to try Twilio for different use cases, industries, and integrations. The contest has been running for over a year and offers resources such as tutorials, videos, APIs, SDKs, sample apps, ebooks, industry reports, webinars, and a community hub to help participants get started. To participate in the contest, developers must submit their project by April 17th, which is just two weeks away. The contest aims to promote language-agnostic platform for cloud communications and provide opportunities for developers from all backgrounds to find success with Twilio.

Engineers Without Borders Canada leveraged Twilio's SMS API to create a daily voting reminder tool that helped them win the grand prize of $50,000. They were initially drawn to Twilio due to its flexibility and easy API, which provided the necessary tools for their National Conference. The organization built an app that delivered reminders to members' smartphones, helping to maintain sustained interest in the voting process. With the success of this project, Engineers Without Borders Canada plans to integrate Twilio and SMS services into more of their work, exploring opportunities to use these technologies to build a more cohesive online community experience for their members. The organization sees Twilio as a key bridge between the online and offline worlds, enabling them to strengthen relationships and communities through interactive applications.