Twilio Client Expands to Android to Enable Cross-Platform VoIP Calls

Following the February launch of Twilio Client for iOS, we are very excited to expand our mobile tools with the launch Twilio Client for Android. This makes it possible for any Android application to make and receive voice calls over a cellular data or WiFi connection without ever using standard cell phone minutes.

With this launch, Twilio Client is now available for Android, iOS and web browsers to implement VoIP communications into any mobile app. Seamlessly talk between these platforms and traditional phones to let your users talk over whatever medium they choose.

Building Apps That Talk in the Cloud

Using Twilio Client for Android, developers have access to a few key features that will make building communications apps easy.

  • Real-time Presence – Build buddy lists into any app letting users know who is online and set up notifications when a user is available for voice chat
  • App Backgrounding – The SDK can receive voice calls even when a different app is in use, letting users switch between apps easily to respond to incoming calls.
  • Cross-Platform Interoperability – Twilio Client supports Android, iOS, and web browsers so apps can make calls between any platform, including bridging VoIP calls with traditional phone calls.
  • Voice Over Data and WiFi connections – Make and receive calls over data and WiFi connections without using carrier minutes

Getting Started with Twilio Client for Android

Ready to get started on building a mobile app that makes and receives phone calls?  We’ve got documentation, helper libraries, sample code, and an active community of developers ready to answer your questions.

If you are looking for iOS information take a look at the Twilio Client iOS Quickstart, iOS User Guide and download the SDK here.

Need more help?  Can’t code but want to find someone who can?  That’s cool!  Contact us at sales@twilio.com and we’ll connect you with members of our developer community who can help. Can’t wait to see what you build.

Posted by Meghan Murphy on May 16, 2012 Tagged ,

DOer Lyle Pratt Launches BuildANumber alongside BetterVoicemail

Lyle Pratt is a DOer by nature, with a business-focused education on paper, he’s been writing software for years. After missing API Hack Day because of the flu, Lyle reached out to share with us the app he built anyways – talk about hack commitment. What he built was an add on to his current start up BetterVoicemail, an app that allows users to simply build their own custom phone system with voicemail, call routing, virtual phones and more.Meet BuildANumber, a brilliantly easy way to set up a customized phone system that anyone can build.

We interviewed Lyle on how he was able to use his entrepreneurial skills and love for code to create BuildANumber and BetterVoicemail. First, check out the demo of BuildANumber below:

Twilio: What was your inspiration for BuildANumber?

Lyle Pratt: BuildANumber started as a way to make the BetterVoicemail.com back-end more flexible, but it turned into a product in and of itself. I was also pretty frustrated with the limited functionality of existing virtual phone system providers. BuildANumber tries not to limit your phone system’s potential in any way.

BetterVoicemail is a product created specifically for Real Estate Agents. Soon, the back-end code behind BuildANumber will power BetterVoicemail.com, which will let us easily offer tons of additional features on a case-by-case basis if a customer needs them.

BuildANumber is also about opening up Twilio’s services to a larger base. Twilio provides a lot of incredible tools that let developers easily create custom phone and SMS systems, but the vast majority of people can not directly benefit from Twilio’s tools because they don’t know how to code or setup and manage servers. OpenVBX helped open Twilio up to a larger base of people, but you still have to know how to manage and set up a server to use it, or pay someone to set it up for you. With BuildANumber, Twilio’s services are suddenly available to anyone. No programming or technical knowledge required!

T: What technologies did you use to build it and how are you using Twilio?

LP: I built BuildANumber on a Python/Django back-end running on load-balanced EC2 servers connecting to an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database system. The call template builder uses custom Javascript that interfaces with the back-end and Twilio Client to let customers test their templates on the fly. I use Git for version control and Sublime Text 2 as my editor of choice.

I created BuildANumber to be able to use every Twilio technology available, including TwiML, the REST API, Twilio Connect, and Twilio Client.

T: Aside from the features listed above, what do you want to do next with BuildANumber?

LP: There is still a lot of functionality I want to integrate into BuildANumber. One of the functions I’m most excited about is the addition of SMS templates. Currently BuildANumber only lets you create templates that respond to phone calls. Soon, you’ll be able to create templates that respond to text messages in a similar way.

