Announcing TWO Winners for Last Week's Amazon Web Services + Twilio Contest

Announcing TWO Winners for Last Week's Amazon Web Services + Twilio Contest

Winner #1: Email Center Pro Voice Alerts by Evan Coonrod

Voice Alerts is a new feature in Email Center Pro that gives you a phone call when new email matching certain criteria arrives in your Email Center Pro account. It reads a list of matching conversations, and allows you to select a conversation to have it read to you. This is great for people who use Email Center Pro but are often away from their computer, or just want a reminder to check in that’s a little harder to ignore than an email.  Read more on Evan’s blog.

Watch This Demo Video

Alerts are sent out hourly (or once a day if you choose that option) to avoid inundating users with mail (or phone calls, now), so set it up and then just forget about it until your phone rings.

Winner #2: Ask-a-Human by Eugene Osovetsky

By combining Twilio with Amazon Mechanical Turk, Ask-a-Human allows anyone with a caller-ID-enabled phone to call a toll-free number, submit the question, and then get called back with the answer.

As Eugene explains:

This could be useful when using the Internet is impractical (“I’m stuck in traffic on the 520, how do I get to 123 Main Street once I get to Seattle?”). or as a general information lookup for the non-Internet-savvy / non-computer-savvy demographic, or purely for entertainment value (Mechanical Turk workers are currently instructed to supply either serious or humorous answers).

How Ask-a-Human Works with Twilio

Ask-a-Human uses two incoming Twilio numbers (a toll-free one for the question submitters, and a toll one for the Mechanical Turk answer submitters). The application is written on ASP.NET, and is completely stateless (with all state being handled by Twilio and MTurk).

Give Ask-a-Human a Try!

Call 1-866-584-0774 from any caller-ID-enabled phone, ask any question, and you will get called back with the answer within one hour.

Netbook Contest Rolls On

Congratulations to both winners, and thank you to everyone who has contributed to the developer community with open source tools and conversations in our forums.  We’re now in week 16 of our Netbook Contest rewarding developers for building Twilio applications in all sorts of categories.  We’ve given away eighteen Netbooks, and we don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

This week we’re encouraging Twilio developers to get creative with Windows Azure, and you could win $500 in Azure credit as well as a Netbook from Twilio.  We look to partner with companies building services that help developers build great products, and we look forward to bringing you more categories, sample code, and PRIZES!