This is a guest blog post by Jonathan Baldwin showcasing an application that he wrote using Tropo called The People’s Skype. It’s phone-powered, distributed voice and voting system for the #Occupy Movement!
As the Occupy Wall Street movement grew in popularity at Zucotti Park in NYC, and other occupations in North America, Jonathan noticed a problem with the primary method occupiers used to communicate in large groups. The People’s Mic, a method of augmenting a speaker’s voice by having listeners repeat their words, didn’t scale up when huge numbers of people attended rallies and General Assemblies. In these cases, the audience had to repeat the speaker’s words multiple times before it reached the far edges of the crowd – it became gradually harder to understand the original speaker’s words the further you are from the inner circle.
Motivated by this, Jonathan was determined to find a simple solution that anyone had access to. There were similar talks amongst the OWS Tech groups about ways to solve this problem, but those ideas never panned out (they included handheld radios and VoIP systems). He also wanted to address another problem of General Assemblies – hand signals are used to communicate consensus with ideas. In a massive crowd, it is hard to express opinion through visual cues, so he wanted to integrate this problem into a one package solution.
Thus, Jonathan created a one-way conference call solution, called The People’s Skype, through the Tropo phone system. Using PHP, MongoDB and Tropo, he created a simple interface that anyone with any kind of phone, no matter how old, could dial in and create a unique mic with. Upon mic creation, the speaker is given a 4 digit PIN to distribute to others that want to listen in (by holding up a sign or word of mouth). Anyone can call to the original number and listen by typing the unique PIN. Only the speaker is able to talk, while listeners can vote on issues by using their dial-tone, phone keypad (1 for Yes, 0 for No, etc.).
As the Tropo conference call system is able to support hundreds of people, audience members can either turn their speakerphones on to create a distributed PA system, or listen directly on their handsets. Due to the applications flexibility, it could potentially help fragmented occupiers communicate across police barriers or kettled areas.
Try out The People’s Skype yourself: http://www.peoplesskype.org! You can also download a copy of Jonathan’s source code from Github.
We are excited to feature flockNote on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight! Today I sat down with Matthew Warner, the Founder of flockNote, and Jeff Geerling, their CTO, to discuss their business and learn more about how they are using Tropo for their Voice and SMS services.
What is flockNote?
flockNote is a custom registration and communication tool that takes care of your bulk emailing, text messaging, phone calling, social media and more – all from one place.
flockNote is made specifically for Catholic parishes, dioceses and organizations who want to connect with their members using the most effective communication tools of today.
It’s simple, friendly and effective. And it gives your leadership team a powerful way to organize and manage all of your communications across your many ministries.
flockNote uses PHP, Drupal, and the Tropo Scripting API to deliver Voice and SMS services to parishioners. They even use one of Tropo’s SMS short codes (84576) to deliver a very high volume of SMS messages on-demand as needed by churches.
As you may recall, Disruptive Technologies recently extended the capabilities of OpenVBX (the open source cloud PBX software) to run on our Tropo cloud communications platform. The original blog post announcing this project was entitled, “Jailbreaking OpenVBX“. This title was chosen carefully because at the time of the post, OpenVBX only ran on a single cloud platform. Disruptive Technologies was able to extend the communications layer of this application to not only add support for Tropo but also simplify future efforts involved in adding support for other platforms such as Asterisk, FreeSwitch, and others.
As it turns out, the original repository maintainers declined to accept Disruptive Technologies’ GitHub pull request to merge the code bases and asked that the name of the new project be changed, effectively requesting a formal fork of the open source project. Here is the new GitHub repository for TropoVBX.
The TropoVBX fork still provides support for multiple platforms – including the platform of the original repository maintainer. Disruptive Technologies will also be merging updates from the original fork where possible and continuing to add new features to TropoVBX as time permits. Because TropoVBX now runs on the Tropo platform, there are many new and advanced features only supported Tropo which include:
Speech Recognition in 24 languages
Text-to-Speech in 24 languages with male and females voices for each
Support for biometrics on password resets
Ability to route Skype calls into TropoVBX
Ability to support true SIP VoIP in and out of the platform
Please feel free to clone, contribute, and fork the new TropoVBX project and use our logo as you see fit. Our version of this project will remain truly open in every sense of the word and spirit of open source.
Man we had a couple of REALLY cool applications submitted for the AR Drone contest, but like a wise immortal once said “There can be only one..”, and with that immortal bit of wisdom I am happy to annonce the winner of the contest….
Drum roll please………………………………………..
May I have the envelope………………………………
And the winner is……………………………………….
Mattt Thompson from Austin, TX!!! (applause, the crowd goes wild)
Congrats Matt, we sure hope you enjoy this AR Drone for your Thy-Dungeonman application.
Mattt’s submissions was a speech controlled choose your own adventure RPG style game which was really quite cool. The team really liked this application for quite a few reasons, and none of them have anything to do with us being RPG nerds :P.
Among other, unnamed reasons, we really like this because it showed off some powerful Tropo technologies & principles:
Using the WebAPI to communicate w/ the Tropo platform
General ‘Awesomeness’®
We asked Mattt to tell us what he thought about the Tropo platform after he submitted his application, here is what he said to say:
Tropo is kind of like a manic pixie dream girl in an indie flick, played by Natalie Portman, or Ellen Paige. You know, the kind of girl who can rattle off every The Smiths lyric, and owns the complete works of Coltrane in its original vinyl. Pretty, with insane depth. Tropo takes decades of wisdom about telephony and brings it to the modern context of web APIs. “Thy Dungeonman” would not be possible if it weren’t for Tropo’s support for [SRGS grammars], which opens up a world of possibilities for realtime natural language processing.
