Have you visited Tropo.com lately? Have you used it to create any apps for voice, text messaging (SMS), IM or Twitter? The Voxeo Labs team just gave the Tropo site a major overhaul ... added a new video intro... added more sample applications in JavaScript, PHP, python, ruby and Groovy... added more documentation... and just generally gave the site a new fresh look. If you haven't stopped by lately, do come by and check it out.
If you are looking for a cloud communications platform to build new voice, SMS, IM or Twitter apps on, sign up for a free Tropo account and get started today!
P.S. You can also follow Tropo on Twitter or Facebook - and yes, if you haven't figured it out, Tropo is a service of my employer, Voxeo. But even if I didn't work for Voxeo, I still would find Tropo very cool!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
What if you could have customers call in to your call center from directly within your web browser? No "click to call" that calls them back on their cell phone... but literally just press a button on your web site and start talking? And get connected directly to the team appropriate to the web page rather than a generic inbox?
What if you could do this with more than just voice... but also video? screen sharing? with better audio quality than the legacy telephony network (the PSTN)?
What if you could also add in live chat sessions directly from your website? Giving you true multi-channel interaction with your customers?
And what if you could do this without any downloads by the customer?
Even better... what if this could be done with your branding? and connecting to ANY IP communications system?
Announcing Phono
Today at the JQuery Conference in Boston, the Voxeo Labs team is announcing Phono a new software development kit that lets you create apps just like the ones I mentioned. It's free, it's "skinnable" and it works with any systems that use SIP or XMPP (Jabber). More info here:
You can use it to connect to your IP-PBX... to applications on platforms like Tropo... or really any other IP communications / Unified Communications platform.
FAR More Than Just A Softphone
That last part is really the point... the Phono SDK being shown today is far more than "just" a softphone. Sure... that's what some of the first reference implementations are all about. Things like Twelephone that let you easily call all your Twitter friends... or Facebook Telephone that lets you call your Facebook Friends. You'll see some more apps like that in the coming weeks.
But Phono is more than that...
Phono is a toolkit for Rewiring the Real-time Web
We as an industry need to drop the shackles of the legacy telephone network... we need to move beyond the PSTN in true rich collaboration between people... wherever they may be.
Voice, chat, video, screensharing... whatever mode they want to work in... from basic web browsers to mobile devices...
Phono is our contribution to that... and to taking away friction from developers wanting to build communications apps that make the most of the new tools and media we have available to us.
I freely admit to being intrigued by all the various new tools (frameworks, platforms, etc.) that are springing up to aid in the rapid creation of web sites and services. One such intriguing tool is Node.js, a way to build event-driven scalable applications using plain old JavaScript. It's truly a fast way to get web apps up using a language known by most web developers.
So I was naturally pleased to see the Voxeo Labs team come out with a post "Use Node.js & Javascript to Write Your Tropo Apps" explaining how you could build communications apps using Tropo.com and the new Tropo Web API library for Node.js created by Mark Headd (who does not work for Voxeo but likes to develop apps on Voxeo's platforms). The Node.js library for Tropo can be found up on Github at:
You create your app using Node.js and then login to Tropo and create an app there pointing to the URL where your Node.js server is running. In Tropo you can then add phone numbers to the app for both voice and texting/SMS, add instant messaging IDs for most major networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber) and add a Twitter ID, too. One app connecting to all those different channels.
Are you interested in creating applications that can open up government? Apps that can give people better access to government data?
If so... and if you are in the Seattle area or are attending the GnomeDex event happening this weekend, you can join in to the 24 Hour Open Government Hackathon starting at 5pm tomorrow, August 21st, at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. Here's the basic info:
Who Should Attend?
Ruby, Python, PHP, web developers, coders and anyone who has a passion to code, hack or kluge applications that will free (or otherwise enhance) the accessability and usefulness of government-shared data.
Although the sprint takes place August 21-22 during Gnomedex10 in Seattle, you don't have to be attending the conference to join us.
Participation is free and open to anyone...we just ask that you register in advance so we know how many individuals or teams we need to accomodate.
What's Going to Happen?
The nature of the Hackathon will be fairly free-form. Hackathon Partners will have organizers onsite to help get things rolling initially. At the end of the 24 hours, each app will be evaluated by the Hackathon Partners and prizes will be awarded to those teams or individuals that develop the best applications in the 24 hour period.
It sounds like a great time! I won't be there... but I know many of the folks attending. (The Tropo cloud communications service, one of the services of my employer, Voxeo, is one of the sponsors of the hackathon.)
