March 2016 Summaries

Lyft has scaled rapidly to become a successful company, valued at over two billion dollars and recently raising a billion dollars from General Motors. In 2013, passengers might have struggled to get a Lyft on a Friday night due to the limited number of drivers available. To overcome this challenge, Lyft focused on self-onboarding and mentorship to enable rapid scaling. This approach allowed them to increase both driver numbers and passenger demand simultaneously, ultimately breaking through bottlenecks and achieving success.

Whispir is a company that aims to help developers deploy their applications faster by providing pre-built communications solutions. They believe in letting developers focus on their strong suits rather than spending time on redundant code and backend management tasks such as scaling and logging. Whispir integrates with Twilio, allowing developers to manage their backend efficiently without having to start from scratch. By using Whispir, developers can save time and focus on building more complex projects, similar to stacking Lego blocks to build a structure.

The blog post by Eddie Zaneski explores the process of modernizing an existing application by integrating React, specifically focusing on transforming a Twilio Video application. By leveraging React's modular and reusable component structure, the author demonstrates how to replace parts of a brownfield application with React components, thus simplifying the modernization process. The example provided involves using React to handle the conversation logic of a Twilio Video app, with detailed instructions on setting up the necessary environment, including Node.js, Babel, and Webpack. These tools help in bundling and transforming JavaScript code to be compatible with modern browsers. The post guides readers through creating a React component, ConversationContainer, which manages Twilio conversation logic, showcasing how React's lifecycle methods are utilized to handle component mounting and unmounting. Finally, the author emphasizes the ease of introducing new frameworks like React incrementally and encourages readers to expand their applications further by adding more React components, thereby enhancing state management and application functionality.

The experimental Android Plugin for Gradle offers improved debugging capabilities, hybrid debug mode, and enhanced code completion. It provides a more efficient workflow for native development on Android, with the ability to create static libraries and handle dependencies on dependencies. The plugin's documentation is sparse, but the benefits of using it are well worth the effort, despite a potentially daunting ramp-up period. With its seamless integration with Android Studio 2.0, this plugin has improved the developer experience for native development on Android.

The Kiosk exhibit at MoMA PS1 in New York City utilizes text-to-speech (TTS) technology to guide visitors through an audio tour of the exhibit, which celebrates the story behind everyday objects. The TTS robot is built using Twilio's capacities and NodeJS, providing a cost-effective solution for creating 1,300 different clips of two-minute audio recordings. The installation aims to highlight the humanity in everyday objects by juxtaposing technology with art, offering visitors a brief respite from the constant competition for their attention in urban environments. By leveraging TTS technology, Kiosk provides an intuitive and accessible experience for museum-goers, allowing them to engage with the exhibit without the need for additional hardware or apps.

Sara Chipps, founder of JewelBots, is teaching young girls to code through a programmable friendship bracelet that reacts to their friends' presence and sends secret messages. Her approach focuses on user testing with middle school girls to understand what's important to them, finding that they prioritize friendship over other features. Sara draws inspiration from Minecraft, which allows kids to build mods without coding, and aims to create a similar experience for her users. User testing revealed that girls value social interactions over technical aspects, leading JewelBots to focus on building relationships rather than just programming. Sara believes that hands-on hardware experiences like First Robotics events can be more engaging for young learners compared to traditional programming environments. With plans to manufacture and sell the bracelets by spring, JewelBots has already run a successful Kickstarter campaign and is pre-selling the product online.

Meet the SIGNAL speakers: Allison Craig, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Eileen Uchitelle, and Byron Deeter. These individuals will share their expertise in engineering "mad science," investing, testing, and more at the upcoming SIGNAL conference. Allison Craig is a frontend engineer with a background in fashion design who will talk about developing good Slack apps. Feross Aboukhadijeh works on "mad science" technology that surprises users, including his P2P BitTorrent client built with WebRTC. Eileen Uchitelle has an 18-step plan for writing great talks and focuses on testing and improvement in her session on security. Byron Deeter is a cloud computing investor who will be on a panel discussing how nonprofits can raise capital alongside other venture fund experts. You can get $75 off your SIGNAL ticket price with the promo code BLOG75.

Here's a neutral and interesting summary of the provided text in one paragraph: The Twilio Video JavaScript SDK simplifies building multi-person video chat applications by minimizing complicated WebRTC boilerplate. To get started, create two web pages, local.html and remote.html, each with its own JavaScript code to accept conversation invitations and attach media to their respective divs. The client-side code uses the Twilio AccessManager to generate an access token, which is used to connect to a Twilio Video Conversation. Once connected, the code invites another participant to join the conversation using the `inviteToConversation` method. With these basic steps, you can create a bare-bones JavaScript application that runs with Twilio Video, serving as a foundation for more complex applications like Skype or integrating video chat into other projects.

