Category: Programming
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Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform
Continue Reading: Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application PlatformWOW! In companion blog posts today Cisco and Tropo announced Cisco’s intent to acquire the Tropo team and platform:- Cisco blog: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo
- Tropo blog: Tropo joins Cisco to Power next-gen collaboration APIs
As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I’m thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]
Congratulations to all involved!
Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I’ve written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I’ve continued to be very impressed by what they’ve done over the years. They’ve truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.
It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:
Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.
From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and…
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Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?
Continue Reading: Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?Do you want to understand what WebRTC / RTCWEB is all about and why so many people are passionate about its potential for extending real-time communications (voice, video, chat, data-sharing, etc.) into web browsers?I recently wrote about some of the larger issues of how WebRTC will disrupt telecom, but in this video, “RTCWeb Explained“, Cullen Jennings, one of the co-chairs of the IETF’s RTCWEB working group, dives down into the technical details to explain how it all works and what the various different components of of the solution are. I particularly like how Cullen covered some areas like “identity” that I haven’t seen stressed as much in other pieces about WebRTC. The video comes in at about 39 minutes and is well worth viewing:
For more information, I’ve put together a page about the broader WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative with links to relevant resources.
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AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)
Continue Reading: AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)Do you like building telephony apps with Adhearsion? Have you built a really cool app that is worth sharing? Or used Adhearsion in an unusual way? Are you planning to attend AdhearsionConf 2012 in Palo Alto on October 20-21? Or would you attend if you could speak?If you answered yes to any of the above questions, why not consider applying to be a speaker? The call for speakers is at:
http://adhearsionconf.com/call-for-speakers/
The only catch is … the deadline is TOMORROW, Saturday, September 8th!
Ever since I first saw Jay Phillips present about Adhearsion back at one of the early ETel conferences in maybe 2006 or so I’ve been intrigued by how easy Adhearsion made it to develop telecom apps. It’s just incredibly simple to make powerful apps.
If you are a Ruby developer (or want to be) and you are interested in building telephony apps, Adhearsion is definitely worth a look… and if you do use Adhearsion, why not consider signing up as a speaker?
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Civic.io – Mark Headd’s new site on Civic Hacking and Open Government
Continue Reading: Civic.io – Mark Headd’s new site on Civic Hacking and Open GovernmentMy friend Mark Headd passionately wants to open up government – and to do so through code. I’ve known him for years as the author of the VoiceInGov / Vox Populi blog where he has been writing about mashups and so many other ways to open up access to government information via telephony. Back in November 2010, Mark joined me and the others on the rocket ship known as Voxeo and did outstanding work for the Voxeo Labs and Tropo teams.
But just as my passions altered my career last fall, as of just a short time ago Mark is now the Director of Government Relations at Code for America and, with that, changing a bit about the way he is writing online.
His new site is
civic.io, where he will be writing on “civic hacking, civic startups and the future of open government“. He’s brought over to the site many of his relevant older posts, so he’s already got a solid amount of content.The work he and the others at projects like Code For America are doing is incredibly important to help with keeping our networks open. I’m looking forward to reading more…
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The Big Question On Avaya’s Acquisition of Radvision – What About The SIP and H.323 Stacks?
Continue Reading: The Big Question On Avaya’s Acquisition of Radvision – What About The SIP and H.323 Stacks?With today’s big news in the VoIP / Unified Communications (UC) / telecom space of Avaya’s acquisition of Radvision, pretty much all of the coverage has predictably focused on the video angle. While that’s certainly important, I have a far bigger question:What about Radvision’s SIP and H.323 stacks?
More specifically –
will Avaya continue to support and promote the strong usage of Radvision stacks by other vendors?
Of all the coverage I’ve seen so far, only Tom Keating touched on this in his brief post:
They also developed a H.323 stack used in hundreds of VoIP and videoconferencing products before SIP became the dominant VoIP protocol of choice.
Beyond the popular H.323 stack, Radvision’s SIP stack has also been used in a good number of products out there – and Radvision also developed stacks for RTP, MGCP and many other VoIP protocols. Just follow the links off of Radvision’s developer page at:
http://www.radvision.com/Products/Developer/
to see the wide range of developer solutions they have developed over the years.
