Check out this great video of Twilio’s presentation at SF New Tech today. The humor of watching the CEO, Jeff Lawson’s, race to enter code into an API within 5 minutes (which he almost succeeds in doing) makes this video pretty entertaining. I have to admit that when I first started watching, I was skeptical of Lawson’s ability to perform the task in 5 minutes, and I didn’t understand why a CEO would start coding during a five minute demo time slot. As the video continued, though, I realized his motive. It was to convince people of how simply they can learn to use Twilio. Ok, I’ll give it to Twilio. They may not have presented the most eloquent talk, but they did get me to read more about their services.
Twilio at SF New Tech – December 2009 from Twilio on Vimeo.
Here’s the basics of what I learned about Twilio.
The company provides a web-based API for any apps related to making and receiving phone calls. For example, the app that Lawson demonstrates in this video enables conference calls. The conference call API allows businesses to run the most simple conference calls, to ones with a moderator, or even ones with a hold room for participants waiting for the conference to start.
With Twilio, you can also enable simple apps. They provide the building blocks for coding apps like click to call, phone menus, appointment reminders, weather by phone, and voicemail transcription. Their more advanced services include: call screening, voicemail, company directory, voice broadcast, call queue, and phone polls.
What Twilio Is: Twilio is a great tool for web developers to build phone applications. They primarily target businesses, but the wedding guestbook created by a groom and featured on their blog shows how creative you can be with this platform!
What Twilio is Not: For small businesses that don’t have access to web resources. For SMBs without developers, Twilio recommends hiring a developer from the Twilio community. They do not provide the user interface for business managers without programming knowledge to customize phone apps. They also do not provide dial tone, so their services will not replace your business’s regular phone provider. Twilio based on a proprietary platform, so it comes along with the whole package of pros and cons of code that’s not open-source.
For a similar open-source alternative, check out Cloudvox.
Related posts:
- Marketing Tip: Ask Your Developers about Telephony APIs
- Phone Marketing Insider’s Greatest Highlights
- Skype Releases Click to Call for Salesforce CRM
- Cloudvox Launches Open Source Phone API
- 7 Phone Call Tracking Tools Every Online Marketer Must Know
