If you want the source code to do this your self, it is available on Github here. The original blogpost may be found here. Of course you are not limited to using Heroku and Amazon S3, but this serves as a working example.

I’m admittedly a sucker for anything related to typography, so I did have to check it out.  It’s a set of TrueType fonts for Windows, MacOS X and Linux developed by Mark Simonson and available for free under the Open Font License.  Code looks quite nice in the font when editing.

Another similar font I’ve enjoyed using is “Inconsolata” developed by Raph Levien and also available for free under the Open Font License:

You might ask – why does this matter? I mean, programming code doesn’t have any formatting when it’s compiled, so who cares about the font! Well… if you are working for much of the day using a code editor, it can be great to use a typeface that makes your code very readable on the computer screen or printed output.

What do you think? Are there other fonts that you’ve found you like to use for working with code? (There are many out there…)

http://www.voxeo.com/outboundivr/

The great news is that you can sign up in our Evolution developer portal and try out creating such an app for free!

More resources and links can be found at the bottom of that web page.

Today’s Chart of the Day from Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) is Comscore’s metrics on the use of various IM networks. For the venerable AIM, it isn’t pretty. After years in the #1 spot, a sharp decline starting at the end of 2008 led SAI to title their graphic “The Death Of AOL Instant Messenger.”

Yahoo had a huge spike around the same time, but within 6 months declined back to around where they started. I’m not sure what caused the Yahoo spike, but a few things may have contributed. Yahoo 9.0 was released around that time, as was the Yahoo iPhone IM client.

Facebook and Google Talk aren’t represented on the chart. Comscore is unable to break the IM traffic out from Gmail and regular Facebook usage.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-voicexml30-20100831/

This newest draft listed only these changes:

• Revised Legacy profile description to match current thinking.
• Removed SIV Resource (section 5.4) since it is now covered along with the recognition resource in section 5.3.
• Update section 4.4 (Event Model) to match our current thinking about DOM events as the underlying model for all flow control
• Cleaned up text in sections 1, 2, and 5

Per Voxeo’s Dan Burnett, co-editor-in-chief of the specification, the biggest change is the third bullet about the updates to the event model (section 4.4).

Personally, I’ve found the best way to understand the changes is to view the “diff” of the version from the previous version at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-voicexml30-20100831/diff.html

Given our interest in VoiceXML and VoiceXML 3, we’ll be continuing to write about it here… you can see related stories at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/category/voicexml/

http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/SIPit27/SIPit27.htm

As I’ve written about in the past and recorded a video interview about, these SIPit events are critical, in my opinion, to helping drive the overall adoption of SIP and open standards in communication systems.

If you are a creator of software or hardware devices that use the SIP protocol, SIPit events are a great way to test how well your equipment works with other SIP implementations. There is a fee, but it’s small for the week-long testing you get to do. More info can be found on the registration page.

P.S. You’ll note that this SIPit event is the week following IETF 79 in Beijing, China… so if you can make the travel work, it’s a great way to combine two weeks of open standards / SIP – related events.

http://github.com/tropo

However, as those libraries have evolved, we’ve found that they’ve developed in slightly different directions with regard to the naming of the repository on Github and to the module names, etc.  We gave some thought to the best way to provide guidance to make it easier on developers, and came up with these goals:

• Provide a consistent repo name so developers using multiple languages can easily locate their downloaded/cloned directories on their local systems.
• Provide consistent naming of module/library names and function/class names so developers can move with ease from one language to another. (Use case: a developer builds a Ruby app for one client for Tropo. Developer then needs to build a PHP app for another client. Developer should be able to move from one Tropo library to another without having to relearn or guess what the names are.)
• Allow for the future creation of additional Tropo-related modules/libraries

To get there, the existing repositories are going to migrate to these new names:

• http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-ruby
• http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-php
• http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-python
• http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-ruby

Going forward, we’ll ask that anyone creating a new Tropo Web API module please follow this same naming convention.

We’re also going to move the names of the actual modules to be more consistent. The result will be something like:

You’ll note that we’re treating “webapi” as one word in the names.

