Developers Used Twilio to Win Podio API Launch Hack Day
Time to read: 2 minutes
June 22, 2011
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To celebrate the launch of their API, Podio organized a Hack Day to get a crowd of developers building apps using their API from day one. Steven Harms won 1st place with an SMS-enabled Podio app powered by Twilio and 2nd place went to John Fan and Ching-Mei Chen who built a click-to-call app, once again bridging the Podio and Twilio APIs.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, Podio is an online work platform with a new take on how everyday work gets done. Podio lets you build an online workplace that lets you use hundreds of specialized and flexible apps with messaging, tasks, reporting, workflow and contact management.
The Winners
Stephen built an app to “scratch his own itch.” As he says, “The back story comes from some amount of frustration in needing to enhance the accountability chain with the property management group who arranges work on my building! As a former sysadmin, it seemed strange that a server losing a disk got me paged at 3 a.m. but a water leak impacting multiple floors might not merit so much as a phone call to an impacted owner. I wanted to bring the urgency that paging/SMS signals bear into property service request tracking.”
His app was built on a Sinatra instance on Heroku and it talks to the various APIs that you want to mash together. From the Heroku node he used the Podio and Twilio APIs and Ruby client libraries to create the paging system. You can see a video of Steven talking about his app at Podio’s blog.
Second place winners John Fan and Ching-Mei were able to get their app running in just 5 hours and this was the first time they had ever used Twilio’s API (and Podio’s for that matter)! Their app pulls your Podio contact list and provides you with a “call” button that will connect you to your contact. Their app was also built on Heroku with Rails 3 interacting with the Podio and Twilio APIs. In addition, they used Balsamiq and then converted it to HTML/CSS with Napkee.
Congratulations to the winners as well as all the other entrants in the Podio Hack Day! And let’s not forget Podio for their API launch, too!
Do you have any ideas for other Podio/Twilio Mashups? Build it and show us! If you have any questions, feel free to email us with any questions.
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