October 2014 Summaries

The Peace Corps has launched Medlink, a system that uses Twilio SMS to get medical supplies to volunteers in remote areas faster. The current process of sending emails or texts to request supplies was taking up to eight hours per week for Peace Corps staff. With Medlink, volunteers can send an SMS to request supplies and receive a text confirmation when they are fulfilled. This solution is important to the Peace Corps as it allows them to serve in places with limited technology access. The system's success relies on the ingenuity of developers, who built out its functionality with minimal budget support from the Peace Corps. The developer community is seen as an essential asset for improving government processes and making the world a better place.

The author, Ricky Robinett, shares a personal anecdote about debugging an error in his Twilio app that sounded like a scary voice. He then provides tips on how to debug common Twilio errors using tools such as App Monitor, Request Replay, Postman, and Runscope. These tools can help developers identify and fix issues with their Twilio apps, including Document Parse Errors, HTTP Connection Failures, and Invalid Content Type errors. The author also introduces the concept of Triggers in App Monitor, which notifies developers when errors occur in their app. Additionally, Ricky Robinett encourages readers to use these tools to test their skills and share any favorite debugging techniques they may have.

Twilio has announced lower prices for its US and select international call routes, with savings of up to 25% starting November 1st, compared to on-premise alternatives. This price drop is made possible by Twilio's growth in its developer base, which has doubled to 400,000 over the past year, executing over two billion communication API interactions a month. The company also recently deployed new Data-Driven Routing, allowing dynamic selection of high-quality and best-value routes with carriers worldwide. Additionally, Record, previously bundled into Twilio Voice, is now a pay-per-use feature, offering customers an average savings of 16% on US voice bills. These changes aim to provide more value to Twilio users while reducing the total cost of ownership.

Lassy Project is a non-profit organization that aims to keep children safe by connecting neighbors and towns through their app, which allows users to upload critical information about their child, select emergency contacts, and monitor their location. They recently partnered with Twilio to use MMS to instantly send alerts to the village when a child goes missing, including a picture of the child's face, which they believe will increase response time and convey all necessary details. This technology feature enables community members to respond quickly and efficiently to locate the missing child. With this new tool, Lassy Project hopes to help villages of first responders act swiftly and bring missing children home faster.

Lukly allows users to access their iCloud contacts remotely through SMS, providing a plan B for when their phone's battery dies and they cannot use it. This is achieved by registering the user's number and uploading their contact list to Lukly, which can then be accessed via Twilio's SMS service from another phone. When a user texts Lukly's number with a specific contact's name, the relevant contact information will be sent back in response, allowing them to select and contact the desired person. Lukly is currently offering 5 free backup credits to new sign-ups, enabling users to test this feature before committing to a paid subscription.

The article describes a project that uses APIs from Best Buy, Bing Maps, and Twilio to create a website that allows users to search for products at nearby stores, receive driving directions to those stores, and send customized map images as MMS messages. The project involves building a simple web page with a form that accepts product SKU, zipcode, and distance, which sends an AJAX request to the Best Buy API to retrieve store locations within the specified distance that have the product in stock. The API returns a list of store locations formatted as JSON, which is then displayed on the web page using Mustache templates. Once the user clicks the "Send Map" button, the website generates a static map image with a driving route overlayed and sends it to the user's phone via an MMS message using Twilio.

LOOP is an interactive art installation in Beijing that uses Twilio to enable commuters to contribute their voices, songs, poetry, or sounds to a bus's soundtrack, creating a democratic and open-source art exhibit. The project was designed by Xiaowei R. Wang and Ian Pearce as part of the 2014 Beijing Design Week. LOOP aims to make bus rides more than just a commute by turning them into automotive galleries where commuters can share their culture with others. By using Twilio's Voice service, commuters can easily record and contribute audio samples to the project without needing any special equipment or software. The project has already launched and is now open for new contributions from commuters-turned-artists.

Twilio`, a communication platform provider, was implemented by `Recruitment Genius`, a leading UK-based recruitment company, to improve the candidate interviewing process. The integration of `Twilio` with `Microsoft Azure` and `New Relic`, a data monitoring service, helped streamline the application process, reducing support time for candidates from 30 minutes to just 1 minute. With this new system, issues were easily diagnosable using `New Relic` logs, which revealed that 90% of problems stemmed from candidates mistyping their interview pin codes. The integration also improved user experience by making pin codes more readable and adding instruction codes, drastically reducing the number of inbound support tickets.

