Call the Empire Strikes Back hotline on Star Wars Day

May 4th, 2012 by Adam Kalsey

Happy Star Wars day! May the 4th be with you.

Poster courtesy Wikipedia

Thirty years ago for the upcoming Empire Strikes Back release, Lucasfilm created a telephone hotline so fans could dial in and hear a short message from a Star Wars character. Each month, fans could dial the hotline and hear a new message, each recorded by the actors from the films. The audio was lost until two years ago, when Lucasfim’s first head of fan relations found an old cassette tape with the recordings on it.

At the time, we created a copy of the telephone hotline, and since we’re big Star Wars fans around here (I have a lifesize Yoda and dozens of vintage posters in my office), we’ve updated it for Star Wars day, complete with a vanity phone number.

Call (630) 92-FORCE ((630) 923-6723) to hear one of the original messages from the Empire Strikes Back hotline. Want to hear more? You don’t need to wait a month for the next one. Just call back. Each time you call, we’ll play a randomly-selected recording. There are five in all.

Outside the US? Call in via SIP at 9991443239@sip.tropo.com or Skype at +990009369991443239. Or call one of the 36 local access numbers listed below.

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International Space Apps Challenge is Out of This World!

April 26th, 2012 by cmoe

Space Apps Challenge San Francisco with @Astro_Ron

The International Space Apps Challenge was held this past weekend for the first time in 17 countries and 25 cities with over 2,000 developers participating to work on 71 different challenges.

Tropo was a sponsor and I was fortunate enough to participate in the codethon with members of NASA including Astronaut Ron Garan, Chief Information Officer Linda Y. Cureton and Kristen Painting Project Manager for the NASA Open Government Initiative all in attendance at TechShop San Francisco with great enthusiasm.

Despite the abnormally warm San Francisco weather, developers kicked off the weekend presenting their challenges and formed teams to create solutions.  One of my favorite challenges for Space Apps San Francisco were the developers from OpenRov, creating open-source underwater robots for education and exploration of the ocean floor.

Their passionate pitch included a story of 100 pounds of gold lost over 100 years ago in an underwater cave which began their obsession with robots uncovering the sea.  OpenRov won the Open Source Extensibility Award in SF and was the only organization in the world that could mobilize such enthusiastic global participation.

WilloBl00, CristinaSF, Space Apps, Tropo, GWOB

Organizing the event was the fabulous Willow Brugh of GWOB, an organization founded by Tropo’s own Chief Developer Evangelist Johnny Diggz.  An Open Gov champion of the weekend with her space tights, space tie, amazing waffles and exuberant energy.  Thanks @WillowBl00 for an exceptional job leading the weekend!

And thank you to all the participants both in groups and participating online to develop over 100 solutions for the challenges presented in 48 hours!  We look forward seeing all the development over the weekend accelerate and many more codethons of citizen science to come!

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Recovering from the Railsberry Sugar High

April 24th, 2012 by Diggz

Wow, what an awesome event that the Railsberry team put on last week in Krakow, Poland! It’s difficult to describe in words the attention to detail and coordination by the Applicake and Future Simple crews put into making this a truly memorable event.

The Railsberry team put together some awesome videos as well such as this one from Day 1 and this one from Day 2. I put some video together from the API Bakeoff and Day One.

The highlight of the conference (for me at least) was getting to play the giant grand Yamaha piano at the very end of Day 2 for the entire Railsberry conference. Here’s a video of the performance. You can also check out the lyrics, which have already been transcribed and forked on Github!

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Philly Tech Week and the News Innovation Hackathon

April 23rd, 2012 by Adam Kalsey

Once again, Tropo will be in Philadelphia attending Philly Tech Week events and presenting the Hackathon at BarCamp News Innovation (BCNI).

Tropo’s sponsoring the Media and Transparency Track at Tech Week, and we’re looking forward to a great week of events. From robotics to open government to startups to interactive art, there’s a little something for everyone. Heck, there’s even some lock picking workshops.

