April 2015 Summaries

### Receive Twitter Notifications by SMS with EventMachine and the Twitter Streaming API (Send and Receive Tweets Using SMS with Twilio Part 3)` This project uses the Twitter streaming API to listen for events such as direct messages and mentions, and sends an SMS notification when these events occur. The application is built using Ruby and utilizes the TweetStream gem, which leverages EventMachine to process incoming events from the Twitter streaming API without blocking the Ruby thread. By running the application with Thin, a web server that also uses EventMachine, the app can simultaneously listen for webhooks at its /messages endpoint and collect and respond to events from the streaming API. The code is organized into several key components, including configuration setup, event handling for direct messages and mentions, and sending SMS notifications using Twilio.

Asha Sharma, COO of Porch, discusses the challenges and future of customer communications in the home improvement space. She emphasizes the importance of seamless communication for a differentiated customer experience, highlighting the need to overcome industry-specific barriers such as language differences. Sharma also touches on the role of developers in architecting unique solutions that cater to customers' needs, and encourages collaboration through regular "dev days" where developers can explore tools and create innovative solutions. She envisions live video capabilities bridging communication gaps between professionals and homeowners in the future.

TaskRouter has enhanced its functionality to allow for multi-reservation, enabling tasks to be routed to multiple workers and completed quickly by the first responder. This new feature allows developers to adjust the behavior of TaskRouter to suit their specific needs, including increasing the number of workers that can be reserved for a task. With this enhancement, tasks are now offered to a group of eligible workers, and the first to accept the task handles the work, reducing the overall time required to complete tasks. The new feature is designed to take advantage of the availability of multiple workers, allowing developers to build more efficient and effective workflows.

The sales and marketing process is plagued by a critical coordination issue known as the "handoff," where leads often go cold due to delayed responses from sales reps. This results in significant consequences, including lost business, poor customer experience, and reduced ROI. To address this, businesses can leverage automation technologies like Instant Lead Alerts, which prompt sales reps to respond quickly to new opportunities, with a focus on speed being critical to preventing stale leads and giving businesses a competitive edge. By implementing such solutions, companies can create more effective handoffs between marketing and sales teams, leading to improved campaign outcomes.

Camfed, a nonprofit organization, is working to provide education opportunities to young women in sub-Saharan Africa, where millions of girls cannot afford school. To track their progress and collect data, they use Twilio SMS, which helps them organize and analyze incoming data, as well as send reminders and updates to their community partners. By leveraging the power of SMS, Camfed has seen an increase in data collection and a positive impact on their programs, with Daniel Probert, Head of Innovation at Camfed, citing the simplicity of Twilio's API and the value of simple texts as key factors in improving their data collection process.

Twilio's API is being used by Small Farm Central to help small farms grow their distribution network and land new customers, providing a one-stop shop for farms' online needs including website setup, online store management, and customer communications via Twilio SMS.

The Twilio Lookup API is a REST API that can verify phone numbers exist, format international phone numbers, determine if a phone number is a cell phone, VOIP, or landline, and discover information about a carrier. The Twilio Ruby gem makes it easy to use the Lookup API in just a few lines of code. To start using the gem, you need to sign up for a free Twilio account, install the gem, and set constants for your credentials. You can then create a Lookup Client and use it to validate phone numbers by looking them up on the Lookup homepage. If the phone number is valid, it will return a JSON object with attributes such as country code, phone number, national format, and URL. The API also provides information about carriers, which can be accessed by adding an additional parameter to the lookup request. However, if the phone number is invalid, the API will return a 404 error, which the Twilio gem throws as an exception. To handle this, you need to catch the exception and check its code to determine if it's a "Not Found" error code (20404) or just raise the exception as normal. The `valid?` function provided in the tutorial demonstrates how to validate phone numbers using the Lookup API.

Twilio and CRMText partnered with Vita Coco to help them connect with Maroon 5 fans through a selfie campaign, which was launched in time for the band's tour. The partnership utilized Twilio's MMS feature to enable rapid response and scaling of the campaign, allowing Vita Coco to reach millions of fans across the US and increase sales at participating retailers. With CRMText's help, Vita Coco was able to quickly provision a shortcode that could scale to meet demand, making it possible for them to execute their campaign in a short amount of time. The campaign was successful, with fans engaging with the call-to-action, driving sales and providing a notable lift in sales for Vita Coco.

