Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

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Tropo joins Startup World in 36 cities

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Tropo loves startups. Why? Because entrepreneurs always think of new and innovative ways to use Tropo that we’ve never even dreamed. Since we launched Tropo in 2009, we’ve helped thousands of developers and entrepreneurs build apps, demo them, pitch them, get investment and launch into full businesses. In fact, pretty much everyone behind Tropo from the engineers to evangelists…even our newest community manager…have come from startups of our own. It’s part of our DNA.

That’s why we’re extremely pleased to announce that Tropo is partnering with Newspepper, TheNextWeb, i/o Ventures, Startup Bus, Startup America (and a whole lot more!) to launch Startup World!

Startup World is a global competition to find the next big thing. The competition will be held in 36 cities world-wide, with the regional winners flying to Silicon Valley for a grand showdown to battle it out in front of a panel of expert judges to be crowned the “world’s best startup”.

We’ll be kicking off Startup World at a Launch Party at i/o Ventures in San Francisco on Tuesday Jan 24th 2012.   Come join us for the fun and some awesome speakers including Sarah Lacy!

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Tropo Jambox Megaphone

Monday, December 19th, 2011

After rocking out to a little White Stripes’ Icky Thump, Chris Matthieu shows you how to build a megaphone using a Jawbone Jambox, an iPhone, and the Tropo Scripting API!

Here’s the Ruby script used in the video:

say "Welcome to the Tropo megaphone app! Please turn on and pair your Jam box now."

while $currentCall.isActive do

record "Record your message at the beep and then switch audio to jam box.", {
        :beep => true,
        :timeout => 10,
        :silenceTimeout => 7,
        :maxTime => 60,
        :onRecord => lambda { |event|
            log "Recording result = " + event.recordURI
            say event.recordURI}
        }

end

Rock on!

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Posted in Audio, Awesome, Hackathon, Ruby, Screencasts, SourceCode, Tropo | No Comments »

Tropo Powers Apps for Communities Winners

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Yesterday, at the Andreessen Horowitz Offices in Silicon Valley, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the winners of the Apps for Communities challenge.

The challenge, a several months-long call to developers to build apps that connect people to their communities, culminated with the submission of 75 innovative applications. The idea behind the challenge, which was sponsored by The Knight Foundation and the FCC, was as follows:

“Using hyper-local government and other public data [entrants] should develop an app that enables Americans to benefit from broadband communications — regardless of geography, race, economic status, disability, residence on Tribal land, or degree of digital or English literacy — by providing easy access to relevant content.”

When the winners were announced, three inspiring, innovative applications built with Tropo and SMSified were among the winners, including the Grand Prize winner.

Here is a quick summary of the winning entries that used our platforms:

YAKB.us (Grand Prize Winner)

YAKB.us is a realtime bus notification service that provides information via phone and SMS. The service, which is available in both English and Spanish, provides transit information in three municipalites – Arlington County VA, Charlottesville VA and Santa Clarita CA. This innovative application was built by Code for America fellow Ryan Resella.

PhillySNAP (Honorable Mention)

PhillySNAP makes it easy to get information on retailers in Philadelphia that provide reimbursement for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The service allows users to send an SMS message with their address and then it provides the addresses of retailers near them where they can use their benefits. This application was initially developed at the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Philadelphia this past June.

PhillySNAP was also featured on the SMSified blog several weeks ago.

Off to Market (Bonus: English Literacy)

Off to Market is another SMS-based app that provides the locations of farmers markets, where users can go to find fresh produce. It’s written in Node.js and uses the Tropo WebAPI. The developer – another Code for America alum, John Mertens – wrote a fantastic post on his blog about how he obtained, refined and staged the farmer’s market data for this app.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this outstanding challenge, and congratulations to all of the great apps that were honored as winners!

