VerbalizeIt co-founder Kunal Sarda (pictured right) shares four keys to preparing your communications app, which he and co-founder Ryan Frankel learned from appearing on the ABC Television series “Shark Tank.”

After a harrowing experience being unable to communicate in a foreign country, I wanted to help eliminate language barriers by offering instant real-time access to human translators using the power of technology. My co-founder Ryan, had a similar experience in China and we soon began designing our first human-powered translation app. Some months later, we were ready to raise capital and applied for a spot on Shark Tank, the popular ABC show which gives entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their ideas to veteran investors.

In order to prepare for the spike in VerbalizeIt app downloads from appearing national TV, we took several important steps, which will help us generate the most productive outcome:

Do Your Homework
Before we stepped in front the sharks, we conducted extensive background research to better understand how the show would impact the number of downloads of our app. This meant researching how much traffic was generated from the show to previous companies, websites, social media pages, and app stores. Understanding precisely how much pick-up we expected to receive was crucial when preparing our servers. We now do this before every marketing campaign.

Test, Test, Test and Test Some More
Though VerbalizeIt is still young, we’ve found it effective to identify the successes we’ve already had. In our company’s young history we’ve had several spikes in downloads from press, events, and marketing campaigns. All of these spikes have informed the improvements to our new app and our deeper integration with Twilio. We filmed Shark Tank only months after incorporating and before we had a working iPhone app. With the showing airing shortly, we’re confident that our tests have put us in the best possible position to succeed.

Cherish Your Time
As a software as a service company, Twilio saves us precious development time. Because Twilio offers an easy-to-use API, clear documentation, and an out of the box learning experience, getting our developers up to speed was painless and easy and allowed us to continue to press forward on the other aspects of our SaaS platform.

Keep It Real
Through Twilio’s platform we now have a dynamic environment where customers can call via a typical phone line or our mobile app wherever they are in the world. This allows us to seamlessly route calls to our translators all over the world from any device to any device. We also have an “on-off” switch for our translators to alert the Twilio platform when they’re available to take live translation calls. This functionality when coupled with clear-call quality, have put us in the best position to connect real people across language barriers all over the world.

Jumping into the Shark Tank: How VerbalizeIt Swam With the Sharks and Prepped Their App With Twilio

Ben’s solution, Powered Now, provides an end-to-end platform for contractors to easily generate and manage invoices, quotes and certificates while on site. Just two years into their journey as a company, the app won Best Mobile App At The Next Web Conference,  and are expanding rapidly.

“Our number one goal is to arm tradesmen and women with tools to do their paperwork more easily, more quickly and more professionally. Nobody goes into business to do admin,” says Ben. Their tablet based application allows tradesmen to easily log details of their project, contracts, record of payments, and customers’ information in one simple dashboard.

Powered Now uses Twilio SMS to keep customers in touch with contractors. When there’s a new quote or update on a job site, Powered Now sends the customer an SMS notification.

With the Best Mobile App Award in hand, they’re looking to keep improving their platform. “In the future, we’re looking to incorporate voice into the App, its one of the most highly requested features from our users,” says Ben.

To learn more about Powered Now, visit their website here.

Powered Now Simplifies Construction Contracts, Wins Big at The Next Web Conference

We’re looking for companies that are innovating communications products and creatively using the Twilio API. To be eligible for this current round of Twilio Fund, you must be based in the European Union and have a Twilio-powered product or company.

Here’s what Twilio Fund Europe Winners will receive.

• Twilio Credit
• Booth space at TwilioCon 2013 in San Francisco
• Investment and benefits from 500 startups
• Publicity support from Twilio PR and Marketing

For more information visit www.TwilioFund.com

Twilio Fund Alumni

Previous Twilio Fund Winners like OrderMapper and Talkdesk have gone on raise additional rounds of funding and expand their business. Read more about the most recent Twilio Fund 2012 winners here:

Twilio Fund Winner Profile: Wedgies

Twilio Fund Winner Profile: Babelverse

Interview with Sessions

We can’t wait to see what you build!

Twilio Fund Europe Deadline Extended to May 6 – Apply Now

Sound awesome? It is and General Assembly, 3beards, Twilio and WAYN are offering you the chance to be a part of that awesomeness in person as part of their Accelera-tour.

The Accelera-tour

Enter General Assembly’s contest to win a trip to Geneva, Switzerland, the home of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider by May 3rd. To enter, just submit your email here. One winner will get:

•  A tour of the Large Hadron Collider
• Roundtrip airfare from anywhere in the UK or Germany
• Two nights stay and transportation in Switzerland.