The App That Shouldn’t Exist: PulledOver Strives To Deliver Transparency In Police Interactions` PulledOver is an app that aims to provide transparency in police interactions, particularly for people of color who are stopped by law enforcement. The app was created by Matt, a technologist, after hearing about multiple instances of racial profiling and killings during traffic stops. PulledOver allows users to record interactions with police via a phone call, which is then sent to registered contacts via text message. The app's goal is to provide peace of mind for families and friends of those who are stopped by law enforcement, allowing them to act quickly based on the information provided. By using Twilio, PulledOver makes it accessible to anyone with a phone or smartphone, regardless of their device or operating system. Matt's vision is to create a tool that empowers people with an account of what happened during a police interaction, rather than leaving them in the dark.

A project architect at Wix, Karen Cohen emphasizes the importance of giving engineers sufficient time to complete projects, highlighting that this directly impacts the quality of their work. She uses baking metaphors to illustrate her point, noting that just as a baker needs adequate time to make a cake, an engineer requires enough time to produce high-quality results. Cohen stresses the need for a supportive development culture, where developers are respected and empowered to thrive. Her approach is informed by her experience in Israel's tech industry, where she has learned from Wix's talented developers. Furthermore, Cohen reveals that software hacking has made her life easier at home, suggesting that embracing this aspect of development can have personal benefits as well.

Agile CRM has integrated Twilio's SIP functionality into their platform, allowing sales agents to make, record, and receive calls from the browser. This integration provides a context-rich experience for both customers and sales agents, enabling them to access customer usage history, past communications, and support tickets during calls. The setup process involves adding the Twilio widget to contact pages in the CRM, which can be customized with features like call recording and voicemail automation. Once set up, users can make and track calls, record calls for playback, and run automated call campaigns to streamline sales processes. The integration also provides advanced reporting tools to help users understand their calling processes and improve customer engagement.

Twilio is hosting a live stream demo tutorial on masking phone numbers and calls with Python, led by Matt Makai. The event will take place on Friday, March 25th, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm EDT, where participants can learn how to create disposable phone numbers on-demand for anonymous user communication. This tutorial aims to protect users' privacy by preventing the exchange of personal information during calls and SMS interactions.

Twilio has announced an enhancement to its Lookup service called Caller ID Name (CNAM) that allows developers to programmatically lookup information about the registered owner of a US local phone number at any time. This feature provides accurate caller identification, which can be useful for various applications such as building directory listings or automating CRM updates. The CNAM Lookup is part of Twilio's Lookups API and returns caller name, type, and error codes. Pricing is simple pay-as-you-go with $0.01 per lookup.

In 2016, the web browser became increasingly capable with powerful APIs like WebRTC, enabling it to connect voice calls with other browsers, mobile apps, and phones globally. The tutorial series explores how to use Twilio Client to establish a browser-to-browser voice call, using languages such as C#, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, or Ruby. The tutorial is designed for developers working in various popular frameworks and languages, including ASP.NET MVC, Spark, Express, Laravel, Django, and Ruby on Rails. The goal of the tutorial series is to provide a comprehensive guide to implementing browser phone calls, with over 100 use case tutorials available at Twilio's documentation website.

By Siraj Raval, published on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn on March 24, 2016, is a tutorial on building an interactive answering machine using JavaScript and Node.js. IVRs are automated phone systems that enable communication between callers and businesses. The tutorial will be live-streamed on Twitch.tv at 2:30pm-5:00pm EDT, where Twilio's Eddie Zaneski will showcase the implementation of an interactive answering machine with JavaScript and Node.js. Attendees can expect a hands-on experience and interact with Team Twilio through Twitter by tweeting @twilio with any questions they may have.

The author is Jarod Reyes from Twilio, and in this video tutorial, he explains how to build SMS ETA notifications with Twilio and Ruby on Rails. The motivation behind creating these tutorials was the feedback from developers that technical documentation focused too much on isolated code snippets and not enough on end-to-end solutions suitable for production environments. To illustrate the use-case, a fake company called Laundr.io is used in this instance. The author will walk through the final product and live-code a core piece of the implementation to demonstrate how SMS ETA notifications can be implemented using Twilio and Ruby on Rails.

