Archive for July, 2010

Announcing the GnomeDex10 Open Government Hackathon

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Join us during Gnomedex 2010 in Seattle for a 24-hour hackathon, where we will see who can build the best open government application in just one day.

You can participate as an individual or a team.  Prizes will be awarded to the winners by the Hackathon Partners.

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 accessibility 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 accommodate.

What’s Going to Happen? The nature of the Hackathon will be fairly free-form. Hackathon Partners will have organizers on site 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.

Hackathon Partners The Hackathon Partner list continues to grow.  The partners are companies and organizations that provide tools or services that can enhance open government apps; they’re also providing the prizes and choosing the winners.  If your organization has tools or services that you think would be useful to the Hackathon, contact Johnny Diggz and we’ll see about adding you to the list:

Tropo – Tropo is a powerful yet simple API that adds Voice, SMS, Twitter, and IM support to the programming languages you already know.

Socrata – Opening government, one dataset at a time.

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Are you on Facebook? If so, you can join the Tropo conversation there…

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

If you are on Facebook, you can now stay up-to-date on what is happening with Tropo by “Liking” our page at:

http://www.facebook.com/TropoCloud

We post updates about the service, mention new features, link to blog posts and also highlight how other people are using Tropo. It shows up right in your regular Facebook NewsFeed and is a great way to stay connected:

Facebook | Tropo.jpg

P.S. Does anyone else find the new Facebook terminology for connecting to Facebook pages rather awkward? I mean, before we could ask you to “Please become a Fan on Facebook”… now we have to say “Please like us on Facebook”???

Or we could say before “Are you are fan of Tropo on Facebook?” Now what do we say? “Do you like us on Facebook?” “Are you a ‘Liker’ on Facebook?”

Count me as one who does NOT “Like” the new wording… :-(

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Come meet Tropo at an upcoming event

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Tropo’s going to be at quite a few events over the next few weeks. Come by and say hello.

  • Sacramento Ruby, July 15 — Adam Kalsey talks about jRuby and how Tropo uses it.
  • ClueCon, Aug 3-5, Chicago, IL — Jason Goecke talks about open source cloud telephony and Adam Kalsey will talk voice user interface usability.
  • DrupalCamp LA, Aug 7-8, Irvine, CA — Adam Kalsey talks about Drupal as an application development framework.
  • AdhearsionConf, Aug 14-15, San Francisco, CA — Learn about this open source phone development framework.
  • 140 Character Conference, Aug 19, San Francisco, CA — Johny Diggz in an interactive demonstration of collective consciousness.
  • Gnomedex, Aug 19-21, Seattle, WA — We’ve got some interesting things up our sleeve. More soon.
  • Lone Star Ruby, Aug 26-28, Austin, TX — Jason Goecke on how we built Tropo and Adam Kalsey talks about avoiding lock in from cloud services.

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Get a text message when someone calls your app

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

If you have a Tropo app and you want to get a notification every time someone calls it, you can add a single line of code somewhere in your application (right after answer() for instance) that will send you a text message telling you who called and which app they called you from.

In PHP….

message("Someone from " . $currentCall->callerID . " just called me.", array('to'=>'your number here', 'network' => 'sms', 'callerID' => $currentCall->calledID));

If you have an IM address attached to your app, you can get an IM instead. Just change the parameters of the message call. For example, if you have a Jabber name set up for your app, we can send a message to your Google Talk or other Jabber service. We give Jabber IDs away for free, just type in a name and click Activate.

Activating a Jabber ID

Once you have a Jabber ID for your app, just add the @tropo.im address to your contact list and change the code to send to Jabber.

message("Someone from " . $currentCall->callerID . " just called " . $currentCall->calledID, array('to'=>'your IM id here', 'network' => 'jabber'));

Not using PHP? Just make some slight changes to adapt the code to the syntax of your chosen language. For instance, Python…

message("Someone from " + currentCall.callerID + " just called " + currentCall.calledID, {'to':'your IM id here', 'network':'jabber'});

… or JavaScript …

message("Someone from " + currentCall.callerID + " just called " + currentCall.calledID, {to:"your IM id here", network:"jabber"});

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SF Telephony Videos

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Couldn’t make it to last week’s SF Telephony meetup? The videos from each talk have been posted online, including a ten minute overview of how we built Tropo.

There’s a bunch of other great talks from the event on YouTube.

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Tropo talks at Cluecon

Monday, July 5th, 2010

ClueconWe’ll have a group from Tropo at ClueCon August 3-5 in Chicago. Got questions about Moho, Adhearsion, or Tropo? Talk to the people who built them.

In addition, Jason Goecke will be giving a talk describing Moho, our open source telephony framework, how it works, and how we use it to build Tropo. And Adam Kalsey will be presenting on the basics of creating usable voice user interfaces.

Cluecon’s discounted hotel rate expires next week and conference pass prices go up at the same time, so get your tickets now.

ClueCon Telephony Developers Conference
August 3-5, 2010
Trump International Hotel & Tower, Chicago

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Beyond the Browser talk

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

Last month I gave a talk at the London Web Meetup about how web developers can get applications out of the browser and start communicating in real time with voice, SMS, and IM.

Here’s the video of the talk.

Or watch at Vimeo: Beyond the Browser at LONDON WEB – Jun 2010 – @akalsey.

Thanks to Nathan O’Hanlon and London Web for hosting me. It was a lot of fun.

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