You can download his application from our GitHub contest page or go straight to Mattt’s GitHub site if you want to check out some of his other creations as well! Hatt’s off to you Mr. Thompson, and we sure hope you enjoy your Drone!
Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service platform that lets you deploy Spring, Grails, Rails and Node.js applications in the cloud. We’ve already shown in previous blog posts how you could easily create Tropo-powered Grails applications with Tropo’s Grails webapi plugin. However, in this blog post I’m going to show you an screencast in which you will learn how to deploy your applications to CloudFoundry.
As you will see in the screencast, deploying your Tropo applications with Grails to CloudFoundry is really easy. A few commands and you get your application not only in one, but in two cloud platforms!! So, you’ve got on one hand Tropo’s cloud platform which lets you run voice powered applications that can quickly scale and on the on the other hand you run all the business logic in CloudFoundry’s cloud platform. So you don’t have to worry about server and resources provisioning and you can take advantage of CloudFoundry’s infrastructure to scale.
So, here is the screencast:
Also, be sure to check these links to get extra information:
I’ve been doing my Python Tropo development on top of Google App Engine, for the past couple of years. Out of the box, App Engine uses the webapp framework. But for my current “Hello, World” project, I decided to leave my App Engine comfort zone, and gain a different perspective. I took up the task of writing a “Hello, World”, Tropo Web API app, using the Django framework for Python.
Over the weekend about two dozen developers gathered at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland OR for the Open Government West Apps Contest. The Cross-Gov Apps Contest represented one of the first efforts to get government data providers from Canada and the US to share data and expertise through one apps competition event. The goal is to see apps developed that utilize two or more government’s data, or scale across at least two governments.
Tropo was proud to sponsor this event with our friends at Socrata.
Max Ogden, Brian Rice and Randall Leeds teamed up to take the Grand Prize with a 211 social services application that enables any city/government or organization to make information about city services more accessible. Other winners included a Washington State Ballot Box finder (powered by Tropo), Tsnuami Evacuation Route finder (powered by Socrata) and an app that makes it easier to search for contextually relevant legislation using data from Library of Congress. Congrats to all of our winning teams…you guys truly rock!
Big thanks to Sarah Schacht, of Knowledge as Power, the driving powerhouse behind Open Gov West, Chris Metcalf and our data API allies at Socrata who helped sponsor the event, Dugan Petty (State of Oregon CIO), Pascal Schubach of Crisis Commons, and the rest of our judges for helping make this event a grand success!
There was much discussion during Open Gov West 2011 about the value of apps contests and hackathons. Much of the discussion was driven by Willow Brugh, director of Geeks without Bounds and Amber Case, co-founder of Geoloqi whose keynote focused on unlocking the value of these types of competitions and how to make them more sustainable and valuable. More about that later :-)
Hi. In a previous post we announced our new and shiny Grails Webapi library that allows all Grails developers to create voice and SMS powered applications very easily from their Grails applications.
If you go to the plugin’s web page at Grails.org you will find that there is already quite a few documentation out there. But I thought it would be quite useful to publish a screencast showing step by step how to create applications. This can be very interesting specially for developers that are not used to the Grails platform.
So here it is. It is a very short 15 minutes video in which I’ll show you how quick and easy you can create voice applications in Grails. I really hope you like it.
Most businesses have a customer defection issue where customers try the product, service or venue once, never to return. This has a massive cash impact on the business as new customers need to be recruited to replace the ones that leave. More worryingly, most businesses have no idea why customers defect so they cant repair whatever is broken in the offer – so customers continue to leave
This is the problem that Portland based, Opiniator is helping solve and is using Tropo as its backbone technology.
Businesses can now collect point of experience feedback from their customers whilst they are consuming the product or experiencing the service. They do this via SMS, voice or any internet enabled device – via Tropo, on the customer’s own cell phone or web enabled device.
Opiniator takes this feedback data and analyzes it in real-time, whilst the customer is still there. This means that the business can fix any issues, salvage any customer and ensure the offer is satisfying the needs of it’s customer base.
Founded by Matt Selbie, the company launched in 2009 but switched to Tropo earlier this year. Retail, Financial Services, Medical, Auto and Events are the key markets for the company – with current clients including Planned Parenthood and the Oregon Convention Center.
“The big benefits are that the business is getting analyzed feedback on what the customer is experiencing right there and then – which means they can fix, adjust and implement based on real data, not guesswork and Tropo’s platform allows us to do this quickly and with scale using a variety of convenient methods for the customers” – Matt Selbie, Founder
In the latest post of that series, we used Asterisk (the open source telephony platform) to make a call to a remote agent with a Phono instance open in their browser. Our call was routed to the remote Phono instance courtesy of Node.js and CouchDB.
In the screncast below, I’ll talk about how you can run an Asterisk AGI application with the Tropo platform.
In the JavaScript remote call center solution we’ve been talking about in this series, our Asterisk FastAGI script is written in Node.js.
Regardless of the language or framework used, you can run your AGI solution through Tropo using AGItate.
For detailed instruction on how to set up and use AGItate to run your Asterisk AGI application on the Tropo platform, check out this earlier post.
So, if you are looking to start a remote call center business, or if you want to work on getting a solution in place for your company, there has never been an easier way to get started.
Tropo and Phono coupled with powerful tools like CouchDB, Node,js and Asterisk can form the basis for a sophisticated call center application.
Any one of the components discussed in this series can be run either in your own data center, or hosted remotely in the cloud. The choice of how to deploy and operate a solution of this type is completely up to you.
I’ve been doing my Python Tropo development on top of Google App Engine, for the past couple of years. Out of the box, App Engine uses the 
