2012 February | The Tropo Blog

Archive for February, 2012

Win a free pass to DrupalCon 2012 in Denver

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

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!

Tags: Denver, drupal, Drupalcon, Hackathon
Posted in Drupal, Events, Hackathon | 1 Comment »

PhonoSDK WebRTC Preview

Friday, February 24th, 2012

Google recently released nearly $70M worth of opensource code to the world, in order to help improve real-time communications (RTC) over the Internet; they call it WebRTC.

“WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. Their mission is to enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5.”

Interestingly enough, we at Voxeo Labs have a complimentary mission for Phono: to provide a simple Javascript Communications API that empowers developers with the ability to build robust voice and messaging communications apps; these apps can run in any web browser and on any mobile device.

Today we are proud to preview our experimental WebRTC support for the PhonoSDK. Since WebRTC is so new, it only runs in Google’s Chrome Canary experimental browser. The video below demonstrates an encrypted Phono-to-Phono – voice and video – P2P WebRTC experience in a Canary browser and we hope you’re impressed with what you see.

Note: there are a couple of additional videos on the page that demonstrate what else we are doing with Phono and WebRTC!

(more…)

Tags: Google, phono, Video, webrtc
Posted in applications, Awesome, Events, JavaScript, Multi-channel, Open Source, phono, Screencasts, Tropo, Video, webrtc | 1 Comment »

Ruby on Rails Conference Caller

Friday, February 24th, 2012

Have you ever wanted to initiate a conference call and have it dial everyone’s phone numbers and invite them into a standup conference call? I will show you how to do this using Ruby on Rails and the Tropo Scripting API. The following Rails application is running version 3.2.1 powered by Twitter Bootstrap for the sweet CSS styling plus Gritter jQuery alerts (like Growl) with a little AJAX mixed in to liven things up.

Here is a screencast to show off my conference caller app!

The Rails application uses the Ruby Rest-Client gem to kick off the Tropo conference caller script while passing the Tropo script a comma delimited string of numbers to dial. The Rails Rest-Client call looks like:

response = RestClient.get "http://api.tropo.com/1.0/sessions?
action=create&token=0e0a2a5742a75c...e01102c8f745818848
&phones=#{phonenumbers}"

Here is the Tropo Ruby script: (more…)

Tags: API, conference, dialer, rails, rest, Ruby, Tropo
Posted in applications, Awesome, Open Source, Ruby, Screencasts, Tropo | No Comments »

Creating a Chat Room Interface using Multiple Conferences

Monday, February 20th, 2012

In this blog, I will demonstrate how to turn multiple conferences into a chat room interface, including a full option menu . A great perk to this app is the ability to monitor everyone in the room using CouchDB – with CouchDB, you can see how many people are in each room, along with their corresponding callerIDs. There are several different CouchDBs that you can use, however for this blog I will use iris.

To start, set up an instance of CouchDB by initially going here. Once on that page, fill in the “Sign Up” fields on the right side of the page and hit “SEND”. You will then be directed to the page where you can access your CouchDB; it looks something like this:

To finish setting up CouchDB, first click the link you received from the confirmation; once there, click “Create Database” towards the top – you can name your database whatever you want, however, to follow the app’s design, I named mine conferences.

(more…)

Posted in JavaScript, Tropo | 1 Comment »

Join Tropo at LessConf Feb 23rd-24th Atlanta Georgia

Friday, February 17th, 2012

Tropo is sponsoring LessConf and giving away 2 FREE tickets worth $1,000!

Join us there for what’s being called the “Summer camp for startups” and “the best time of my life” with a full line up of kick-ass speakers and a pre-party on Wednesday Feb 22nd at Ri Ra Irish Pub.

ANY CHARACTER HERE

>>What: LessConf 2012

>>Where: Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) 250 14th Street NW Atlanta, Georgia 30318

>>When: February 23-24 2012

>>More info: http://lessconf.eventbrite.com/

Don’t forget to follow @Tropo on Twitter and ping us why you want to go for a chance to win FREE tickets to LessConf 2012!

Tags: LessConf, LessConf 2012, Tropo
Posted in Tropo | No Comments »

Visit us at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona!

Friday, February 17th, 2012

Over 60,000 people are preparing to converge on the city of Barcelona for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012. But what is MWC?

