Posts Tagged ‘Hackathon’

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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 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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Posted in Events, Hackathon | No Comments »

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 »

Join us for the App Dev Hackathon in Santa Clara

Monday, October 24th, 2011

App Dev Hackathon and Bootcamp takes place October 27, 2011, 9am – 8pm at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The event is for developers working on mobile apps. Learn new skills, build mobile apps, compete for prizes, meet people and find teammates for new or current projects. Not your traditional hack, AppDev Hackathon features hands on training classes (including one on Tropo!) that can help you build better apps.

Over 500 developers have already registered, so make sure you get your seat. Participants are welcome to bring a team that is all ready together and use the time to innovate or meet other developers and create a team onsite. Or, you are also welcome to work alone as well. Registration for the hackathon is free.  Click here to Register

Schedule

8:00a Check-in

9:00a Introduction, Rules, Prizes

10:00a Hack begins

10:00a Bootcamp begins

12:00p Lunch break

1:00p Hack Continues

6:30p Presentations begin

8:00p Winners Announced

8:30p Hack Ends

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Posted in Events, training, Tropo | No Comments »

Weekend Hacking and Events

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Another weekend, and another set of events where we’ll be meeting up with developers and others interested in hacking with our cloud communication APIs and building awesome apps.

This weekend, we’ll be in Reno, NV for the Hack4Reno event. Our own Adam Kalsey will be pitching tent and camping outside the Pioneer Center in downtown Reno with other hackers working to make their city smarter. If you’re in the area, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

We’ll also be back in the Raleigh, NC area for BarCampRDU. Just a few months ago, Tropo advocates attended a series of events in the Raleigh area and we had such a great time we couldn’t stay away. Be sure to say hi to Aaron Huslage at BarCampRDU.

If you’re not going to either of these events, you can still hang out with us this weekend in the #tropo channel on freenode IRC.

Drop by if you need help, or if you just want to chat about your Tropo app.

Happy weekend! Happy hacking!

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Posted in Events | No Comments »

php|tek hackers and winners

Monday, June 20th, 2011

room keys at tek

The hotel room keys from php|tek

At php|tek last month, the Tropo-sponsored hackathon and contest attracted a dozen development projects, nearly 100 people, and lots of hacking with Tropo and other apps.

A dozen people even stayed up all night long trying to complete their projects before the 9am deadline. In the end, five teams managed to finish their applications and submit them before judging started.

Entries were judged by SourceForge’s Elizabeth Naramore and Tropo’s Adam Kalsey on how well they used Tropo’s features, the quality of the end-user experience, and the viability of the project – are people likely to use it?

First place and an iPad 2 went to TropoNote by Savva Korolev and Neil Mansilla. TropoNote is a note-taking application that allows you to take quick notes by sending in a text message or IM or leave voice notes by making a phone call. Notes can be viewed on the site or in your Evernote account. Yes, they included Evernote integration in their app.

Second Place was won by Jeffrey and Greg Wilson’s cALLOWED, a voice-based phone number verification and captcha library for PHP. Web developers can include cALLOWED in their forms to validate a phone number. The Wilsons took home a Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter.

Third place went to Call Couch by Benjamin Young. Use IM or SMS to look up documents in CouchDB or send the formatted contents of a Couch document to the phone number of your choice. Benjamin won a Kindle for his prize.

Honorable mention goes to the other two developers who managed to deliver a working, testable application after a night of hacking.

Brooks Boyd built a group die rolling application for SMS. Send a text message to roll any size die and all your RPG buddies will get a text letting them know what you rolled.

William Bond mashed up Twitter, a little oAuth magic, and Tropo to read your Twitter direct messages to you over the phone.

Thanks to these five teams as well as all the other people who worked on Tropo apps or pitched in with the open source projects that were represented.

We look forward to doing this again next year.

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Posted in Tropo | No Comments »

RHoK 3 Seattle Roundup

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

What an amazing weekend the Tropo team had across the country this weekend, with Tropo representing at simultaneous events in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York City & Raleigh.  In Seattle, Tropo teamed up with Geeks Without Bounds to be the U.S. Main Stage event for Random Hacks of Kindness.  We gathered folks from NASA, Microsoft, Crisis Commons, Code for America and brought together geeks like Chris Pirillo (founder of Gnomedex), Chris Metcalf (Socrata), Mike Laine (Liftport Space Elevator) and Ed Jezierski (CTO of Instedd).

It was an unforgettable weekend, kicked off Friday night with a reception featuring awesome DJ’s Turbo & Maxx, aerial acrobatics by the magnificent Zita the Aerialist and lightning talks by VIPs from the representing organizations.  The folks from SecondMuse posted some raw video of the lightning talks.  At about 28 minutes into this video, as I was about to begin my talk, I was encouraged to throw the words I had prepared out the door and instead played an impromptu chorus of Billy Joel’s Pianoman.  Never in my life could I have imagined this particular course of events:

 

RHOK#3 Seattle Reception from Gerty on Vimeo.

 

 

But it was Saturday and Sunday when we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. Some of the hacks that were worked on that featured Tropo:

SAARAA : Situation Awareness And Rapid Assessment App, collecting data from various places via phone apps, voice, text, etc and collecting that information into a crisis map.

Open211 : A Directory of city social services. Search is live. Portland, Oakland, and San Francisco.

Tethered Towers : weather data and communications devices attached to ballons to assist when traditional communications are down and local data is needed (toxic plume detection, gun fire detection etc).

MoveFood: Matching restaurants & people with excess food to individuals who are hungry.

Sincere thanks to everyone who came and hacked. I think we’re all quite a bit blown away by the incredible synergy that was created this weekend. Extra thanks to our excellent venue hosts at Microsoft, folks from SecondMuse and especially Willow Brugh from Geeks without Bounds, who wrangled the entire weekend together with brute force and determination to make a difference.

More pics from RHok3 events all over the world this weekend are available on the Flickr Stream

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Posted in Awesome, Events, Tropo, Video | No Comments »

Hacking Across the Country with Tropo

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

This weekend will be a busy one for hacking events and codeathons in general, and a busy one for the hackers at Tropo as well.

Tropo will be taking part in hacking events across the country all weekend long.

Tropo is in Raleigh, NC this week for the upcoming CityCamp Raleigh event which runs from Friday, June 3rd through Sunday June 5th:

CityCamp Raleigh is three days of open sourced talks, workshops, and hands-on problem solving, to re-imagine the way the web, applications, technology, and participation will shape the future of our city.

Already a cool event focused on using technology to make government work better, the organizers have provided an additional incentive for participants to develop innovative solutions for the City of Raleigh – a $5,000 cash award.

Get your ticket to this event while they are still available!

Tropo will also do some bicoastal hacking this weekend during the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathons in Seattle and Philadelphia.

Seattle is the main stage event for the RHoK hackathons in the U.S, and we’re proud to be a sponsor. We’ve also sponsored food and refreshments in all of the other U.S. locations. (Hey, Hackers get hungry… ;-))

We’ll round out our busy weekend of hacking by taking part in OpenGov Camp in New York City on Sunday, June 5th – another event that we are proud to sponsor.

Should be a fun and productive weekend. Hope to see you at one of these great events!

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