Craig Walker's career in entrepreneurship began with a securities attorney background, advising startups during the dot-com bubble burst. In 2001, he joined Dialpad and turned it around using "depression-era" tactics to focus on product development rather than marketing expenses. He founded UberConference and later Google Voice, which showcased his passion for communications technology. Walker believes that every person on the planet is a consumer in this field, offering opportunities for improvement. He's now focused on helping software-centric entrepreneurs leverage WebRTC technology to revolutionize communication, moving away from legacy telecom approaches.

This post outlines the development of a passwordless authentication solution using Xamarin and Twilio for SMS authentication. The solution involves creating a cross-platform mobile frontend in Xamarin that uses a feature of Xamarin called Xamarin.Forms, which allows writing user interface code in a shared project that generates UI for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone from the same source. The application sends a POST request with the user's phone number to validate the account, and then makes another POST request with the token received via SMS to authenticate the session. The solution uses ASP.NET MVC port of Ricky Robinett's Laravel backend, which provides endpoints for validating phone numbers and authenticating tokens. While the solution is complete, it lacks features such as registration pages, backup authentication methods, voice solutions, and profile pages, which could be added in future improvements.

Twilio's TaskRouter is being used by ThinkVoice, a company that provides communication tools for businesses, to manage their call center data and provide reliable and scalable solutions to their customers. The tutorial by Brian Coyle explains how to build a Salesforce-powered call center using Twilio's TaskRouter and Open CTI. This solution aims to reduce dependence on third-party solutions and leave as much configuration in Salesforce as possible, resulting in a more cost-effective and error-prone management headache. The demo demonstrates the ability to handle multiple channels of communication, including phone calls, SMS, and other messaging platforms.

The author of this article created a small app that allows users to send and receive tweets using SMS and Twilio. The app was built in 62 lines of Ruby, and the first part of the blog post series covers setting up the application, including creating a Gemfile, configuring environment variables, and defining a Twitter client. The app uses Sinatra as its framework, Rack underpins it, and Thin is used as the web server. The author also secured the endpoint to prevent unauthorized access by checking if the SMS was sent from their phone number and using the Twilio Ruby gem's Rack middleware for authentication.

You can leverage Twilio's Voice API with SIP Interfaces to utilize numbers from another carrier, ideal for conferencing services, IVR, or routing calls to WebRTC. To set up this configuration, configure the Twilio side by adding an IP allow list or username and password, then create a Twilio SIP domain and connect it to Toll Free Forwarding's account, which can be done by selecting a local number from another carrier and setting up call forwarding with a specific "To" address. Once set up, you can send calls through Twilio SIP Interfaces to various devices such as PBXes, softphones, or WebRTC clients.

Signal is an upcoming conference in San Francisco on May 19th and 20th, designed specifically for developers working with Twilio. The event features a stacked schedule of talks from top technical speakers, including Coleen Coolidge, Daniel Palacio, Lisa Weitekamp, Peter Shafton, Bob Hagemann, Guillermo Rauch, Leah Culver, Philipp Hancke, James Montenegro, Adam Varga, Elliot Gardiner, Kristina Durivage, and Alan Palazzolo. The conference focuses on real technical sessions for working developers, with tracks covering topics such as Twilio's technologies, design patterns, and concepts, as well as practical talks about socket.io, Swift, WebRTC, and more. Additionally, the event features straight talk from the people who built these technologies, including insights into the challenges they faced while building products like Twilio Video. The conference aims to start a conversation with developers, providing them with invaluable wisdom and knowledge on how to build successful communication experiences.

The author, Ricky Robinett, built an application using Node.js, Firebase, and Twilio to receive SMS notifications when someone posts a link to his domain on Hacker News. The app uses the Hacker News API's Firebase integration to listen for changes in the first element of the new stories array, which is updated whenever a new story is added. Once a notification is received, the app fetches information about the specific story using the item ID and checks if the URL links to the author's domain, sending an SMS notification via Twilio if it does. The author shares his code and encourages readers to try building their own apps with the Hacker News API.