Posted in Hackathon, mashups, Open Source, SMS, Tropo | No Comments »

Tropo SMS Wolfram Alpha Mashup

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Tim Strimple joined us at the LA Holiday Hackathon to get in on the competition of building Tropo applications for prizes and won a $50 Tropo Production credit for his Tropo SMS and Wolfram Alpha mashup!

You can ask the application virtually any question via SMS using the following phone number 661-206-2681 and it responds to your inquiry via SMS using Wolfram Alpha’s search results. Here’s a video of Tim demonstrating his application in action!

Here’s the code behind Tim’s Tropo SMS Wolfram Alpha mashup! It’s written in PHP and uses the Tropo Scripting API.

<?php  

function CheckForShortcut($request)
{
    if(stripos($request, "siri") !== false)
    {
        return "I don't like to talk about her.";
    }

    if(stripos($request, "remind") !== false)
    {
        return "I am not your personal assistant.";
    }

    if(stripos($request, "tropo") !== false)
    {
        return "Tropo is great, I love it!";
    }

	return false;
}

function ParseResponse($response)
{	
	//	Replace with real XML parsing
	$min = strpos($response, "</plaintext>");    
	$startPos = strpos($response, "<plaintext>", $min) + 11;
    $endPos = strpos($response, "</plaintext>", $startPos);
	$length =  $endPos - $startPos;

	if($min > 0)
	{
		return substr($response, $startPos, $length);	
	}
	else
	{
		return "Go ask Siri...";
	}
}

function GetResults($request)
{
    $shortcut = CheckForShortcut($request);

    if($shortcut)
    {
        return $shortcut;
    }

    $request = str_replace (" ", "%20",$request);
	$wolframApiKey = "XXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX";
    $url = "http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?appid=" . $wolframApiKey . "&input=" . $request;
    $response = file_get_contents($url);

	return ParseResponse($response);
}

if($currentCall->channel == "TEXT")
{
    $result = GetResults($currentCall->initialText);
    say($result);
}
else
{
    say("I do not support voice currently. Try sending me a text message instead.");
}
?>

Happy Hacking!

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Posted in Awesome, Events, Hackathon, mashups, PHP, SMS, Tropo | No Comments »

LA Holiday Hackathon :: Results

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Approximately 30 Los Angeles .NET, Ruby, PHP, and Javascript developers attended this Saturday’s LA Holiday Hackathon at Outlook Amusements sponsored by RightNow Technologies and Tropo. The theme of the event consisted of building a Voice, SMS, or Instant Messaging holiday application based on the Tropo Scripting or Web API. Here is a photo of everyone hard at work hacking on their holiday Tropo application.

I love the sound of phones ringing in the morning! By noon, the applications were starting to take shape with some definite front runners in the competition. In addition to Tropo APIs, many of the teams also used Phono, SMSified, RightNow, Wolfram Alpha, and Google’s Shopping APIs to deliver their new applications.

Here are the winners of the LA Holiday Hackathon listed in order:

First place goes to Gift Finder winning an iPad2 compliments of RightNow Technologies. This application allows the user to enter a phone number, name, and email address to place an outbound call to someone to recommend gifts for loved ones. Speech recognition was used to ask the user for their zip code, gender, price range range, and category of the gift. The application uses the Google Shopping API to find gifts in their area for the gender and age of the recipient and reads them off one by one using text to speech. This application was built using Ruby and Sinatra and hosted on Heroku as well as using the Javascript Tropo Scripting API.

Second place goes to Santa’s Book winning a Kindle Fire compliments of RightNow Technologies. This application asks for two phone numbers and starts by calling the first number to ask a series of five questions using speech recognition to determine if the person is naughty or nice along with asking them to record the present that they would like to receive. The application proceeds to call the second number to relay the naughty/nice determination and playback their gift recording. The application also sends an SMS text message to the second number with the naughty/nice determination along with the transcribed gift request. This application also used RightNow’s CRM API to log the call and data related to the surveys. This application was built using PHP and the Tropo WebAPI along with RightNow’s CRM API.