Another aspect I’m planning to develop is functionality that will let your templates respond to calls differently based on who is calling. As an example, if someone calls who is in your “Family” group, you might want them to have a different experience than someone calling about from your “Business” group.

Android and iOS mobile apps are also in the works that will let you easily access your missed calls and voicemails on the go.

Lastly, I want to increase the level of organization support offered by the product. I want BuildANumber to be friendly to large organizations who might want to be able to do things like share templates across multiple accounts or easily route calls to various organization members.

Lyle has been able to publish a live ALPHA version of BuildANumber using Twilio Connect, and just recently launched a feature that allows you to set up specific call functionalities that respond to each caller differently depending on their number. To hear a simple example created with BuildANumber, call (512) 843-8606.

Posted by Ladan Mahini on May 15, 2012 Tagged , , , , , , , ,

This Week Twilio takes Chicago with Text Messages and Pizza

We love Chicago and we don’t get to give the city as much attention as we’d like. But every so often, an entire series of events line up to let us visit the Chicago area to enjoy the only city with real deep dish pizza, connect with developers, and generally get to know the community better.

Jon Gottfried

Jon is on the left.

Starting tomorrow, May 15th, Twilio’s Jon Gottfried will be visiting Code Academy and the Chicago Node.js Meetup. Code Academy is a beginner-focused programming school that teaches students to build web applications with Ruby on Rails. He is running a workshop for their current classes on how to add voice and SMS support to a Rails application and how to build an awesome game of Telephone with Twilio and Rails.. Though the current classes are full, you can still apply to join their next Web Design, Development, and User Experience cohort kicking off in June.

At the Chicago Node.js Meetup that evening, Jon will demo both his Two-factor Authentication Twilio/Node.js application and a Twilio-powered Pacman clone. There is plenty of room so RSVP on their sign up page to join.

Devin is on the right

Next, Devin Rader is hitting Chicago Code Camp on Saturday May 19th. In addition to his session to dissect what goes into designing good REST APIs using the new ASP.NET Web API Stack, you can learn about mobile development with Qt, Test Driven Development with iOS, an overview of Windows 8, and finally Microsoft’s Robotics Studio. Overall, a “full day” is an understatement.

Keith Casey

Keith is in the middle

To round out the week you can find me (Keith Casey) on May 22nd-25th at php|tek. This event is near to my heart as I help co-organize and this time I’ll be serving as the facilitator of the Hackathon and Unconference sponsored by our friends at Engine Yard/Orchestra.io and Mashery respectively. Last year, the Unconference ran until midnight with sessions on regular expressions and random hackery while the Hackathon lasted until 2am. Unlike many hackathons, the theme isn’t just a clever hack but draws project leaders from the open source community who build apps they use on a daily basis.  Before you go, catch my closing keynote Thursday morning.

If you can join us for one, any, or even all of these events, please do. I promise t-shirts, stickers, and new ideas that will make you think.

Posted by Keith Casey on May 14, 2012 Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Twilio Office Hours: Hang Out in the Cloud With Real Live Twilions!

We are kicking off a series of developer office hours on the Twilio Spreecast Channel this coming Thursday, May 17th at 4pm PST/7pm EST where you can grab instant answers and direct feedback on your Twilio questions.

We invite you, our noble community of Twilio hackers, to ask questions, talk about your favorite hacks, tell us what features you’d love to see, or just talk about Star Wars (disclaimer: no Jar-Jar).

Join me on Spreecast for our first online developer office hours – Thursday, May 17th at 4pm PST/7pm EST to 5pm PST. You can RSVP at http://www.spreecast.com/events/twiliohelp517 or just hop online on the 17th!

A hat tip to Dwolla Evangelist Michael Schonfeld who kicked off office hours the other week on Google+. We thought it was such a great idea we wanted to offer it to our community as well. Maybe one day we’ll do an API mashup developer hangout, what do you think?

Look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Jonathan Gottfried on Tagged ,

Infield Health Builds Mobile Health Solutions with the Twilio SMS API

Can a text message a day keep patients on-track with health programs? Three years ago Doug Naegele, president of Infield Health, decided to find out.