Kenneth Reitz's journey to becoming a Python Overlord at Heroku was not a traditional one. He dropped out of college, which he describes as a "lazy river," and instead followed his passion for coding, inspired by his dad who taught him programming languages like Turbo, C++, and Pascal. Without the spark of classroom learning, Kenneth found himself unproductive and uninspired. However, when he started pursuing inspiration and creative projects outside of traditional education, his productivity skyrocketed. He eventually landed a job at a .NET shop and later became Python Overlord after discovering the possibilities of Python. Now, Kenneth seeks out new software and APIs to inspire him and continues to build upon his passion for coding.

We are deprecating Absolute Paging and related properties across all endpoints that return List Resources on September 14th, 2015. This change will impact accounts created after June 16th, 2015, which will no longer receive these properties in their list responses. The decision to sunset Absolute Paging was made due to its limitations with large page numbers and the high cost of calculating counts, which led us to opt for Relative Paging using AfterSid and BeforeSid, and caching instead. This change allows us to maintain a balance between rich filtering, high performance, and accurate data while minimizing the impact on customers. The new helper libraries will be updated to remove these properties, and we recommend utilizing the Usage API for alternative data aggregation needs.

Twilio has announced its new Video product, which enables developers to create live peer-to-peer video experiences in mobile and web applications. The service is built on the WebRTC standard and provides a scalable infrastructure for video conferencing, with features such as unlimited video connections, low latency relay, and optimized mobile media stack. Twilio Video also supports multi-party voice and video calls, allowing users to add participants ad-hoc to conversations. The product has been designed from the start to support this new breed of applications, which will change the way we connect, work together, and share with one another.

Eric Ries' story is one of how he got his first break in programming and eventually became an entrepreneur, with a focus on the importance of passion and vision in starting and running a successful business. He recounts how as a teenager, he lied to a publishing house about his age and experience to get published, but ultimately succeeded due to his ingenuity and passion for programming. This experience fueled his career as an entrepreneur, where he emphasizes the need for a clear vision and passion to overcome the many challenges of starting and growing a business.

$azure` and `Twilio` are used to build a notification system that can send SMS notifications to attendees of the Silicon Valley Code Camp. The system uses Azure Mobile Services, Azure Storage Queues, and WebJobs to process notifications and send text messages. The system is built using less than 150 lines of code and can be deployed to an Azure Website for continuous operation.

Mike McGarr, a late bloomer in his career, discovered his passion for Continuous Integration after working on waterfall-style IT development. He devoured books and information on DevOps, streamlining production cycles with tools like Jenkins and Hudson. His self-proclaimed neurosis about having repeatable and reliable processes led him to Netflix, where he now serves as Engineering Manager for the Build Tools team, guiding a culture that values continuous delivery and excellence in individuals. The Netflix team holds each member to high standards, both culturally and technically, and those who don't meet them are let go with generous severance packages, making it an attractive place for talented engineers like Mike.

Scout is a developer tool company that aims to make ugly tasks like server side monitoring easier and more customizable. The company's plugins are built by the community, with nearly 85% of them being created by community members. Scout's simplicity and reliability, including mission-critical alerts via SMS, aim to prevent developers from experiencing the heartache and ugliness Andre Lewis faced when dealing with monitoring tools in the past. With a focus on developer-centricity, Scout seeks to make life easier for developers by providing them with the tools they need to succeed.

Sonar has partnered with Twilio to power its SMS outreach tool, which aims to provide an immediate and personal connection between businesses and customers. By leveraging SMS, Sonar seeks to enable higher-quality conversations and increase customer satisfaction while generating more leads. Mayvenn, a company that helps salons and stylists sell hair products, is one of the clients using Sonar's tools, having previously struggled with a similar approach before adopting the new suite of communication tools. According to Sonar co-founder Matthew Berman, SMS offers the most immediate and personal connection among all customer channels, making it an ideal choice for businesses looking to engage their customers effectively.

Fresno Unified School District's parent-teacher portal has been improved by integrating report cards, attendance sheets, and other student information into a text-based system, utilizing Twilio SMS to send timely updates to parents. The district aims to enhance the notification system with trigger-based event notifications for incidents such as sudden grade drops or school events, ensuring seamless communication between parents, teachers, and students. By leveraging Twilio's API, Paul Scott, a software engineer at FUSD, successfully developed a scalable and customizable solution that has improved student tracking and parent engagement.