Spring brings many things, warm weather, girls in sundresses and angels. That’s right, this May Tropo will join AngelHack on their 2013 world hackathon tour!
Not only is this the largest hackathon competition in the world with over 6,000 hackers in 30 cities but these angels also take the winners of each city and put them in a 12 week accelerator program then introduce them to Silicon Valley investors. Talk about a heavenly gig!
If you are in San Francisco, AngelHack will be here on Saturday and Sunday May 4th & 5th and you can register here. Not in the Bay Area, no problem. Check out the many other cities and Spring dates you can participate in. If you’re coming to the SF AngelHack, we’ll see you there with wings on.
Last weekend in Las Vegas, AT&T held their annual Developer Summit and Hackathon. Among the over $100,000 in prizes, AT&T offered a $10,000 prize for the team that best used their new Call Management API, powered by Tropo and the Ericsson IMS for WebRTC. While there were over 70 cool hacks that came out of the event, the team that won the $10,000 prize was an app called Joyride.
What is Joyride exactly? With Joyride, your car becomes a media destination for voice and music media. Friends can send music (by request) directly to your car, and join in a voice conference party line. With Joyride, voice and media are now an experience to share and enjoy while driving.
What’s in the future for the Vobi team? Joyride is an early example of leveraging the mobile identity for content sharing. In the case of Joyride, the content sharing is the music media, as well as the voice media. Vobi is going to be expanding on that concept in real ways that make a difference for the mobile user and mobile service provider.
This past weekend in Las Vegas, AT&T held their 6th Developer Summit and Hackathon at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. Many of us from the Voxeo Labs team were on hand to assist the hackathon teams with building apps using the AT&T’s new Call Management APIpowered by Tropo. The event was a great success with over 400 developers creating over 70 hacks in less than 48 hours.
With over $100,000 worth of prizes, including a $10,000 prize for the best use of the Call Management API, the competition was fierce and there were many teams that took advantage of the call control, sms, speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities that the Call Management API supports. In fact, many winners of the hackathon and all three finalists that won the opportunity to make it on stage during the opening keynote talks for the Developer Summit, used the Call Management API in one way or another to power their winning apps. So lets take a look at some of the winners, shall we?
Joyride won the $10k AT&T Call Management API Hackathon prize for using both the AT&T Call Management and WebRTC APIs built on the Ericsson IMS. Joyride is like a party line for your car to deliver services from music, calling and conferencing, to voice control of web services.
In addition to the hackathon winners, AT&T selected three of the best hacks to do a 2 minute pitch on stage during the keynote presentations at the opening of Developer Summit. Third place was going to take home $5,000, Second place $10,000 and the First Place Winner took home a whopping $30,000! We were quite pleased to discover that all three finalists had implemented the Call Management API into their apps. Also, the winners were picked by audience vote using an SMS voting application…also powered by…(you guessed it!)…the Call Management API.
Finalists Brad Roller (Talk to You Now), Ruggero Scorcioni (Good Times), Mark Davis (HearHere)
The three finalists were, in order of winning (drumroll please):
Third Prize ($5k): HearHere – by Mark Davis. Built on Windows Phone, HearHere allows you to share your voice on popular social networks and it’s also its own social network… Powered by your voice.
Second Prize ($10k): Talk To You Now – Brad Roller (and team). Talk to You Now uses the Call Management API to translate SMS text messages to voice and vice versa, allowing a driver to communicate via text without using your hands.
First Prize ($30k): Good Times – Ruggero Scorcioni. The obvious audience favorite, Good Times was a clever hardware hack using brainwave detecting cat ears hooked up to an arduino board and using Axeda’s M2M technology. It detects the user’s mood based on brainwave activity and used the Call Management API to intelligently route inbound phone calls based on the operators mood (if they are concentrating, route the call to voicemail; if they are relaxed, accept the call). Fortunately before Ruggero became famous and won the big prize, I was able to catch up with him so he could explain how his clever winning hack works:
Here are a few selections of the excellent press and blogs covering this week’s announcement:
“AT&T with its Call Management API and WebRTC API powered by Tropo™ and Phono from Voxeo Labs is heralding a change in how we deliver the service that built the industry, voice and more broadly communications.”
“Incumbent public network operators, like AT&T and Deutsche Telekom expect to prove the value of their multimedia management capabilities, billing systems, network reliability when used on behalf of third-party developers and application providers.”
“The AT&T Call Management API is the first step toward allowing customers to free their mobile number from a single device, while making it easier for developers to add real-time voice and text communications to Web and mobile apps.”
“AT&T’s Call Management API will let customers add Web telephony to other devices, such as tablets, gaming devices or even the connected car, and use their existing AT&T phone number.”
We’ll be joining forces again with our friends at the AT&T Foundry for the AT&T Mobile Hackathon for Social Good coming up on October 26-27 in Palo Alto. Mobile App Hackathon is an event produced by the AT&T Developer Program that is designed for attendees (technical & non-technical) to build apps/mobile apps, get fed, compete for prizes across different categories and most importantly: meet new people and scout for teammates to work on new or current projects.
Tropo will be there along with our friends at AT&T and Geeks Without Bounds for the Social Good Challenge. For this event we have teamed up with the Full Circle Fund to bring you social good projects that were specifically requested from organizations focused on humanitarian efforts. We have $10,000 in total prizes for teams willing to take the challenge and build applications for good!