Infield Health uses mobile technologies like SMS messaging and secure mobile web to help people adhere to programs with a certain health goal in mind. By delivering information straight to mobile phones, the company helps people better manage their health between visits to the doctor. The results, according to Infield, are better outcomes for patients and decreased costs for providers.

The company’s emphasis on mobile solutions meant finding the right telecom partner was crucial for its success. Rather than hire a developer with expertise in esoteric protocols and complex technologies, Infield chose to leverage the power of cloud communications.

Cloud communications platforms use the Internet to provide voice telephony services and text messaging capabilities to web and mobile applications. Not only does cloud communications simplify the development of telecommunications apps, it also ensures those apps can instantly scale to tens of thousands of users, or more.

Naegele recalled the first time he heard about Twilio: “I was in the office of the chief technology officer for the DC city government. There were two young programmers working on a text messaging project for parking tickets or something like that, and they were using Twilio.”

Back at home, Infield’s IT pros set up a Twilio account and started playing with the Twilio SMS API. They were immediately struck by its power and ease of use. “We can do in a day what we thought would take a month!” remarked one Infield developer.

Besides a highly reliable, scalable and secure platform, Twilio offered one big advantage to a growing company like Infield Health: It made it easy to prototype SMS applications on standard ten-digit phone numbers and move them to short codes after they were approved by a client—without any changes to the app.

Carriers require organizations that send large volumes of text messages to use short codes—five or six digit numbers that can send SMS messages at a rate of 30 texts per second. A random short code costs $3,000 for a three-month lease, and a vanity short code costs $4,500.

Naegele said it took about four months to build and test Infield Health’s first product: InfieldCMS. All Infield clients now use that content management system, built specifically for SMS and mobile web content. “Because we didn’t have to spend $50,000 integrating to a custom telecom SMS back-end with an arduous annual contract, we were able to build InfieldCMS without a first customer, then show a completed product to potential customers. As a start-up, speed-to-product was absolutely crucial,” said Naegele.

One beneficiary of the Infield/Twilio linkage is the American College of Cardiology. Infield helped ACC develop CardioSmartTXT, an app that promotes heart-healthy living. “Most of ACC’s heart-healthy outreach went from idea to testing to production-ready in under two weeks. Twilio’s flexibility makes that happen,” Naegele added.

Naegele said Twilio makes it possible for his team to “have an idea on Monday and start testing it by Wednesday.” This applies not only to features, but to entirely new apps. “When we schedule a meeting with a new prospective client, we are able to build a fully-functioning demo app and show it to them on the first day. Leading with software that works enables us to compete with firms much larger than ours,” he said.

One project that Infield Health built for WellCall, an employee wellness firm, integrates with Salesforce.com. If an employee needs a health coach, he or she simply sends a text with the word “coach” and an approved coach gets a message in Salesforce to call the employee back within one business day. “By matching a live health coach to a client who needs advice immediately, and to put it all in motion with a simple SMS, we keep our users on-track with their health goals without missing a step,” said Kerry Bradley Sylvester, director of coaching services for WellCall.

Other apps launched by Infield Health include a text message add-on to FirstBorn, which supports new mothers before and after delivery. “With Infield, FirstBorn counselors deliver healthy challenges (with incentives), patient follow-up content, and appointment reminders right to mom’s mobile phone,” said Dr. Miguel Tirado, who works with the Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM and the Ben Lujan Institute at New Mexico Highlands University.

Over the past year, data from Infield’s current campaigns suggest a 50 percent improvement in self-reported outcomes versus users who didn’t receive health messages. This summer, Virginia Commonwealth University will follow two Infield projects and strictly measure results.

“I love the idea of delivering health advice straight to someone’s mobile phone. Regardless of income, it’s the one device everyone has and everyone uses,” Naegele said.

Get started with Twilio SMS

Posted by Team Twilio on May 10, 2012 Tagged ,

San Francisco Startups Do Pushups for Charity Next Thursday

Doing pushups started as just a way for the Udemy team to stay in shape at the office. Before they knew it, the team had the crazy idea to one day turn that exercise into a way to raise money for charity. And that crazy fundraiser is about to happen.

This Thursday, San Francisco startups 99Designs, GitHub, Hotel Tonight, Udemy and Zaarly will put their hands to the ground, literally, in a pushup competition to benefit five different charities. Join us at the event May 17th, 6pm at Minna Gallery, to cheer them on! All ticket proceeds will go to the selected charities.

