TwilioCon 2013: Announcing Picture Messaging, Price Drop, Business Critical Apps and More

Today kicks off the third annual TwilioCon, a gathering of the people who are redefining human interaction in every area of business, social good and general hackitude. Our CEO Jeff Lawson took the stage this morning, looking forward to APIs as the new dial tone, with the Software People as the innovators driving the change. You are building the future of your industries, and we’re building the products you need to reach more geographies around the world, and expand your success. We’re so excited to announce a flurry of new products to power your business including Picture Messaging, Twilio SIP, new developer tools to help you build and maintain business critical apps, and drop in price.

Twilio Picture Messaging: When Words Are Not Enough

Combine the power of an image with the reach of sending a text. Introducing Picture Messaging for Twilio Short Codes to send and receive pictures over the MMS protocol. Build trust with your customers through visual interaction, simplify the complex with a picture, or drive action with visual cues. Picture Messaging is now available today on US short codes and Canadian long codes at $0.02 outbound and $0.01 inbound. Using a short code requires an 8-week application process and fee. We aim to open this up to long codes in the US as soon as we can, sign up for the beta and learn more.

Text Messaging: More Value for You and Your Users

We aim to provide you with the best quality service at the best price possible, and when the opportunity for more value presents itself we want to pass those benefits to you. Starting today all inbound and outbound text messages from US Twilio numbers will be 25% lower – $.0075 inbound and outbound. In addition to lower pricing, no more will your messages be limited to 160 characters or split into multiple messages – rolling out today is concatenated messaging which increases the character count to 1600. More value in your text messaging, more value for your business. Read more about pricing.

Business Critical Apps: Build and Deploy with Confidence

The ability for developers and companies to quickly address issues and detect errors when building a product is essential. – you can’t manage what you can’t see. You should have the tools to build business critical apps with Twilio. Today in your account portal you will find five brand new developer tools from diagnostics to security, to help you build and deploy with confidence on Twilio.

• The Request Inspector gives developers visibility into the HTTP requests and their responses during every phone call enabling them to identify failed and slow responses as well as showing the exact TwiML that Twilio executes.
• The App Monitor gives developers a consolidated real time view of all errors aggregated by error type that enables them to identify the most critical error, helping them focus on what’s most important. It also gives them the ability to drill down to identify the root cause and a time series of the error to put in context.
• Usage Triggers gives developers and sysadmins the ability to create email alerts or webhooks on daily, monthly or yearly thresholds of calls, messages or total spend. Making it easy to detect anomalous usage patterns.
• Error Triggers gives developers and sysadmins the ability to create email alerts or webhooks on daily, monthly or yearly thresholds of errors and warning. Making it easy to detect errors before their customers.
• Data Compliance Account and Security Settings including Limited Logging for the ability to switch the Request Inspector on/off, and enforced HTTP authentication on media URLs

Twilio SIP: From The Closet To The Cloud

In March we launched , a way to receive inbound SIP calls with Twilio, and today we’re introducing the ability to also make outbound calls. Now Twilio SIP allows companies to architect for the future with an agile communications environment, and plug their current infrastructure into the cloud. Learn more about using your existing hardware, extending your communications capabilities and more with SIP here.

TwilioCon is just getting started, stay tuned on the blog for more announcements and keep in the know via #TwilioCon on Twitter.