Challenges include:
Education Circle (Request from Niroga Institute)
Most of us are chronically stressed out. This mobile application would allow anyone to measure their stress anytime and anywhere, in moments. Coupled with a 15-minute stress management video that Niroga has already developed (“Manage Your Stress, Anytime, Anywhere”), users can compare their stress before and after using the video, as well as track their stress levels with sustained practice. Users will also be able to easily share their stress scores, building a global community of stress management practice.
Environmental Circle (Request from Roots of Success)
Roots of Success’ mission is to ensure that all people have the knowledge and skills needed to accelerate the transition to a more equitable, healthy and sustainable society. They would like to build an app that will make it possible for students going through our Roots of Success environmental literacy and job readiness curriculum to access additional resources and continue engaging with course content long after they have completed their classes. A course companion app could allow students to easily track progress, access multimedia, and practice vocabulary outside the classroom. The app could contribute to students’ personal and professional development by offering tips on how to apply what they learn in class, along with prompts to begin enriching conversations with classmates, family, and community members. Additionally, a mobile app would be the ideal platform for students to access our extensive ‘Green Jobs and Career Pathways Guidebook’ – which is now only available to students in programs that can purchase print copies for in-class use.
Global Economic Opportunity Circle (Request from One Economy Corp)
One Economy built a webapp called BeeLocal, which they describe as the “Yelp of social services”, that allows a user to enter a zip code and find local, reviewed resources spanning family services, health resources and much more. BeeLocal is targeted toward a low-income population, in line with One Econony’s core mission of providing technology resources to the underserved. This builds off of over 10 years of localization of The Beehive in communities around the world. Their user base, confirmed by many studies, is moving off of browser-based services and toward mobile. BeeLocal would like to provide dedicated mobile apps for iOS or Android.
Get your DrupalCon on with Tropo at our hackathon Monday August 20th. Come learn some new API’s, meet some new friends, win prizes and hack on some Drupal projects. It doesn’t matter if you are a coder, designer or just have an idea simply bring your laptop and desire to build something awesome!
We’ll be providing pizzas and beers for dinner but space is limited so be sure to RSVP for our free event and bring your Lederhosen if you have it…just for fun!
Tropo DrupalCon Hackathon
When: Monday, August 20th 2012
Where: In the Cuvillies I conference room at the Sheraton München Arabellapark Hotel
(Next to the Grand Westin – official hotel of DrupalCon Munich)
At the API hackathon at Drupalcon Denver in March, Chris Teitzel led a team working on Hope One Source, a Drupal-based tool for organizing humanitarian aid workers. Using Hope One Source, aid workers can mark their location and classify themselves across a variety of categories. Then an aid organization can post messages to those categories. This way, an aid organization in northern Haiti can deliver a message to all doctors near Cap Haitien.
Electricity and internet access in aid zones can be scarce unreliable, but mobile phones often work just fine. Chris and team saw an opportunity. They created Tropo Rules a plugin for Drupal’s rules engine that allows site administrators to build voice and SMS into their workflow. Events within Drupal can trigger a call or deliver an SMS. Now, when someone posts a message to Hope One Source, everyone who should see it gets a text message.
Photo from Hope With Love
We thought it was a pretty nifty tool and awarded our hackathon prize of a Kindle Fire to the team. Chris told us he was teaming up with nonprofit humanitarian organization Hope with Love and heading to Haiti to test his tools with over 70 relief workers in northern Haiti at the clinics run by the Cap Haitien Health Network. He planned on taking the Kindle with him, where a grad student running the program would use it as a tablet to help with the organization.
Hope With Love is a 100% volunteer effort, and they’ve created Hope One Source with a team of three dedicated developers and the support of eight more during various phases of the project. The goal is to improve collaboration between aid workers, making sure that information is distributed in a timely manner. By doing so, Hope With Love aims to build more sustainable development and reduce the one-off efforts that are often seen in humanitarian work.
Tropo’s sponsoring the Media and Transparency Track at Tech Week, and we’re looking forward to a great week of events. From robotics to open government to startups to interactive art, there’s a little something for everyone. Heck, there’s even some lock picking workshops.
On Friday night, Tropo will have a table at the Signature Event, so be sure and stop by and say hello. Then on Saturday, come hack the news at the BarCamp hackathon. We’re going to be helping development teams create tools to help improve how citizens get news about their city, both by improving citizen access to information and creating ways for journalists to create better news, faster. Like any good hackathon, there will be prizes. Over $3000 worth of prizes in fact.
Not sure what to build? BCNI has been doing some early brainstorming and have 5 ideas for your projects. There will also be an idea generation session in the morning, and if you’re still drawing a blank, there’s sure to be a team or two in need of your skills. Just show up and let people know what you can do – we’ll find a spot for you.
Want to meet up this week in Philly? Come visit us at the hackathon on Saturday, stop by our table at the Signature Event on Friday evening, or hit Adam up on Twitter at @akalsey or by email at adam@tropo.com.
Hackathon image coutesy of BarCamp News Innovation
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!
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
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.");
}
?>
Spring brings many things, warm weather, girls in sundresses and angels. That’s right, this May Tropo will join AngelHack on their 2013 world hackathon tour!
At the 
Tropo’s sponsoring the Media and Transparency Track at Tech Week, and we’re looking forward to a great week of events. From robotics to open government to startups to interactive art, there’s a little something for everyone. Heck, there’s even some lock picking workshops.