Five Amazing Nonprofit Organizations

Each startup chose one charity to support, which makes for an impressive lineup of philanthropic initiatives. You can support by sponsoring a team or buying a ticket to the event.

 Kiva Zip is a part of the Kiva that provides micro loans for entrepreneurs directly. Sponsor Team Github to support this nonprofit.

 Muttville is a senior dog rescue and foster service based here in San Francisco. Sponsor Team Udemy to support this nonprofit.

 DonorsChoose connects donors from around the world directly with classrooms in need of financial support. Sponsor Team 99designs to support this charity.

 CharityWater brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries. Sponsor Team Hotel Tonight to support this charity.

 Livestrong, started by Lance Armstrong, leads a charge on improving the lives of those affected by cancer. Sponsor Team Zaarly to support this nonprofit.

We look forward to seeing you at the event!

Posted by Meghan Murphy on Tagged , ,

Retail SMS In-Stock Reminders with Twilio

Timmy Crawford, DOer

DOer Timmy Crawford is the developer behind Cone Patrol, the Twilio-powered app serving up your powder alerts for northwest during the snow season. He is also the Lead Web Developer at The Longboard Store. Timmy recently implemented SMS reminders to customers waiting for out-of-stock items to be available and below he walks through the process on the site, as well as the conversions he’s watching.

This blog was originally posted on Timmy’s personal blog here, and you can follow him @Timmycrawford.

We have all been in that place.  After scouring the web for that latest *must have* toy, and just as you are ready to add to growing debt you see the dreaded words – OUT OF STOCK.

At thelongboardstore.com, such scenarios often resulted in young shredders contacting us via email, or even phone, asking when that super sick Landyachtz Evo deck was going to be available again.  Indeed something had to be done… the consumers want their stuff, so we brewed up a fancy new In-Stock reminder tool to satisfy the retail hunger.

New School and Old Skool

The feature is far from ground-breaking in the online retail world.  Many large e-tailers for years have been offering email-based reminders to shoppers to receive an alert when their desired item is back in stock.

But since a majority of the shoppers at The Longboard Store tend to be in their teens and early twenties, it seemed natural to offer a similar notification service, but via SMS. Additionally, SMS obviously has some major advantages over email-based communications (no-spam folders for the message to die in, immediate customer attention), so we decided to create a system that offered both email and sms notifications.

Sign Up Flow

When a product is out of stock, the user is presented with a call to action to be informed when the inventory is replenished. The design of the page is somewhat muted/grey, and this call to action is rather prominent:

The subsequent page provides the shopper two options for notification, SMS or email. Nothing too exciting here.

When a user chooses the text option, a confirmation sms is sent via the Twilio API (using twiliogem). The user can click the link in the text -or- enter the confirmation code on the web form to confirm their alert subscription.

Waiting Game

Now the consumer waits, iPhone in hand, credit card warming in pocket for that alert to arrive. A few other things that happen during this time though are the buyers can evaluate the number of alerts for given products/brands and adjust buying decisions accordingly.

When our receiving department checks in product, our Rails application determines if the product being checked in has any alert subscriptions, and enqueue’s a job to send notification to our customers that their product is now in stock. Simple. Beautiful.

All About Conversions

Indeed the project was fun to do, and having Twilio in my programmer toolkit made it all possible, but in the online retail space, it all comes down to conversions. So after letting the system run for the first quarter of the year, I decided to analyze the numbers.

To determine if a given alert signup resulted in a paid conversion on our sites, I simply cross-referenced the email/mobile signups from the alert table with those in the billing and shipping addresses on orders. Granted, this won’t catch every possible conversion, it is fairly accurate and accommodates not being able to track conversions with cookies across multiple devices.

EMAIL ALERTS SMS ALERTS
Alerts Sent 638 314
Unique Recipients 558 261
Conversions 75 33
Rate 11.75% 10.50%

These conversion rates are obviously well above our overall conversion rate for site visitors, and more than justify the added (albeit minor) expense of sending a text message over an email. I was personally quite surprised to see users signing up for multiple alerts. This makes me think in a future iteration we should allow users to manage all stock alerts via one unified tool – and thus reduce the burden (and cost) of confirming a subscription for each product.