On Friday night, Tropo will have a table at the Signature Event, so be sure and stop by and say hello. Then on Saturday, come hack the news at the BarCamp hackathon. We’re going to be helping development teams create tools to help improve how citizens get news about their city, both by improving citizen access to information and creating ways for journalists to create better news, faster. Like any good hackathon, there will be prizes. Over $3000 worth of prizes in fact.

Not sure what to build? BCNI has been doing some early brainstorming and have 5 ideas for your projects. There will also be an idea generation session in the morning, and if you’re still drawing a blank, there’s sure to be a team or two in need of your skills. Just show up and let people know what you can do – we’ll find a spot for you.

Want to meet up this week in Philly? Come visit us at the hackathon on Saturday, stop by our table at the Signature Event on Friday evening, or hit Adam up on Twitter at @akalsey or by email at adam@tropo.com.

Hackathon image coutesy of BarCamp News Innovation

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Timeless SMS – Using CouchDB to Track Two Way SMS Conversations

March 28th, 2012 by kbond

Tropo includes an “ask” method, which allows you to ask a question and wait for a response.  On a voice call, the user is actually on the phone and typically responds quickly; with SMS, they might receive your text with the question but wait to respond until they have the free time.  If your ask has a timeout of 30 seconds, and your user responds in a couple hours, how do you manage it? The absolute maximum timeout you can set is 2 hours – what if they respond the next day?

The best way to work around this limitation is by storing and reading the progress of an SMS conversation in a database, effectively eliminating any timeout concerns. This blog will discuss – and show – how to start, save and work with CouchDB to accomplish this. For the sake of simplity in this sample code, we’re getting back all the users. Realize that in a production system, you’ll probably want to tune this lookup so instead of getting back the couch documents for every user, you should search for the callerID and get only the documents for a particular user.

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SXSW Roundup – StartupBus TV

March 21st, 2012 by Diggz

Anyone who has ever been to SXSW Interactive will agree that it’s pretty much the Super Bowl of tech. It’s the biggest tech event of the year and for 5 days Austin Texas became the mecca of innovation and buzz in a world traditionally dominated by Silicon Valley.

This year Tropo partnered with Viadeo, Live-U and The Next Web to sponsor StartupBus TV, bringing a live stream of the ups and downs, successes and failures as 10 buses traveled from around North America to Austin, each one packed with “Busenpreneurs” with aspirations to launch the “next big thing” in technology.

With over 16 livestream broadcasts over 5 days and garnering 100,000 views (including being featured on he the front page of UStream), Hermione Way and her Newspepper crew interviewed some of the most promising entrepreneurs of tomorrow and livestreamed from the “best of the best” tech events at SXSW.

Speaking of the “best of the best”, SXSWi Keynote speaker, and founder of Geoloqi (one of Tropo’s favorite startups!), Amber Case stopped by the during the semi-finals of The StartupBus competition.  Here’s the video of her interview with Hermione:

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Startups, Hackathons, and Parties…oh my! Tropo at #SXSWi

March 6th, 2012 by Diggz

Every March, thousands of techies from all over the world descend on Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference.   Tropo has partnered with Newspepper, The NextWeb and @TheStartupBus others to bring you StartupBus.tv.

This year, 10 buses are leaving from all over the USA.  StartupBus.tv will be broadcasting daily live shows tracking the progress of the ‘tribes’ on the buses as they build and launch a web app by the time they reach Austin, Texas in time for SXSW.

StartupBus.tv will be broadcasting the whole week, but you can get the full schedule here.


Video streaming by Ustream

SXSW is a great opportunity to network and meet face-to-face with members of our Tropo team.   Both Mark Headd and Johnny Diggz will be in Austin all week and would love to meet up.  Send them a tweet or find them at one of the following events:

State of NOW (#140Conf)  SXSW Cocktail Party Friday, Mar 9th 7pm-9pm Lanai 422 Congress Ave

Catch up with the #140conf Community while you are at SXSW. Jeff Pulver is holding a Texas style cocktail party Friday, March 9, from 7-9pm at Lanai. The lights will be up, the music low, the energy will be high, and you can enjoy interacting in a space just right for making connections and creating lasting relationships. You decide which state is bigger, the State of NOW or the State of Texas.

