Regulatory compliance (RC) requirements for phone number users have increased worldwide. Depending on the phone number and its features, your or your company's status in the country, and your intentions for the number, different laws and regulations apply while building Voice, Fax, or SMS-based applications.

While some of these regulations are new, many of these laws and rules have been in effect for some time. Countries are increasing enforcement for many reasons – including fraud, incidents of misuse and abuse and heightened national security concerns.

All your Twilio phone numbers on Twilio’s platform need to comply with individual country requirements or they are at risk of being suspended until you submit proper RC information.

Read on for what you need to know to bring an existing communications application into compliance or before starting a new application.

Here's a video overview explaining what's happening:

You can find the regulatory …

Robocalls, automated phone calls usually delivering pre-recorded messages, are on pace to be roughly half of all US mobile phone calls in 2019. Americans are only answering about 52 percent of all calls to their mobile phones. Further, more than three out of every four calls go unanswered when the call comes from an unidentified or unfamiliar number.

As a company providing a cloud communications platform, we are often asked about unwanted robocalling and whether we harbor robocallers and robotexters. Our CEO laid out Twilio’s feelings on robocallers in no uncertain terms:

“We don’t. And, we don't want these robocallers on our platform.”

Twilio’s communications platform

Twilio is a platform for legitimate companies to send wanted communications to their customers – communications those customers have opted into. Whether that’s an alert about an upcoming doctor’s appointment, notice of a school closing, confirmation that a purchased item has been …

Last week at SIGNAL 2018, we debuted v4 of our venerable hardware badge that we lovingly call the Hackpack.

This year’s Hackpack was our most advanced yet. Sporting a joystick, 7 buttons, a touchscreen, a massive battery, and Linux on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, we hoped to craft the perfect badge for both our conference and your next handheld computing project.

We also designed it with a special goal in mind: to release under an open hardware license. That’s why today we’re proud to announce the hardware collateral and assembly instructions are available under the Solderpad 2.0 license.

Go to the hardware repository now.

Building Twilio’s Hardware Badge

We designed and built v4 of the Hackpack using version 5 of KiCad. And even if you never fire up KiCad, you can take the gerbers to your favorite PCB house and (with a fair bit …

The Internet of Things certainly has potential – and for some applications it’s even currently performing. Smart farming is one of those fields (pun intended), where always-connected sensors can do better at crop monitoring than any human ever could. Watching moisture levels and other soil metrics is a perfect assignment for low-powered microcontrollers scattered throughout amber waves of grain.

Building a Smart Farm with Arduino, Twilio and Helium

Here in the Bay Area, lot sizes are measured in square footage not acreage – so excuse my diversion into hyperbole. At my house, I have a couple of 3’x6.5’ planter boxes where we grow herbs and root vegetables. Today, we’ll wire up a planter box …

In May, Twilio announced Twilio Functions, a serverless Node.js environment for spinning up functions without having to find hosting. Functions is an easy server replacement – but did you know we have other ways to rapidly build and iterate on your product serverless-ly? (Including a new visual communications tool, Twilio Studio, in developer preview).

Today I’m thrilled to shine a light on TwiML Bins, an incredibly simple way to start building or prototyping with Twilio. TwiML Bins are all you need to enable very desirable – and previously quite expensive – communications features like Cloud-based Voicemail or SMS masking and forwarding with Twilio.

Oh, and did I mention you won’t need to write a single line of code? Onward!

Get Yourself a Twilio Number or Three

The magic of TwiML Bins starts in the Twilio Console. Log into your Twilio account (or create a new one – try …

Sometimes a blank text editor window and that irritating blinking cursor are the biggest obstacles to starting your project. We here at Twilio most definitely agree – starting is the hardest part.

That’s why we’re so excited today to announce TwilioQuest!

TwilioQuest is an interactive, self-paced game to learn how to Twilio. You’ll master products like Twilio Voice and Messaging while earning experience points and loot. Read on to take the first step on your new adventure.

Prefer an introduction in video form? We’ve got you covered.

Get Started on Your TwilioQuest Journey

Before you can byte into TwilioQuest’s 8-bit goodness, you first need to create an account with Twilio or log into you …

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got an entire desk drawer full of hardware dev boards and sensors waiting patiently for a project. (Okay, fine, a garage storage rack.)

That’s why I was so excited when we announced we’re bringing Twilio’s Sync to IoT devices. Sync is Twilio’s real-time state synchronization product, allowing you to persist, update, and check variable state from anywhere the internet is found. We added MQTT over TLS support to Sync, opening up Sync’s super-scalable architecture to many of those aforementioned drawer hardware devices.

If you can’t tell, I’m over the moon at this development. Follow along with this blog post; we’re going to use an Espressif ESP8266 Dev Board, Sync for IoT, the Arduino IDE and billions of electrons to blink an LED from the command line.

Sync-ing Our Capabilities

Sync for IoT is currently in Developer Preview, so you’ll first …

“Code is Creative”.  You showed us how true that statement really is at this year’s SIGNAL San Francisco.

Your creativity was made readily visible on the 40 foot video wall (and interactive art display) we hosted upstairs at the show.  We handed out Hackpacks, hackable hardware badges with a Particle Electron onboard, which had the ability to control that massive display via text messages.

Poking, then Automating, then Drawing…

One of the first groups to figure out how to draw on the video wall was our friends at MissionMode.

By day, MissionMode builds incident management and notification solutions.  At SIGNAL, MissionMode proved they are also talented at reverse engineering. Their team of …

After spending some quality time with Particle’s Electron product, I’m so excited to share some of the awesome things I’ve got it doing.  Powerful, always connected, and perfectly priced for experimentation, it’s an incredible kick-start on your IoT journey.  We’re going to give you an even bigger boost today by showing you how to receive messages with Twilio and do something useful… blink the onboard LED with some Morse Code!

Particle Electrons, LEDs, and Antennas… Oh My!

At SIGNAL 2017, we handed out over 1,250 Particle Electrons with our HackPack v3 badge.  This Morse Code Translator will work with either a retail Electron or one you’ve removed from the badge – please follow along eithe …