The Future

Ultimately the beauty of this system is opening yet another way to keep a ongoing conversation alive with our customers. Being able to leverage systems like Twilio to connect with first-time and returning customers on mobile devices will continue to be a growing part of our strategy at The Longboard Store.

Posted by Meghan Murphy on May 9, 2012 Tagged , ,

Startup Weekend Launches its GOV Initiative in Seattle

Mayor McGinn Kicks it Off

This past weekend Startup Weekend kicked-off it’s GOV initiative in Seattle.  The premise is simple: connect communities and governments to innovative and entrepreneurial people.  Startup Weekend has done such a great job of rallying these DOers over the years in order to solve persistent and pressing problems.

Mayor McGinn and representatives from the City of Seattle, King County and the State of Washington were on hand this past Friday to kick-off the event and thank everyone for spending their weekend thinking about how to use technology and think differently about improving their communities.

Crunching Data and Hacking Government

Team My Spot busy finding a better way to pay for parking

Over 100 developers, designers and entrepreneurs participated this event, which was held in Seattle’s City Hall.  This was my first ever Startup Weekend and I was excited to be a mentor and help the teams define their vision, compile customer validation and build their prototypes.  There were several other mentors there from both the public and private sectors.  A big focus of the weekend was data: the government has a ton of it, but it’s not necessarily being put to productive use.  Teams were challenged to take advantage of data that was currently being made available by companies such as Socrata. For governments who haven’t yet released data sets, teams tweeted the hashtag #needdatanw to request information.

Which Bus Makes Finding the Right Bus Safer and Easier

Gilad Gray and team tied for 1st with Which Bus

By the end of the weekend dozens of ideas had been whittled down to 10 teams that would present to the judging panel, which consisted of Bill Schrier (City of Seattle CIO), Kate Matsudaira (Decide.com), Bharat Shyam (State of Washington CIO), Greg Gottesman (Madrona) and Mike Mathieu (Front Seat).

I was fortunate to spend some time working with a team building Which Bus, an app that takes the best of Google Maps and One Bus Away providing a simple way to figure out how to get from point A to B in Seattle. Figure out how to use public transit, see which bus to hop on and when it’s expected to arrive.  A big theme of the weekend was accessibility and making sure that public services are available to as many people as possible.  Most apps and services require a web browser or smart phone, which excludes many of the residents of the State of Washington.  Once Team Which Bus decided to use Twilio for SMS notifications, it only took about an hour to implement, which caught the attention of Sol Villarreal, the community engagement director for the City of Seattle.

Thinking about technical solutions for government issues was new to me and my guess is it was new to many of the attendees of Startup Weekend GOV.  I’m really happy that I had the chance to attend and am looking forward to see this initiative roll-out to more cities and hopefully see some great solutions get some tractions and improve the quality of our communities.

Posted by Carter Rabasa on May 7, 2012 Tagged , , ,

Twilio Teams Up With Fruition Partners To Bring Cloud Communications To ServiceNow

Fruition Partners LogoAt Twilio, we believe that the effort to bring cloud communications to global companies and brands is best done with friends, so today, we are proud to announce our partnership with Fruition Partners.

Founded in 2003, Fruition Partners is a Cloud  IT consultancy that specializes in large-scale systems implementations for the Fortune 500. The company is the world’s leading ServiceNow partner, with over 200 successful deployments for customers like Coca-Cola, Viacom, American Express and Yale University under its belt.

Chris Dauw, Fruition’s Director of Product Management, says that when he started tinkering with Twilio’s APIs, he immediately understood the magnitude of their potential.

“We instantly realized that Twilio was going to revolutionize business telecom,” Dauw says. “Since then, we’ve been using the API to do some fantastic things.”

These fantastic things have included eliminating a $25,000/month answering service for a global brand, creating a real-time support ticketing system for a supercollider and launching FruFone, a Twilio Client-powered softphone that works in the browser and integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow.

