Category: Mashups
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Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS Apps
Continue Reading: Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS AppsWant to build text messaging (SMS) applications for a very cheap price? My colleagues over in Voxeo Labs recently reduced the price of sending or receiving SMS messages to only 1 cent per message. (As a bonus, they also came up with the cute graphic I’m using on the right.)As Adam Kalsey writes in the Tropo blog post, “Announcing New lower SMS pricing” sending an SMS is a trivial matter in Tropo. His language of choice is PHP, so he shows:
<?php call('+14155551212', array('network' => 'SMS')); say('d00d, Penny SMS? '); ?>But you could obviously do something very similar in Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript in Tropo Scripting… or with any language using the Tropo WebAPI.
Personally, I like seeing what I can do to merge SMS with Twitter… back in December I wrote about how to use Tropo to trigger alerts via SMS based on text in Twitter, which is a variation of an app I do actually use for Twitter monitoring. My colleague Justin Dupree also wrote a cool post about using Node.js to build a Twitter IM/SMS service.
Anyway… all of these SMS apps are now able to be deployed in production for only 1…
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Want to speak locally about Tropo.com voice/SMS/IM/Twitter mashups? Here’s some free gear..
Continue Reading: Want to speak locally about Tropo.com voice/SMS/IM/Twitter mashups? Here’s some free gear..If you have become a fan of Tropo.com for creating applications that use voice, SMS, IM and Twitter and want to speak about Tropo to a local user group, meetup, BarCamp, WordCamp or other event, the Voxeo Labs team has put together a pretty cool “meetup kit” that you can request (for free) for your next event. It’s got some T-shirts, stickers and even some USB drives.
The Tropo blog post has info about how to request a kit.
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Tim Panton’s VERY cool demo: Google Wave + Skype + Asterisk + Ibook
Continue Reading: Tim Panton’s VERY cool demo: Google Wave + Skype + Asterisk + IbookOver on Skype Journal, Phil Wolf posted about Tim Panton’s VERY cool demo which he gave at Astricon and then apparently just yesterday at eComm Europe. Tim from phonefromhere.com mashes up Google Wave, Skype, Asterisk (with Skype for Asterisk) and Ibook to make Skype calls from within a Wave, complete with recordings of utterances and, naturally, the ability to have an annotated collaboration session in Wave:Phil quotes Jason Goecke (a colleague of mine at Voxeo) describing how it works:
“it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames.”
Read Phil’s full post for more info and for Phil’s views on what this all means.
VERY cool demo!
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Has Asterisk NOT “crossed the chasm” for developers? (Key links to read for open source)
Continue Reading: Has Asterisk NOT “crossed the chasm” for developers? (Key links to read for open source)Jay Phillips is frustrated. He passionately wants to see open source telephony enjoy success all around the world. Yet right now, when people think “open source telephony”, they almost always think of Asterisk… and Jay sees too many challenges for developers embracing Asterisk. Jay, the creator of the Adhearsion telephony framework for Ruby, has spoken about this at recent conferences and pulled together his thoughts in a lengthy post earlier this week entitled “What We’re Not Admitting about Asterisk“.Jay argues that Asterisk has not crossed the proverbial chasm for developers and outlines some of the issues he sees.
What is perhaps most interesting about Jay’s post is the equally lengthy response by Asterisk creator Mark Spencer. Mark responds to Jay’s various points and in doing so provides some good insight into his views on Asterisk’s connections to developers, APIs, etc., as well as the differences between the markets that Digium, the company, goes after versus the “market” of Asterisk, the raw telephony platform.
Both Jay’s article and Mark’s response are definitely worth reading. I’m friends now with both of them and they both bring immense passion and energy to the world of open source telephony. Ultimately they…
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FYI – I’ll be out at OSCON next week in Portland talking about voice mashups…
Continue Reading: FYI – I’ll be out at OSCON next week in Portland talking about voice mashups…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…
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Join us tomorrow (2/15) morning for a discussion of eComm 2008 on the Squawk Box conf call / podcast
Continue Reading: Join us tomorrow (2/15) morning for a discussion of eComm 2008 on the Squawk Box conf call / podcastWhat are you doing at 10am Eastern time tomorrow morning? (Friday, February 15th) How about joining us for a “Squawk Box” conference call to discuss the upcoming eComm 2008 conference?The call will take place using Iotums Facebook app called “FREE Conference Calls”. You can just visit the show web page and RSVP (and add the Facebook app if you need to). I’ll be hosting the show tomorrow while Alec Saunders is flying back from Barcelona and Thomas Howe and I will be interviewing Lee Dryburgh about the upcoming eComm 2008 conference… what it is, who is speaking and why people should attend. It should be a lively conversation with a great group of folks.
Bring your questions and join us!
P.S. The show will be posted later in Alec’s blog and I’ll provide a link here.
Technorati Tags: alec saunders, applications, etel, ecomm, ecomm2008, lee dryburgh, dan york, thomas howe, squawk box
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The EComm 2008 Interview with Skype’s Jonathan Christensen should be required reading…
Continue Reading: The EComm 2008 Interview with Skype’s Jonathan Christensen should be required reading…As we enter into the final month before eComm 2008, I would suggest that the interview with Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s general manager of audio and video, should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in this space. Why? Well, in part because Jonathan Christensen does provide some good information about what Skype has done and is doing but also because it provides some good insight into what one of the people driving Skype’s agenda is thinking about this space. Take one of the final paragraphs where he answered Lee Dryburgh’s question about what he saw as the the future of communications (bold emphasis added by me):Well, a big question I guess and, having worked on the space for quite a while, I think that it’s only going to get more interesting over the coming years since, well, like this open spectrum for example. You know, I just have to reiterate, I think that anybody who has not figured out that the Internet is the platform and that there isn’t any such thing as walled gardens that will survive, or sub-networks [such as AOL tried] that are going to survive, those people are doomed. The intersection of these worlds is going…
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Voice mashups – Notes on Alec’s conference call today
Continue Reading: Voice mashups – Notes on Alec’s conference call todayUPDATE, Jan 11: The recording of this conference call is now available.
As I mentioned in an earlier post today, Alec Saunders convened a 30-minute conference call today on voice mashups. The call was recorded and will be available as a podcast from his site. (I’ll add the link here once I’m online.)
I was traveling down through the state of Vermont today and so while I had no Internet access I did call in and joined the call from my Blackberry. (My wife was driving the car at the time.) I wrote down the following notes on my laptop during the call.
Alec introduced the call, mentioned that it would be recorded and distributed as a podcast. He then muted all the callers except for himself, Thomas Howe, Jim Courtney and Andy Abramson. For callers with Facebook open, they could press a button to “raise their hand” at which point Alec could unmute them. I was calling in on my cell phone while traveling with no Internet access, so for me it was to press “*2” to raise my hand.
Alec tossed out the first question which was “what is a voice mashup?” Thomas laid out one definition which…