Third place goes to Santa Hack winning a $75 Fry’s Electronics gift card compliments of Outlook Amusements. This application used Phono and Tropo to schedule and bridge appointments to speak with Santa. This application was built using C# and the Tropo WebAPI.

Fourth place goes to Tropo WA (Wolfram Alpha) winning a $50 Tropo production credit. This application was a Wolfram Alpha and Tropo SMS mashup written in PHP using the Tropo Scripting API. You can ask the application various questions via SMS on the following number 661-206-2681.

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Posted in Awesome, Events, Hackathon, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, SMS, Tropo, Web API | No Comments »

Help build a smarter San Francisco at CityCampSF Hackathon

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

CityCamp is an unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. As an unconference, content for CityCamp is not programmed for a passive audience. Instead, content is created and organized by participants and coordinated by facilitators. Participants are expected to play active roles in sessions. This provides an excellent format for creative, open exchange geared toward action.

This weekend in San Francisco, Tropo is sponsoring the CityCampSF Hackathon.   From 12pm Saturday Dec 10 until 12pm Sunday December 11th, civic-minded coders will be working together to make new tools, apps, and data available to make San Francisco better.

Some of the proposed hacks:  http://www.wiredtoshare.com/citycampsf_hackathon_projects

WHEN: December 10, 2011 at 12:00 PM – December 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM
WHERE: Granicus 600 Harrison St Suite 120 San Francisco, CA 94107 Google map and directions

REIGISTRATION: http://www.wiredtoshare.com/citycampsf_hackathon

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LA .NET Hackathon 2011

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Tropo is partnering with the LA .NET Developers Group and Outlook Amusements to sponsor this weekend’s LA (Burbank) Hackathon at Outlook Amusements on Saturday, December 10, 2011 from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM (PT).

Here’s the address: Outlook Amusements 2900 W. Alameda Ave suite 400 Burbank, CA 91505

The theme of the LA Hackathon is “Build Voice/SMS apps for Holidays”! Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

  • Santa Caller (similar to http://santacall.us) – Build a website that allows a parent to schedule a call to their kids from Santa. Have Santa ask the kid what they would like for Christmas and then email the parents their kid’s recorded message and/or transcribe the message for the email.
  • Santa Tag (similar to http://www.bloggingbistro.com/jc-penney-comes-up-with-a-new-use-for-qr-codes-video/) – Build a website that calls someone to record a message then associates the message with a QR code that plays when scanned.
  • Holiday Greetings Hotline – Build a holiday greetings hot line where user can leave a voice message that will be transcribed into text and posted to “Holiday Greetings” twitter account.

Even though this event is sponsored by the .NET Developers Group, we will be supporting all development languages and will have Tropo expertise onsite in .NET, PHP, Ruby/Rails, and Javascript, and Node.JS!

Register today!

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Posted in Awesome, C#, Events, free, IM, Java, JavaScript, node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, SMS, training, Tropo, Web API | No Comments »

Drop2Drink wins Random Hacks of Kindness San Fran

Monday, December 5th, 2011

What a weekend!   Tropo sponsored Random Hacks of Kindness events in 4 different cities.  We’re still resting up from the craziness, but I wanted to do a quick post about the winning project in San Francisco.

Last summer I was attending Summer of Smart at GAFFTA and I met Sarah Filley, who told me about an idea she had for an earthquake preparedness project centered around awareness.  Turns out that there are 62 fire hydrants spread out around San Francisco specifically designated for emergency drinking water in the event of a major quake.  The most publicly available source of this info was a “blurry PDF file downloadable from a city website” or visibly by a blue “drop” painted on each of the hydrants.  Sarah wanted to increase the visibility of these sources of emergency drinking water.