Twilio provides a service that allows users to make secure, anonymous phone calls and SMS without sharing contact information. This technique is called "masked phone numbers" and can be implemented in various programming languages, including Ruby, C#, Node.js, Java, PHP, and Python. The Masked Phone Numbers tutorial on Twilio's website guides developers through creating a demo app that enables users to communicate using masked phone numbers. When managing communications between users, it is essential to comply with laws and regulations regarding obtaining consent and recording or storing communications. Developers can explore over 100 use case tutorials on Twilio's website for more information.

Authy OneTouch is a two-factor authentication solution that provides strong security while maintaining simplicity for users. It improves upon traditional methods like SMS and soft tokens by offering more reliable delivery, better usability, and increased security. The key to its effectiveness lies in the use of RSA key pairs generated on the user's device, which ensures secure communication between the application and the Authy server. This method eliminates potential vulnerabilities such as phishing attacks or man-in-the-middle scenarios. Developers can start a free trial using Authy two-factor authentication, while users can download the appropriate app for their devices.

** The Twilio team has launched their new documentation experience, called Tutorials, which provides annotated walkthroughs of example Twilio applications. The tutorials aim to present a sample Twilio application in a familiar setting with the context of the user's favorite web framework. Unlike traditional code tutorials, Tutorials reverse the relationship between text and code, making code the centerpiece of the experience. The tutorials cover 19 different use cases using Twilio Voice, SMS, Client, and IP Messaging, and are written in popular web frameworks such as Django, Rails, Laravel, Express, ASP.NET MVC, Java with servlets and Spring MVC. Each tutorial is a full application that can be used as a jumping off point, and the source code is bundled with a permissive open-source license. The tutorials were developed over a year and a half by 21 different developers, and are intended to help users achieve production readiness with Twilio.

Twilio Monitor Events provides a comprehensive event log that serves as a holistic dashboard for all changes made to a Twilio account, offering full visibility into user permissions updates, message logs deletions, and new payment methods creations. This tool allows users to customize the monitoring of their Twilio usage by selecting specific event types and change types to be logged, enabling them to adhere to industry standards and data retention policies. By utilizing Monitor's features such as filtering and forensic analysis, users can track changes and maintain visibility over their Twilio account, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

In this blog post, Marcos Placona demonstrates how to use the Twilio Video SDK in Android to build video applications that allow users to have a video conversation between their device and a browser. The author provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up the necessary dependencies, initialize the Twilio SDK, and create a layout for displaying the local camera preview. He also shows how to handle incoming invites from other users, accept or decline them, and hang up the call when finished. Additionally, he discusses how to customize the app's appearance and add features such as displaying participants' video tracks and handling audio tracks. The author provides sample code snippets and explanations of each step, making it easy for developers to follow along and build their own video chat applications using Twilio Video SDK in Android.

This post by Sam Agnew explores the use of Twilio's Lookup API to validate phone numbers in PHP. To get started, developers need a Twilio account and the Twilio PHP library installed via Composer. The author provides an example code snippet that demonstrates how to perform a basic phone number lookup using the Twilio PHP library. The code can be used to check if a phone number exists and return its nationally formatted phone number. Additionally, the post discusses carrier lookups, which require an extra parameter and cost $0.005 per request. It also provides a function that takes a phone number as input and returns true if it's valid and false otherwise. The example code can be used anywhere in PHP code to check phone numbers.

In the blog post, "Real-Time SMS with Erlang, ChicagoBoss and Twilio", the author creates a web application using Erlang and the Chicago Boss framework that displays incoming SMS messages in real-time and allows users to respond to them. The application uses functional programming, which is ideal for concurrency and high-volume traffic applications. The author sets up a development environment, installs Erlang and the Chicago Boss framework, and creates a basic "Hello, World" application. They then expand the application to receive and display incoming SMS messages in real-time, allowing users to respond to them using the Twilio API. The application also includes features such as storing Twilio authentication credentials securely, starting new Erlang services for making HTTP requests, creating a Twilio module, and adding a new controller action and view. The author provides a comprehensive guide on how to create this real-time SMS application using Erlang and Chicago Boss.

Twilio has released a new security whitepaper that outlines the company's security measures, including updates to its SSL certificate and introduction of a Secondary Auth Token to help switch to new credentials in case of a compromise. The whitepaper also discusses the use of API keys for managing credentials, a new platform feature called Monitor for tracing and auditing lifecycle events, and recommendations for companies to re-evaluate their security implementations as their business grows. Twilio is committed to maintaining the highest level of security possible and encourages users to review the revised whitepaper and conduct a security audit with them. The company also has plans to release MPLS in early access for SIP trunking in the near future.