This contest follows the rules of the sub-atomic particle physics, meaning no two applicants can occupy the same place spot at the same time. Only one will win. Best of luck to everyone who applies!

For more information on the contest and rules of entry visit here

Win an Atomic Getaway to Visit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

espnW Hackathon

About a week ago, ESPN held their first public hackathon, and over 100 female developers and designers packed the Stanford design school to attend. HackespnW brought together female hackers and college athletes to create apps combining sports and tech. Organized by espnW, the event brought together leading API platforms to offer their resources to coders.

The Winners

A trio of female CMU grad students took home the grand prize with their app, iSports, a web app that scans athletes’ faces and pulls up key facts and context about each player. iSports uses machine learning and facial recognition technology to enhance a sports fan’s viewing experience, similar to how Microsoft SmartGlass does the same for actors and musicians. According to the Hacker League page, the app used the ESPN Athletes and Statistics API, Mashery, YouTube, and Twitter API; as well as Machine Learning (Javafaces), Skybiometry and SOLR. Each team member will get a behind-the-scenes VIP trip to ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, CT with an ESPN Technology meet and greet, as well as two regular season tickets to any sporting event.

Team Hackbright
Without a doubt, the most well represented local developer group in attendance was the Hackbright Academy, a 10-week programming fellowship for women. Most of the winning teams including, Does Parking Suck, The Pack is Here (Twilio prize winner), and Strength is Beautiful (YouTube prize winner), all featured current Hackbright students or recent alumni. Here’s a closer look at a few of those hacks.

The Pack is Here
Taking home the Twilio prize was a “management platform” for sports leagues, specifically Roller Derby. “The Pack is Here” uses Google Calendar, Twilio, and Twitter to monitor league communications, schedule practices and games, and communicate with multiple teams. The app solves the problem of having to manage multiple teams all over the country by consolidating multiple communication channels. On a side note, a fun subplot developed during the hackathon. One of the “Pack is Here” team members, Margaret Morris, is active in roller derby and somehow got the roller derby community behind her team on twitter. Hundreds of roller derbiers from across the country starting supporting “The Pack is Here” by tweeting to the hashtag #espnwderby. Here’s a picture of us with the winning team:

Does Parking Suck?
Does Parking Suck? uses the ESPN API to tell if you if a game in your town is going to hold up traffic.

Strength is Beautiful
A web app for weight training tutorials, Strength is Beautiful provides women with a free alternative to costly workout programs.

Till Next Time
Considering how much of a positive response this hackathon received, we can’t wait to see what’s in store for next time. But in the meantime, we’d like to thank espnW, Mashery, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and most importantly, all of the developers who made the trip out.

For a full summary of the event, make sure you check out ESPN’s video recap and Wired’s coverage of the event here.

Female Hackers Represent Well At First espnW Hackathon

If you’ve answered a call, only to be greeted by an unsolicited recording attempting to sell you some “revolutionary” product, you’ve experienced robocalling. The FTC is offering up $50,000 and a free trip to Washington D.C. to any developer, or team of developers, who can help end robocalling. You can submit a fully functional product, or a detailed proof of what you’ll build and how it works when the contest goes live tomorrow. Details on this contest can be found at Challenge.Gov.

Can’t wait to see what you build, let us know what you submit!

Join The FTC in their Fight Against Evil Robots

The pace isn’t slowing down around here. September kicked off a mammoth #EURoadshow with Team Twilio hitting 17 events in seven cities over six weeks. The mission continues this October as we aim to meet as many DOers across Europe as possible. See where we’ll be the rest of this month.

It was an honor to work with developers in Barcelona, London and Warsaw as an API partner with Facebook World Hack.  You guys built some amazing Twilio and Facebook mashups including Facebook Hack London’s  Squirrel Spotter game, which took home the Best in Twilio Show. Huge congrats to all the teams involved.

Here’s a video of the London event, with Squirrel Spotter receiving the prize:

This month we buddied up with our pals the 3Beards for Sizzle 6 The Art Hack. 3Beards are the guys behind some of the most popular tech events in London, like Silicon Drinkabout, Digital Sizzle and Don’t Pitch Me Bro.

There were many incredible and creative projects at Art Hack including a project that made music based on the location of your goldfish and a necklace made of your Tweets and Twitter stats. Check out all the projects here, see our pictures from the event and learn more from this Wall Street Journal video below.

Incubators are where ideas are born and companies can grow into real businesses, which is why we’re happy to support two more UK incubators – Wayra in London and Oxygen in Birmingham. We are really looking forward to working with the teams there. If you are an accelerator or incubator program in the UK and would like to work with Twilio, let us know.