We’re in the process of working with the library authors to make these changes now.  The migration is a pain, quite honestly, because it’s going to break existing applications, samples, tests, etc., but we want to do this once so as these modules start to get more widely used, there is a good degree of consistency between them.

We’ll let you know as the libraries are moved over to the new convention – and please let us know now if you have any feedback on this issue.

Thanks – and we’re definitely looking forward to continuing to see the awesome apps you all are building with Tropo!

Training Center Orlando

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE training): Oct 25-26
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE training): Oct 27-29
• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE training): Dec 6-7
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Dec 8-9

Training Center Cologne

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE training): Oct 4-5
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE training): Oct 6-8
• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE training): Nov 22-23
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Nov 24-25

You can easily register online. For more general course information please look here.

Many of the examples in the guide have also been fleshed out, so they can be directly copied into a hosted file and actually work (though they’re usually still pretty simple).  If your flavor of choice is Python or Groovy, have faith – they’re incoming, as is a new and heavily improved WebAPI Guide.

Questions, comments, praise?  Send us an e-mail to support@tropo.com.  Interested in more complex examples?  Check out our Tutorials and Samples.

Amber and Aaron are on the bottom left of this photo.

There is no doubt that this weekend’s 24-hour Open Government Tinkerstorm was a huge success!  A conference room full of passionate open government developers came together along with city leaders like Bill Schrier, Seattle’s CTO, and Robin Friedman, former Seattle Emergency and Disaster Management Director.  Tropo, Socrata, and Amazon AWS sponsored the event and remained on hand to help and guide the event participants to success.  In the end, all of the entries developed and deployed are available as open source and were produced for the benefit of the citizens of Seattle.

Reflecting on the event, I wanted to share an interesting observation that I had during the course of the contest.  The winners of the iPad, Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, were not originally in the contest.  They were hanging out with us at the event working on their totally awesome side project called GeoLoqi.  Halfway through the event, Aaron looks in my direction and says that he is interested in integrating Tropo SMS with GeoLoqi.  Several minutes later his iPhone buzzes with an SMS and he looks at me and Amber and says, “It worked!  GeoLoqi just me an SMS notification triggered by my location!”  This was certainly very exciting for all of us but it the event gets more interesting…

Amber and Aaron left to get some sleep and came back in the morning for breakfast with an idea to enter the contest.  Their idea was ChatterCast, a mashup of Tropo, Socrata’s data.seattle.gov, Instamapper, and GeoLoqi services.  Basically ChatterCast subscribes your phone to real-time 911 call data provided by http://data.seattle.gov.  ChatterCast alerts you based on your location of 911 events happening around you.

This is a great example of how someone with an idea can not only win a contest only after getting started in the final hours but how anyone with an idea can change the world.  Tropo’s ease of use makes it super easy to communicate with telephones via voice and SMS or even IM and Twitter with a couple of lines a code.  There’s no reason not to add telephone support to your existing web applications to make them even more powerful in this mobile and social age we live in today.  So what are you waiting on?  Sign-up for Tropo today and change the world!

Stefan Besling will introduce VoiceObjects On-Demand, a key feature of VoiceObjects 10, the new release of the VoiceObjects Application Lifecycle Suite.

Now you can combine the power of the VoiceObjects environment with Voxeo’s proven hosting infrastructure in a seamlessly integrated package.

Develop, deploy, and manage your apps more easily than ever before – and use the new nosted application analytics to monitor traffic and understand caller behavior. Learn more about VoiceObjects On-Demand and download your free developer edition at http://www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand/.

REGISTER NOW for this session on Thursday, August 26, 2010

8:00 AM Western, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European.

Looking forward to welcome you in this session.

Tropo fueled the hacking by providing plenty of food and drink. We had several developers around to help people with their projects, as did Socrata. Amazon stopped by for a bit, and Bill Schrier (Seattle’s CTO) and Sarah Schacht (Executive Director of Knowledge is Power) came by to offer ideas and see what people were working on.