Fantasy Football can be a cruel and fickle beast, heightening excitement one moment and crushing disappointment the next. Joe Dyken, founder of Fantasy Football Nerd, aims to give fantasy football fans a competitive edge by compiling leading fantasy data, sorting it via a slick API, and distributing it to players using Twilio SMS. He hopes to save users from the same fate as he experienced when he was one text message short from winning his league's championship due to an injury that occurred while he was driving to watch a game. Using Twilio SMS, Joe is now able to send proactive alerts about player injuries 30 minutes before every game, providing users with crucial information in a simple and timely manner. This allows him to communicate instantly with FF Nerd users, eliminating headaches from building the feature previously, and has made a significant difference for his users.

Twilio and Salesforce integration is a highly customizable and versatile solution for businesses to leverage both platforms' capabilities. As a Solution Architect at Twilio, Charles Oppenheimer shares various resources, including developer-friendly tools like the Twilio-SFDC Helper Library and SFDC Click2dial, as well as pre-built solutions on the AppExchange. Integrations cover click-to-call, creating Call Centers within Salesforce's OpenCTI, making outbound dialers, integrating SMS for case creation and two-way conversations, mobile marketing, and more.

The author of this article, Paul Hallett, from Twilio, has developed a Rapid Response Kit tool to facilitate communication during times of need. The kit provides tools for sending SMS and voice messages, but the author realized that sometimes SMS and voice calling aren't the right medium for a situation. They decided to build an MMS feature to allow users to share images or other media content with their audience. The article explains how to add MMS support to existing Twilio REST API requests, TwiML documents, and handle incoming MMS media from Twilio webhooks. This allows the Rapid Response Kit tool to be updated to provide a new feature that can help people in emergency situations by sharing photos of missing family or loved ones, or providing images of maps for directions to shelters. The author provides example code snippets in Python to demonstrate how to add MMS support to these features.

The days of traditional photo albums are gone, and people now store their photos online or on hard drives. Collage.com offers a simple web app to turn those photos into gifts such as wallpapers and posters. To make it easy for users to upload photos from their phone, Collage.com partnered with Twilio MMS, allowing users to send photos directly to the service's number and upload them securely without needing an app or computer. Since launching this feature, over 41,000 images have been uploaded in just two months, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with users appreciating the ease of use and familiarity with sending picture messages via MMS.

Twilio and Go make it easy to integrate phone calls into your applications. To get started, create a basic web server using Go's net/http library, then use TwiML to provide instructions for the call. Ngrok can be used to expose the local port to Twilio. The example code demonstrates how to make a call using the Twilio REST API and play an mp3 file. With this knowledge, you can build applications that allow users to make and receive phone calls.

The author wants to build a group messaging app using Twilio SMS and Ruby, allowing him to broadcast messages to friends and family while maintaining an easy-to-maintain phonebook in the form of a Google Spreadsheet. The app will retrieve contact names and numbers from the spreadsheet, forward incoming messages from the phone to all contacts, and forward incoming messages from contacts to the phone. The author uses Sinatra as the web framework, Twilio Ruby gem for Twilio integration, and Google Drive's JSON backend to store and parse data from the spreadsheet. He also defines methods to sanitize phone numbers, handle Twilio's POST request, generate instructions on where to forward messages, and send messages to contacts or himself. The app can be deployed to Heroku, and the author provides step-by-step instructions on how to set it up and use it.

Accela Inc, in collaboration with the City of Evanston, used Yelp's API, Open Data, and Twilio SMS to make restaurant health scores publicly available and programmable via SMS. This project demonstrates the power of standardizing data, leveraging the network effect, and making data accessible through APIs and open platforms like CivicData.com. The initiative showcases Accela Developer Evangelist Seth Axthelm's expertise in creating a simple yet powerful tool that can be easily adopted by residents to access health information, with plans to expand to other cities and features.

At DigitalOcean, text messaging is used for both security and internal communication purposes, with Twilio providing an intuitive API that enabled the company to quickly integrate and expand its usage of SMS throughout their applications. The platform has helped the company's customer base by efficiently handling high volumes of SMS traffic, delivering messages quickly and reliably, and supporting global customers. DigitalOcean also uses SMS for identity verification and anti-fraud measures, making it an increasingly important channel in their future development plans.

The author of the article demonstrates how to send daily animated GIFs using Firebase, Giphy, Node.js and Twilio MMS. The author starts by updating their existing app to include a picture in their daily message, replacing the previous code with new lines that use the `giphy-wrapper` node library to interact with the Giphy API and pull random GIFs tagged "puppy". The updated code then sends these GIFs to users who have subscribed to receive updates using the Twilio node helper library.