To validate and look up phone numbers in Google Spreadsheets, you can use the Twilio Phone Number Lookup API. First, sign up for a free trial account with $20 in credit to play with, and then create a new spreadsheet with columns for phone number, status, phone type, carrier, country code, and national format. Use Apps Script to write a lookup function that takes a phone number as input and makes an HTTP GET request to the Twilio API to retrieve information about the phone number, including its status, carrier, name, country code, and national format. The script can then iterate through each phone number in the spreadsheet, look up its details using the lookup function, and update the corresponding columns with the retrieved data. With this setup, you can easily validate and clean up phone numbers, as well as format them properly for use in your application.

VoiceBase is unlocking "Big Voice" to deliver a better customer experience by parsing out data from conversations to provide businesses with predictive insights and complex event detection. This allows for more personalized support, efficient routing of calls, and easier access to contextual information about customers' previous interactions. By partnering with Twilio, VoiceBase aims to democratize communication and make it programmable for developers and businesses, ultimately empowering them with the data they need to improve their customer experience.

Hobnob is using AI technology, Twilio SMS and MMS to automate event invites, making it easier for hosts to manage events and guests. The company has recently joined the TwilioFund program, which provides access to investors, technical resources, Twilio credits, and guidance to help startups grow their business. With this support, Hobnob is able to develop smarter rules for interpreting guest comments and questions, saving hosts from friction and getting guests the answers they need immediately. The company's AI-powered technology uses natural language processing (NLP) to determine if a guest's question should be passed to the host or answered programmatically, providing a more efficient and user-friendly experience for both parties. Hobnob's growth has been rapid, and the company is leveraging the TwilioFund program to accelerate its expansion and achieve a greater return on investment.

Isaiah Grey from Stamplay built a simple demo showing how to create an SMS weather alert service using Twilio and NodeJS. The service works by sending an SMS with a city name to a number provided by Twilio, which triggers a custom Code Block in Stamplay that fetches weather data for the city and assembles a response message. Another Stamplay Task then executes once the Code Block is complete, responding back to the initial SMS number with the weather data for that day. The service can be tested by sending a text to a Twilio number with a city name or "forecast" appended to it, and users should receive a response within several seconds.

The post discusses how to build and design an iOS video chat app using Swift, focusing on improving the user experience. The author starts with the Twilio Video for iOS Swift Quickstart and makes several design changes, including adding camera switching, mute functionality, and hiding the buttons until needed. The app's UI is designed to get out of the way when not in use, and the buttons are hidden after a short delay using a SwiftyTimer library. The author concludes by suggesting additional features to enhance the video chat experience.

Twilio has expressed concerns about the government's request for Apple to develop a backdoor in their software, which could undermine security and privacy. The company believes that this would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to the government co-opting technology companies as part of its investigative arm, creating an undue burden on small businesses and developers. Twilio is standing by principles of security, privacy, and transparency, and has filed an amicus brief in support of Apple's position against deliberately weakening encryption or other information security measures through backdoors.

The author of the article, Kyle Kelly-Yahner, shares how Yext built a simple user verification system using Twilio Voice API and Java Play framework within one week. The system allows customers to receive a phone call with a verification code, which they must enter to complete the verification process. To build this system, Yext used the Twilio API to make outbound calls and gather user inputs, and the Play framework to process requests from the Twilio API and send back TwiML responses. The system uses a database to track call history and updates it after each call.

Emergency Calling is now available in the Twilio account portal for SIP Trunking in the US and Canada, enabling users to configure Elastic SIP Trunking with programmable 911 routing to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs). This feature allows users to route calls to the correct PSAP based on their address and callback number, ensuring accurate emergency call delivery. With Twilio's instant provisioning of E911 address details and granular coverage across key regions, users can easily enable Emergency Calling for their SIP Trunk. The service is designed to work seamlessly with Twilio's phone number inventory management system, ensuring high-quality and complete number inventory on-demand. Users can configure Emergency Calling through the Twilio account portal, testing it by dialing 9-3-3 to validate the address associated with their number.

This summary provides an overview of a project that uses IBM Bluemix, Watson APIs, and Twilio Programmable Voice to analyze customer emotions through phone calls. The application is built on Cloud Foundry using Java and Maven, and it utilizes the Watson Speech to Text API to transcribe audio recordings and the Tone Analyzer API to identify emotional tones in the speech. After recording a call, the system sends the transcription to the Tone Analyzer, which provides an analysis of the customer's emotions, including anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, analytical tone, confident tone, tentative tone, openness tone, conscientiousness tone, extraversion tone, agreeableness tone, and neuroticism tone. The application then uses Twilio to send a text message with the Tone Analysis results to the caller.