In which a global retailer saves $25,000 per month

A little over a year ago, a global retail brand realized it had problems with the $25,000/month third-party answering service it relied on to handle after-hours calls. The high monthly cost was only the beginning: The retailer and the answering service tracked customer interactions with incompatible software, so getting data out of one system and into the other was an entirely manual task: Every day, someone in the retailer’s office had to take the previous night’s notes from the answering service and type them into the retailer’s own system.

Along with this laborious and potentially error-prone process, the retailer faced the risk that the answering service would have an outage or experience an unexpectedly high volume of calls, potentially causing critical messages to get lost and leaving customers needs unattended.

When Dauw heard about the retailer’s situation, he knew that there was a better way. Dauw figured that, in the age of cloud communications, dedicating $25,000 per month and hundreds of hours per year of data entry to answering late night phone calls no longer made any sense. Dauw and the team at Fruition Partners pitched the retailer on a new approach.

They proposed a solution built on ServiceNow – cloud-based IT service management platform – and Twilio’s cloud communications API. This solution, Dauw knew, could deliver a far superior experience to customers, eliminate the manual data entry process and save boatloads of cash.

A few months later, the retailer had completely ditched the old-school answering service in favor of an entirely automated system powered by Twilio and ServiceNow.

The new answering system never misses a beat. It uses interactive voice response (IVR) to automatically capture after-hours customer interactions, turn them into service tickets, sync them with the proper customer records and forward critical issues to the person on call. Everything is logged 100% of the time, and since the the whole system is automated and lives in the cloud, the retailer never has to worry that a spike in call volume or a human error will cause a customer to slip through the cracks. Best of all, the recurring $25,000/month fee is gone, replaced with an on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Now, the retailer only pays for the after-hours calls that it receives – when it receives them – and nothing else. And unlike the old answering service, the new system is profitable: it delivers more revenue than it costs the retailer to use.

A particle physics lab gets the support system it needs

After getting fantastic results with the automated answering service, Fruition went on to build a “proactive” monitoring and escalation system for a national particle physics lab. The lab has literally tons of mission-critical super-computing equipment in use at every hour of every day. When a piece of this equipment encounters problems, the impact to essential scientific analysis is severe and costly.

Before Fruition Partners integrated Twilio and ServiceNow, the lab relied on highly expensive and outdated infrastructure, and the process was generally “reactive”: it required significant manual intervention to capture issues, turn them into support tickets and move them up the chain.

The new system, built on ServiceNow and Twilio, is “proactive”: it automatically calls available members of the support team the moment a piece of lab equipment goes down. On-call support technicians are informed of the impacted service or equipment, and can simply press “1” to accept the ticket. If the technician is not available they can press “2” to escalate the issue to the next agent in line or to management.  Outdated pagers have been replaced with smart phones, providing immediate access to the ticket through the ServiceNow mobile interface. This workflow has enabled the national lab technicians to respond to equipment problems far more quickly.

But these implementations were just the beginning

FruFone: VoIP comes to the browser

Built with the Twilio Client VoIP SDK, Fruition’s FruFone is a browser-based softphone that integrates native VoIP telephony into the ServiceNow platform. The product takes a full suite of telecom capabilities – inbound and outbound dialing, click-to-call, voice conferencing, call recording, call metrics, visual voicemail and more – puts them in the browser and makes them accessible right inside ServiceNow.

Because FruFone works in the browser, it requires no hardware and eliminates the need for the dedicated desk phone and complex computer-telephony-integration (CTI) traditionally required to connect software applications to a phone line. In essence, FruFone enables SerivceNow customers to go beyond the limitations of on-premises telecom with something much simpler, faster and more flexible: a Twilio-powered, ServiceNow-integrated software phone that is hosted entirely in the cloud.

As Chris Dauw says, “All of the hardware based telecom solutions are cookie-cutter, the main differentiator has been price. But when the cloud disrupts telecom, everything is going to be about innovation: what features and functionality can you provide that the others can’t?”

Fruition Partners FruFone in ServiceNow
Fruition Partners and Twilio will be presenting together at Knowledge12, May 13-17th in New Orleans. If you’re interested in learning more about Fruition, you should call the company at 1-888-440-2730 or email products@fruitionpartners.com. Systems integrators that are interested in partnership opportunities with Twilio should email us at partners@twilio.com.

Posted by Dan Kaplan on Tagged , ,