The Twilio team is warning customers to disable Secure Sockets Layer (SSLv3) protocol on their hosts due to a vulnerability that affects the protocol level, urging them to upgrade to Transport Layer Service (TLS) as soon as possible. The vulnerability was reported in October 2014 and will be discontinued for Twilio services on October 22nd at 9am PDT / 1600 UTC. Customers are encouraged to disable SSLv3 and upgrade to TLS to mitigate the risk, with resources provided by Twilio and an external guide available for assistance.

The author, Brent Schooley, created a tool that allows users to send barcodes of food items via SMS and receive the nutrition information for those items. The tool uses Twilio's MMS service and the Nutritionix API to retrieve the nutrition data. Users can choose to get total nutrition information or compare the nutritional values of multiple items. The tool is built using C# and ASP.NET, and includes features such as error handling and keyword-based processing. The author encourages users to try out the tool and share their creations on Twitter or via email.

SpareFoot, a company that provides storage facilities online and offline, was looking for a call center solution that could expand with their business. They were dissatisfied with their previous vendor's inflexibility and lack of integration capabilities. After evaluating options, they chose NewVoiceMedia as their new contact center provider. With the help of Twilio, SpareFoot designed, prototyped, and shipped a new call center that can handle high per-second call volume and easily adapt to changing agent call flows. The new solution was built with flexibility in mind, mirroring SpareFoot's elastic business model. NewVoiceMedia provided the necessary developer hours savings by replicating call flows, building call logic, and integrating Salesforce information quickly, allowing SpareFoot to focus on their growth strategy.

The Twilio App Monitor is a tool that logs errors and sends notifications when issues occur with Twilio-powered applications. The app monitor can be set up to send SMS alerts using webhooks, allowing developers to receive real-time notifications about errors without relying on email. To demonstrate this, an example application was built using Python and Flask, which receives HTTP POST requests from the App Monitor Trigger and sends an SMS message using the Twilio REST API. The application uses a webhook trigger to receive error information and can be customized to send messages with specific parameters, such as error codes and descriptions. By setting up this system, developers can ensure that their applications are always aware of any issues and can take swift action to resolve them.

The author created a web service to convert videos sent via MMS to animated GIFs using Node.js, Libav, and Imagemagick. The service runs on an Ubuntu VPS with Node.js installed, uses Libav to extract frames from the video and stitch them into an animated GIF, and serves the generated GIF as a static file. The author integrated Twilio to accept MMS videos and send out animated GIFs, using a combination of child processes and HTTP requests to orchestrate the conversion process. The service can be tested by sending a short video via MMS to the Twilio number, and the resulting animated GIF is returned immediately after processing.

Twilio is gearing up for Dreamforce 2014, a week of talks, tutorials, and panels about telephony and communication. Twilio will be at the DevZone in Moscone North and Expo hall October 13-16th. The company's partners, including NewVoiceMedia, Velocify, RingDNA, and OneReach, will also have booths at the event. Twilio is hosting a pre-gala event with its partner NewVoiceMedia on Tuesday. Throughout the week, Twilio is sponsoring talks by its partners, such as RingDNA CEO Howard Brown discussing how to leverage AppExchange as a lead engine, and Velocify's talk about eHarmony's customer acquisition strategy. Additionally, Twilio will have a booth at the event where attendees can learn more about telephony and communication.

Twilio Client has been updated to provide more control over WebRTC primitives, particularly getUserMedia, allowing developers to manually adjust parameters such as audio gain control. This feature is useful in environments where device-specific issues occur and can be used to work around problems like the Windows auto-gain control issue mentioned, by passing specific settings directly to the underlying call to getUserMedia. The new `audioConstraints` parameter allows developers to enable or disable features like AGC, and can also be used to programmatically choose a specific audio device.

The author, Jarod Reyes, shares his accidental discovery of creating a "branded SMS" using Twilio's MMS service. He explains that by sending an MMS with a custom image that resembles a standard text message, but includes a logo, it creates the illusion of a branded SMS. The process involves creating an image template in Illustrator and hosting it at a public URL, then using Twilio's REST API to send the MMS. The author provides a simple example of how this can be done in Ruby/Sinatra, and encourages others to experiment with customizing their SMS messages and exploring new possibilities for hacking the SMS interface.

The article describes how to build an on-demand translation service using Twilio MMS, CamFind, and Microsoft Translator. The service allows users to send a picture message with a language request, and the system will translate the image into the requested language. The system uses a Sinatra Ruby framework to handle incoming messages, interacts with the Twilio APIs, and makes REST API calls to the CamFind and Microsoft Translator APIs. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up the project, including installing dependencies, creating the server code, and integrating the translation logic. Once deployed, users can send picture messages to the service's Twilio number to receive translated descriptions in their preferred language.

