Archive for the ‘SMS’ Category

Timeless SMS – Using CouchDB to Track Two Way SMS Conversations

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

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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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?

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Tropo Teams with Apigee on API Explorer

Friday, January 27th, 2012

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Dial and SMS your APIs with Tropo

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

The number of APIs available are increasing by the day and so is the popularity of Node.JS, the server-side event-driven javascript framework. This got me thinking… How cool would it be to be able to call or sms an API with your phone using Node.JS?

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Voice Texting With Tropo Speech & SMS Technology

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

We all agree that texting while driving is very dangerous, right? Fred Wilson, VC and principal of Union Square Ventures thinks so too. He recently wrote a blog post that starts like this:

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Up in the Air with Tropo and ScraperWiki

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

ScraperWiki is a powerful cloud-based service that lets you scrape data from online documents and websites.

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Customer Spotlight: Zapier

Friday, December 16th, 2011

We are excited to feature Zapier on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight! Today I sat down with Wade Foster, one of the co-founders of Zapier, to discuss their business and learn more about how they are using Tropo for their Instant Messaging services. (more…)

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.

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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!

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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.

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