Sadly, my schedule doesn't allow me to be there, but the good news is that if you are unable to get there in person, you can follow along on the UStream channel:
Today we announced over on the Voxeo blogs and in a news release that Voxeo has acquired Teleku, a startup letting developers quickly create voice, SMS and IM applications using a RESTful API from common web programming languages. Om Malik had a piece up at GigaOm: Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku. We have a page up linking to articles like that one, a FAQ and providing other info:
I've long been a fan of the work that Jay Phillips did to create the Adhearsion open source telephony framework and so I was delighted to read today of news of its future. To give some context, Jay first created Adhearsion a number of years back because he was frustrated with how hard it was to create dial plans with the open source Asterisk PBX. So Jay went off and created a framework where a programmer could use the Ruby programming language to very simply create voice applications.
Jay went on to team up with Jason Goecke to further develop Adhearsion and then last year Jay and Jason joined Voxeo (my employer) to create Voxeo Labs out in San Francisco. While Jay has since moved on, Jason continues to move Adhearsion forward and announced today that Adhearsion has a new home on Github ... and hinted at much greater plans in store. I'm looking forward to seeing what all they may be...
What if you could have a single application that communicated with your customers not just through voice but also through SMS, IM/chat and even Twitter?
That's exactly what we announced at Voxeo today with our new Tropo.com release. Tropo is our "cloud communications platform" operated out of our Voxeo Labs team that is focused on reaching out to web developers using today's programming languages and APIs. We launched it back at eComm in March 2009 and have been steadily adding more capability to it over the last year. Today the "beta" label was officially peeled off of Tropo, new international phone numbers were added, international speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) were added in 7 languages, and a host of other features were added, too.
Naturally, though, my interest was drawn to the fact that one of the channels you can now communicate to customers with is....
You can try it out by calling any of those numbers or using SMS, IM or Twitter. To use Twitter, just send a @ message to the Twitter ID "danweathertest" like this:
@danweathertest 32801
In a few moments you'll get back a summary of current weather conditions in whatever ZIP code you send it. Now the app isn't perfect... it doesn't do much in the way of error-checking and as I mention in the second blog post, I need to work on it a bit more to get rid of the initial prompt if you send it a ZIP code. I don't honestly know what it will do if you send it a bogus ZIP code. It's just a simple demo app designed to get people thinking about what you can do with apps that plug in to Twitter.
Want to try out building some apps yourself? Just head over to www.tropo.com and sign up for a free developer account. You can look at the many sample apps or, if you know python, you're welcome to play with the code to my sample weather app. (And if you don't know python you're of course welcome to play with the code, too... ) Have fun with it... I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with. (And I'll be writing more about Twitter apps soon...)
If you are free tomorrow at 11am US Eastern / 8am US Pacific / 5pm CET, and want a glimpse into what we all are doing over at Voxeo, we are offering a free webinar about what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9 product releases. I am speaking in the first part about Prophecy 9 and then will be followed by Stefan Besling from our VoiceObjects team to talk about what is new in VO9.
As I put together the slide deck, I realized that the engineering team has filled this release with some great features:
our voice application platform now works across all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS X
the new management console has some graphical features to aid in managing large premise installations that simply have to be seen to be believed (think... three dimensional walls...)
the new "virtual platforms" feature makes adding new capacity as drop-dead simple as installing a new server and adding it in
the new log analyzer tool lets you dive deep into logs to find what's going on - and to generate pretty pictures out of the activity as well
I'm definitely looking forward to talking about it tomorrow... and the more I use it on my home system (the beta is available at www.voxeo.com/prophecy), the cooler I think it is. (And I'm not saying that simply because it's my job now! :-)
If any of you reading this will be out at O'Reilly's OSCON Open Source Convention next week (July 21-25) in Portland, Oregon, I (Dan York) will be there giving a talk on Wednesday on "Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML". Here's the abstract:
With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the Web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the Web, social networks, and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards?
In this session, Dan York will introduce participants to the world of “voice mashups” and how applications can be quickly built on top of open source and open standards. Topics covered will include:
The technology and architecture behind voice mashups
The open standards in voice of VoiceXML, Call Control XML (CCXML), the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and new standards emerging from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Open source tools related to voice including Asterisk and RocketSource.org
How to quickly build voice applications that interact with web sites, databases, and even new services like Twitter.
During the session, York will demonstrate multiple applications and provide participants with sample code, tips, and pointers so they can return home and get started building voice applications with open source and open standards.
If any of you will be attending, please do drop me a note as I always enjoy meeting up with people who read this blog. If you are not attending but are interested, it's not too late... you can still register at the OSCON site. Should be a great convention for those interested in open source development. The schedule is pretty amazing as it truly has a collection of some of the best folks out there in the open source world. (The convention starts on Wednesday with Monday and Tuesday being for tutorials.) I'm definitely looking forward to the event!
If you are free tomorrow at 11am US Eastern / 8am US Pacific / 5pm CET, and want a glimpse into what we all are doing over at Voxeo, we are offering 