The author of this article is Kyle Kelly-Yahner, and he discusses creating GIF polls using Twilio MMS and Wedgies. The process involves storing the Wedgies API key in an environment variable, setting up an Express route to handle incoming SMS messages, preparing the MMS message with a to, body, and from field, and sending it using Twilio's NodeJS client library. The function that hits the Wedgies API returns a poll if successful, or an error object otherwise. The process can be used to create polls that can be shared and voted on via phone, such as sports scores or reader polls.

Oracle Open World Recap: Delivering Customer Experience (and Mustaches)` The Oracle OpenWorld conference brought together software developers, partners, and industry experts to share knowledge and innovations in customer experience, communication channels, and marketing. The event showcased various solutions and services that enable businesses to enhance their interactions with customers through voice, SMS, MMS, and direct mail. Partners such as BlueLeap, OpenMethods, and SureShot presented their experiences with Oracle Service Cloud, demonstrating the benefits of adding SMS as a communication channel, improving customer experience, and driving business growth. Additionally, Twilio partnered with these companies to give away prizes, including vacation packages, to attendees who participated in mustache-themed activities, highlighting the importance of innovative marketing strategies and community engagement.

The author, Ricky Robinett, shares his experience building a digital decoder ring using PHP, FilePreviews.io, and Twilio MMS. The application allows users to send an image of a Caesar ciphered text via MMS, which is then analyzed by FilePreviews' OCR API. The decoded text is sent back as a response, where the user can see the decoded message displayed on their phone screen. To achieve this, the author uses Twilio's PHP helper library to handle incoming messages and generate TwiML responses. Additionally, they use Firebase's JWT library to parse the JSON Web Token sent by FilePreviews, allowing them to access the OCR results. With these tools, users can now build their own digital decoder ring apps to decode Caesar ciphers using MMS and PHP.

Twilio on Rails Part 2 – Securing Your Rails 4 App and Sending SMS/MMS` is a tutorial that guides developers through the process of securing their Twilio-enabled Rails 4 applications, sending text and picture messages using the Twilio REST API, and receiving delivery receipts from Twilio. The tutorial covers how to use Rack middleware to secure webhooks, configure secrets.yml for sensitive information, and integrate with the Twilio Client library for real-time voice communications.

Twilio.org has reached its one-year milestone and is on track to send a billion messages for good. Over 200 organizations have sent nearly 10 million messages via voice and text, using the power of communication to make a positive impact in various areas such as government, arts, education, and more. Twilio.org partners with nonprofits, developers, and resources to empower change, provide tools for communication, and grow its community. The organization has launched several initiatives, including the Twilio Rapid Response Kit, which offers ready-made apps for communication, and is seeking contributions from developers and organizations to further its mission.

The tutorial describes the creation of a digital coupon generation and distribution service using Python, Flask, and Twilio. The application allows users to input their phone number and optional logo image, serial number, and message text to create branded coupons with scannable barcodes. The generated images are then sent via MMS to the user's phone number. The app is deployed on Heroku, where it can be accessed through a web interface. The tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for creating the application, including setting up the Flask app structure, generating coupon images, and sending MMS messages using Twilio.

The author, Brent Schooley, built a meme generator using Twilio MMS, Imgflip, and Sinatra. The app matches incoming text messages against a list of supported meme formats and creates a corresponding meme image using the Imgflip API. If the message doesn't match a format, it returns a prompt to send "list" for a list of valid memes. When a matching meme is found, it sends an MMS with the generated image back to the user's phone. The app can be deployed on Heroku and users can test it by sending a valid meme sentence or using pre-configured Twilio numbers in the US or Canada. The author plans to add more features to the app, including support for custom memes and sharing them with friends.

Upgrading your Django reusable app to support Django 1.7 requires setting up two separate virtual environments, one for each version of Django, updating the migrations files to support both versions, running the migrations in both versions, and configuring Virtual Environments. This process involves renaming the old migrations directory, using Django 1.7 to build new migrations, adding the reusable app to the list of installed apps in the test project, and testing everything out with the terminal commands. The guide also covers documentation, uploading to PyPI, and final steps to update your Django reusable app successfully.

iCracked used Twilio's MMS service to streamline repairs for customers and technicians, allowing customers to post a picture of their broken phone within the iCracked app, providing more insight into repair types and helping technicians plan the day's repairs and set customer expectations. The integration was made simple by Twilio, enabling iCracked to quickly update their API and front-end display code, and is contributing to increased customer satisfaction and business growth for the company, as they expand internationally with offices opening in the UK and Germany.