Startup Bus Daily Show Saturday Mar 10th 1pm-3pm StartupBus.TV

Tropo Chief Evangelist Johnny Diggz will be interviewed by TNW Video Director Hermione Way, Pop 17′s Sarah Austin and NewsPepper’s Anastasia Emmanuel about the latest hotness in the Tropo world as well as Geeks without Bounds.

A Tale of Two City Hackathons Monday, Mar 12th 3:30pm-4:30pmRoom 6AB Austin Convention Center

Tropo Developer Evangelist, Mark Headd, will be speaking about civic hacking and hackathons:

In the fall of 2011 the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore were the sites for civic hackathons organized by a collective of developers and activists. Separated by one month and roughly 100 miles, each city’s event focused on a different area of civic activity, used a different format, employed different strategies and attracted different participants. Both sought the same outcomes; meaningful civic change and the long-term viability of hackathon projects. Looking back on these events, which hackathon will be judged to be more successful? Which projects survived and are prospering in 2012? Which strategies work the best when conducting civic hackathons? This session aims to identify some answers to these questions.

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Auto-Returning Phone Calls with Tropo

March 5th, 2012 by cmatthieu

Using Tropo’s Scripting API and Ruby, I wrote a clever little script that allows you to automatically return missed calls from people as soon as you hang up a phone call.

Here is the use case:

  • User A calls user B
  • While users A and B talking, user C calls user B
  • Tropo script records the missed user C call and returns their call after B hangs up. The Tropo script automatically calls users B and C and bridges them in a conference call.

Here is a video to help demonstrate the concept:

Here is the Ruby script using Iris Couch as a JSON datastore directly from the Tropo cloud!

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Win a #SXSWi conference pass: Here’s how!

March 2nd, 2012 by Diggz

We love coworking.  In fact Tropo is headquartered inside NextSpace in San Francisco.  We love coworking so much that we’re giving away two passes to SXSWi to other coworkers that love coworking too.  All you have to do is follow Tropo on Twitter and tweet out what you love most about your coworking space.  The best tweets will win a conference pass to SXSW Interactive!

“Hey @Tropo, I love #coworking at @NextSpaceSF because Rebecca Brian is the best community manager ever!”

Be sure to include @Tropo, the hastag #coworking and the Twitter handle of your favorite coworking space (so we know where all the awesome ones are!)

 

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Win a free pass to DrupalCon 2012 in Denver

February 29th, 2012 by Diggz

Learn some new API’s, meet some new friends, win some prizes and hack on some Drupal projects at the DrupalCon Hackathon. It doesn’t matter if you’re a coder, designer or just have an idea…bring your laptop and desire to build something awesome!

START AND END TIME

When: Monday, March 19th Where: Room 501 in the Colorado Convention Center Cost: Free! Register: DrupalCon Hackathon

Agenda:

  • 3-3:15pm – Introductions
  • 3:15-3:45 – API Sponsor presenations
  • 3:45-4:00 – Team formation/signups
  • 4:00-7:00 – Hacking!
  • 7:00-8:00 – Dinner Break
  • 8:00-9:00 – Team Presentations & Prize Awards!

Drupal Modules for Tropo

We’ve recently released a couple of Drupal modules for Tropo for your hacking pleasure. Send out content notifications or turn SMS messages into nodes with the Tropo Drupal SMS Framework plugin. It comes with an optional patch to SMS Framework that lets you use Tropo’s multichannel capabilities and do IM and voice with Drupal, too.

Drupal comes with a built-in polling system, and you can turn polls into mobile apps using Phone Poll, the Drupal module that adds voice and SMS voting to Drupal polls.

And while not yet released (although it’s on Github), the Tropo module for Drupal is a developer framework that makes the entire Tropo API available from within Drupal. Launch calls, create applications, add phone numbers, and even serve a Tropo application from within Drupal.

Win a free pass to DrupaCon

Want to win a free pass to DrupalCon?  All you have to do is follow Tropo on Twitter and then tweet a short message:  ”Hey @Tropo I want to go to @DrupalConDenver because…” and fill out a reason.  We’ll pick the best two reasons on March 1, 2012 to win conference passes to DrupalCon Denver!

DrupalCon Denver 2012 - Sponsor

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