For those not familiar with this topic, a “stack” in developer-speak is basically a set of libraries that you can incorporate into your products to enable those products…
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My Rant: Who Are We Building RTCWEB/WebRTC For? Telephony Developers or Web Developers?
Continue Reading: My Rant: Who Are We Building RTCWEB/WebRTC For? Telephony Developers or Web Developers?Yesterday morning I did something I haven’t done in eons. Many years, probably. (I can’t remember.) I fired off a “rant” on an IETF mailing list.
I’ve been a huge proponent of the “RTCWEB/WebRTC” work going on in the “RTCWEB” Working of the IETF and the “WebRTC” of the W3C. I’ve mentioned it in many of my presentations. I’ve advocated for people to join the mailing lists. I’ve written about it a good bit on Voxeo’s standards blog when I was at Voxeo.
We have an opportunity to make it easy for web developers to add “real-time communications” via voice, video, IM, etc., to web applications. We can make that work from directly within the browser.
Think of it… HTML5 with the ability to quickly add voice, video, chat… and without the need for a browser plugin or extension in Flash, Java, etc. (the limitation of all of today’s proprietary options).
It’s the opportunity to move real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web.
Awesome potential!
The work has been moving along quite rapidly in both the IETF and the W3C. Extremely active (high-volume!) mailing lists. Many Internet-Draft documents being created. Regular conference calls, interim meetings, face-to-face meetings. Some…
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Video: Using an iPad to Create Tropo Applications
Continue Reading: Video: Using an iPad to Create Tropo ApplicationsStuck somewhere without a computer but with an iPad? My former colleague Chris Matthieu just posted this amusing video today of how he used only his iPad to create and deploy an application using the Tropo cloud communication service. I don’t know what amused me more – that he wrote the app using his iPad… or that he filmed himself using his iPhone! Quite a deft bit of handling to make it all work:You can, of course, register for a free Tropo.com account and start creating your own voice/SMS/IM/Twitter apps using languages like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and Ruby…
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Adhearsion (and AdhearsionConf) On Tomorrow’s VUC Call – Telephony Via Ruby
Continue Reading: Adhearsion (and AdhearsionConf) On Tomorrow’s VUC Call – Telephony Via RubyWant to learn more about the Adhearsion framework that lets you easily create telephony and other communication apps using the Ruby language? On tomorrow’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12 noon US Eastern, Ben Klang from the Adhearsion project will be talking about all that’s new in Adhearsion-land, including the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2011 in October in San Francisco.I’ve written about Adhearsion before and while I don’t do much with Ruby myself, the power of Adhearsion to create powerful telephony apps in a few lines of code is pretty amazing.
If you’d like to join the VUC call live tomorrow, the info is:
- SIP: 200901@login.zipdx.com (works with wideband!)
- Skype: vuc.me
- Regular old PSTN phone: +15672522286
There’s also a very active IRC backchannel (#vuc on free node) that provides another way to communicate during the call.
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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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New Phono “Callme Button” Demo Shows Use of Calling Directly from Web Browser
Continue Reading: New Phono “Callme Button” Demo Shows Use of Calling Directly from Web BrowserHot on the heels of the new release of the PhonoSDK I wrote about last week, Dave Hoff over in Voxeo Labs came out with a new “Callme Button” demo that’s very cool. As he describes in his blog post on the Phono blog, adding a “call me” button to a website is now as simple as adding this snippet of JavaScript to your web page:$("body").append( $("<div/>") .css("width","210px") .callme({ apiKey: "C17D167F-09C6-4E4C-A3DD-2025D48BA243", numberToDial: "8007773456", buttonTextReady: "1-800-777-FILM", slideOpen:true }) )There is a Callme “demo page” online at:
http://s.phono.com/releases/0.2/samples/callme/index.htm
That shows how you could create a button with or without a dialpad and in various themes:
The source code is naturally there for you to play with if you want to do so.
Cool stuff!
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