This month, we are all hands on deck for Apps World at Earl’s Court, London 2nd and 3rd October. Across these two days, we’ll be running five technical workshops a day at the Twilio booth. Need help on your Twilio apps? Just looking to chat? We’ll be here and it’s free to enter the exhibition space. See the tech talk schedule and register for a pass here.

Till next time,

James
@jamesparton

London Calling: Facebook World Hack, 3Beards and a World of Apps

Today we announced a brand new TwiML verb to the Twilio family: meet <Queue>. In celebration of this newly launched verb, we’re kicking off a special extended developer contest to get your creative developer juices flowing. In exchange for rad prizes and the street cred to say you nabbed the top honors for the first ever Queue contest.

<Queue> provides developers with a simple way to manage and route inbound calls, while tracking callers and hold time. Do a lot more with a lot less code.

Get Started with <Queue>

Build a simple call-waiting app, or expand to dynamic conference center capabilities – Queue’s got you taken care of. Bridge calls, provide callers with hold information, “whisper” key info to callers or call recipients, customize call flows and more. Get familiar with the resources for Queue:

• Read the Queue documentation
• Walk through the Queue How To in XML, PHP and Python
• Watch the Quickstart Screencast
• Utilize the Twilio Queue Hack Pack For Python, on GitHub
• Build your own realtime Queue Dashboard
• See the difference the new Queue feature makes in the amount of code you have to write

Now that you know what you’re working with, let’s get to the hacking and prizes.

Your Challenge

Your mission is simple: build the most interesting app using the newest Twilio primitive <Queue> If you need some ideas to get the ball rolling, here are a few:

• Geotagged Wait Music App: Calling from California? How about listening to “California Girls” by the Beach Boys while you wait.
• The Rivalry App: Have Red Sox and Yanks fans call in and faceoff.
• “You’re On The Air” App: A call-in hour style app that allows radio shows to work through callers quickly and efficiently.
• Voice Chatroulette: Call into a public queue and chat with whoever about whatever.

The Prize

In addition to the developer glory of building the most awesome of Queue apps, we’ve got some great prizes up for grabs:

• First Prize: Google Nexus Q [when released this fall] + Full conference pass to TwilioCon 2012 plus skip the afterparty queue with VIP access.
• Second Runner Up: An autographed copy of I,Q by John De Lancie (The Star Trek!) with certification of authenticity, plus Full conference pass to TwilioCon 2012 plus skip the afterparty queue with VIP access.
• Runner Up: Full conference pass to TwilioCon 2012 plus skip the afterparty queue with VIP access.

Contest Rules

• Apps must be submitted by 11:59pm PST, Sunday September 23rd
• Apps must use <Queue> and Twilio’s API
• Entry must be accompanied by a video or screencast
• Bonus points for submission to the Twilio App Gallery and Programmable Web

Developer Contest: Queue, the Newest Member of the Twilio family

As a conference aficionado, we bet you have some great ideas around apps that could help harness the awesome from each event: Is there a better way to organize all of the after-parties? What app could we use to network with the most relevant people here? As we gear up for TwilioCon 2012, this developer contest is about building the app you want at the next event you attend. The winner of this contest will grab a full conference pass to TwilioCon in October and get a chance to show off the app during the event.

The Challenge

Build the app you want to see at your next conference. A tool that attendees can use to get the most out of the talks, the parties, and the people attending. Need some ideas to get started? Here are a few ideas:

• Meal app – find new friends to eat with for lunch or dinner
• Sessions – organize and be social around the conference sessions
• Realtime talk feedback – interact with the speaker during the talk
• Group messaging – grow your own network within the event

The Prize

First place will receive a full three-day conference pass to TwilioCon 2012 in San Francisco. Your app will also be featured at TwilioCon 2012 for attendees to use.

Second place will take home $50 in Twilio credit and a brand new Kindle Fire.

Contest Rules

• Entries must be submitted by 11:59 PM PST Sunday August 19th
• Entries must use Twilio API
• Entry must be accompanied by a video or screencast
• Entry cannot be an app that has previously won a Twilio Developer Contest
• Bonus points for submission to the Twilio App Gallery and Programmable Web

What’s This Developer Contest All About?

Every month, we encourage developers to build something awesome with a Twilio-powered contest. As a language agnostic platform for cloud communications, we want developers of every shape, size and stripe to solve problems and grab a little glory using Twilio. To kickstart the creative process, we run these developer contests every month.

How To Get Involved

Submissions are accepted via this handy-dandy form. If you need any help or want to bounce some ideas off of other Twilio coders, join us on our forums or just drop a note to help@twilio.com.

Developer Contest: Build the Next Great Event App