I thought this would make for a great project for Random Hacks of Kindness so I encouraged Sarah to present her project on Friday night.   By Saturday afternoon Sarah’s excellent team of hackers had an interactive Google Map set up.  By Sunday, they had full interactive QR-codes, text messaging (powered by Tropo), Four Square checkins… no longer were these 62 hydrants virtually invisible!

Thanks to the RHoK sponsors:  Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, NASA, HP and the World Bank!   More on the other RHoK locations soon…

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Posted in Awesome, Cool, Events, SMS, Video | 3 Comments »

Hacking for Good this weekend with Tropo

Monday, November 28th, 2011

This weekend, December 2-4, thousands of developers, hackers and coders will be joining forces in 32 cities around the globe to participate in Random Hacks of Kindness 4.   This is the third RHoK event we’ve partnered up with Geeks without Bounds to sponsor and help organize events in San Francisco, Portland and Milwaukee.

The what: Random Hacks of Kindness is a volunteer technology community committed to making the world a better place through disaster response. They accomplish this by gathering twice yearly for a marathon hacking session to problem-solve issues of disaster response implementation, communication, and resource sharing. RHoK has been touted by FEMA as a group of dedicated volunteers who “develop software solutions for challenges facing humanity.”

The why: RHoK focuses on capacity building: people, organizations, and the technology they use to help victims during a disaster. Previous projects have included optimizing the distribution and preservation of food, SMS social services directories, air and water quality monitoring, and various communication applications for locating the hardest-hit areas.

The where and when: RHoK will be held in the following locations, with guidance from the mainstage locations, on December 3-4, 2011. An overview of the locations can be found here.

GWOB Venues Global Satellite Locations
Milwaukee, WI Portland, OR San Francisco, CA Atlanta, GA, USA Austin, TX, U.S.A. Bangalore, India Banjul, The Gambia Belgium Berlin, Germany Boston, MA, U.S.A. Buenos Aires, Argentina Lima, Perú London, United Kingdom Manchester, NH, U.S.A. Mexico City, México Montevideo, Uruguay Montréal, Canada New York, NY U.S.A. Oxford, United Kingdom Paris, France Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A. Porto Alegre, Brasil Princeton, NJ, U.S.A. Rio de Janiero, Brasil Rosario, Argentina Santiago, Chile São Paulo, Brasil Tel Aviv, Israel Toronto, Canada Trento, Italy Warsaw, Poland Zurich, Switzerland

The who: No, not the band. You. Get involved. Register at the individual location sites listed above, and get hacking to save the world.

Not close to a RHoK site? Host your own. Random Hacks of Kindness has put together a guide for first-time hackathon planning. Check it out here.

 

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Education Hack Day Recap

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Tropo was a proud sponsor of Education Hack Day – an event held this past weekend at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore.

Education Hack Day

The weekend event brought together technologists, teachers and educators to define problems and challenges facing those on the front lines in Baltimore’s schools.

The event highlighted issues that can be addressed through the creative use of technology, and was the catalyst for the formation of teams to build technology-based solutions.

Turnout at the event was fantastic, with more than 60 educators and hackers attending on Saturday to define problems and begin working on solutions. The turnout on the second day of the event, to see the product demos and to watch as winners were selected, was even heavier.

The event had tremendous support from the local technology community. A local company that has generated lots of attention recently – Battlefield Telecommunications Systems (BTS) – provided WiMAX for the event. The local education community also provided strong support, most notably the staff at Digital Harbor High itself who kindly provided space for the entire weekend.

There was an all star panel of judges on hand to select a winner which included a teacher, a school principle and members of the local VC community.

Education Hack Day

First prize went to an iPad application called (fittingly, given the venue) “Harbor” that helps teachers direct students to specific web resources.

One of the top selections was a Tropo-powered application called ParentConnect that helps teachers schedule conferences with parents using the telephone – this app was a big hit with the teachers in attendance at the event.

Expect to see more of this project – and all of the other great apps built at this event – in the future.

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