“Far more than a mere communication device, mobiles now serve as our books, health monitors, payment transfer devices, social connectors and tour guides. Mobile technology is embedded in our cars, homes, appliances, governments and utilities. Mobile is enhancing and expanding education and thus, transforming the world. Mobile World Congress 2012 will celebrate the current state of mobile and offer a glimpse into where mobile has the potential to go next.”

A world-class thought-leadership conference featuring visionary keynotes and panel discussions
A cutting-edge product and technology exhibition featuring 1,400 exhibitors
The world’s best venue for seeking industry opportunities, making deals, and networking
App Planet, the Centre of the Mobile Apps Universe
The Global Mobile Awards programme, where we recognize innovations and advancement in the industry
and our newest programme, mPowered Brands, where global marketers and agencies increase knowledge of mobile marketing and immediately connect with mobile players to bring their visions to reality.

Basically, anyone who has an interest in the mobile device space will be there. The GSMA invited our Labs team to demo SMSified, the first standards-based API for text messaging. Come visit us at our GSMA podium or schedule a meeting with our business development team, President of Voxeo Labs or our CTO in our private meeting space. Email cmoe@voxeo.com to schedule a meeting. Here’s a video highlighting the 2011 MWC…

Tags: Mobile World Congress, MWC, smsified
Posted in Events, SMS | No Comments »

Tropo Helps Women 2.0 Pick Winners for Pitch Competition 2012

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Team Tropo spent Valentine’s Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA for the 2012 Women 2.0 Pitch Competition and Conference.

Over 1,000 people filled the museum and exhibitor hall where Tropo set up a table and an application allowing attendees to vote for their favorite of the nine companies that presented to win the competition.

The pitches were passionate and the companies were cool which is why we developed the app to have the people vote and help us choose who to give the Tropo Cash Award to for “Most Disruptive Product”.

The voters decided the winner Perfect Beauty, a social site for beauty reviews to help women navigate the right products for them. Considering the average woman spends over $400,000 in a lifetime on beauty products and the founder received over 100,000 visits a month on her YouTube channel reviewing beauty products it appears Perfect Beauty struck a chord among the ladies at Pitch.

The other winners included Docpons, a Groupon for doctors, for the category of “Most Likely to Change the World”, Buyosphere, a Q&A, search site for products won the “Most Promising Team”. And the winner of the whole competition and my personal favorite was Tiny Review, a mashup of Instagram, Yelp and Twitter allowing users to quickly, simply and creatively express their experiences (like the pic above).

In between the pitches were exceptional keynotes from Catarina Fake, Co-Founder of Flickr and Hunch, Robin Chase, Co-Founder of Zipcar and Katie Mitic, Director of Platform and Mobile Marketing at Facebook. With all the exciting new companies, excellent keynotes, VC’s and Angels speaking through out the day it’s no wonder it was packed to the rim with people sitting on the floor and crammed against the walls during the sessions.

Tropo was happy to sponsor the innovators at Pitch and present a cash award to the company voted by the people participating. Thank you Women 2.0 for a wonderful event and all the love given to us at Tropo on Valentine’s Day <3!

xoxo

Team Tropo

Tags: Pitch Competition, Pitch Competition 2012, Pitch Conference, Pitch Conference 2012, Tropo, Women 2.0
Posted in Tropo | No Comments »

SMS Voting App in 10 Minutes with Tropo and CouchDB

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Lat fall, I attended CouchConf NYC and gave a presentation on using Tropo with CouchDB.

It only recently occurred to me that I never did a proper screencast and blog post about my presentation, which struck me as a bit odd – I constantly get asked how to set up an SMS voting app with Tropo.

The good news is that setting up this type of app is incredibly easy with Tropo and CouchDB. The even better news is that I’ve finally gotten around to recording a screencast on how to do it – watch below.

A vote for the Rolling Stones.

All of the code used in this demo can be obtained from GitHub.

To install the CouchApp utility, go to the CouchApp project page.

If you’re looking for an easy way to set up a CouchDB instance, have a look at IrisCouch.

By pairing Tropo with CouchDB and a CouchApp running in IrisiCouch, you can have an SMS and phone voting app running entirely in the cloud in about 10 minutes. It should actually take you longer to write up the categories for your voting app than it should to deploy this solution.

Tropo + CouchDB, FTW!

Tags: couchdb, SMS, voting
Posted in JavaScript, PHP, SourceCode, Tropo | No Comments »