At 4:30pm on Sunday all the teams came up to demo their apps. Troy Davis’s entry SirenSpotter shows you what police and fire activity is happening near you right now. Russell Branca created an app that shows city-owned landmarks on a map and pulls in nearby photos for each landmark. A team led by Socrata’s Chris Metcalf built Notifyre, a tool that will call you if the fire department responds to a 911 call at your house.

The two apps that won the hackathon were ChatterCast, an entry from Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, and GeoNotify from Max Ogden, Reid Beels, and Russell Branca.

ChatterCast, which won the Socrata prize of an iPad, uses Instamapper to track your phone and compares your location to 911 and other data provided by the City of Seattle using Socrata’s platform. When you enter an area that has something going on, ChatterCast uses Tropo to sends a text message to your phone, alerting you to the activity.

GeoNotify won the Tropo prize, including a Flip Mino HD and a year’s membership to Animoto Pro. Their app allows you to draw a shape on a map and subscribe to SMS alerts for things that happen inside that shape. Get road closure and traffic alerts for things that happen along your commute. Find out when public activities take place at a nearby park. The app uses data from the city of Portland and sends SMS alerts through Tropo.

Congratulations to our winners, and thanks so much for everyone that participated in the Hackathon and helped out with making it a success.

Want to create your own voice and SMS apps? Tropo is simple, powerful and completely free for developer usage. Sign up now.

Remember police scanners? You can listen to live radio traffic between police cars. Some people do it for profit, like news reporters or ambulance chasers. Others do it for fun, just to hear what’s going on. The City of Seattle, one of our sponsors publishes their fire department 911 calls in near-real time using services from Socrata, another hackathon sponsor. So I wrote up an app that emulates a police scanner, using 911 dispatches as a data source.

Call a phone number, and Tropo will fetch the current list of 911 data from Socrata and play the incidents over the phone. For demo purposes, we’re only fetching data every 15 minutes and we’re getting any calls from the last 10 hours.

You can grab the code from Github or read it below.

<?php
answer();
sleep(2);
say ('Welcome to the Seattle <say-as interpret-as="vxml:digit">911</say-as> scanner.');
$timer = time();

$data = fetchIncidents();
if (count($data) == 0) {
  say("http://hosting.tropo.com/37423/www/audio/beep-7.mp3";);
}
while(1) {
  $data = fetchIncidents();
  foreach ($data as $incident) {
    say("<speak><paragraph xml:lang='en-us-fmj'>At <say-as interpret-as='address'>{$incident[8]}</say-as> an {$incident[9]}.</paragraph></speak>");
    $timer = time();
  }
  $currTime = time();
  if ($currTime - $timer > 30) {
    say("http://hosting.tropo.com/37423/www/audio/beep-7.mp3";);
  }
  sleep(900);
}

function fetchIncidents() {
  $url = "http://data.seattle.gov/api/views/INLINE/rows.json?method=index";;

  $time = time() - 360000;

  $data = '{"name":"Seattle Real Time Fire 911 Calls","query":{"orderBys":[{"expression":{"columnId": 2354168,"type":"column"},"ascending": false}],"filterCondition":{"value":"AND","children": [{"children":[{"columnId":2354168,"type":" column"},{"value":' . $time . ',"type":"literal"}],"value":" GREATER_THAN","type":"operator"}],"type":" operator"}},"originalViewId": "kzjm-xkqj"}';

  $ch = curl_init($url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type: application/json'));
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

  $json = curl_exec ($ch);

  curl_close($ch);

  $data = json_decode($json, true);
  return $data['data'];
}
?>

One theme that I picked up on quickly from the Tinkerstorm was the love of Socrata’s data API.  Most of Seattle’s available data can be access through their site at http://data.seattle.gov.  The organizers were able to keep the coffee fresh and provide an awesome dinner and breakfast buffets, and plenty of idea people offering suggestions and feedback throughout the night!

Tim from Amazon Web Services stopped by to provide AWS discount codes to assistance with the deployment.  Even the SmartCups from GnomeDex came handy.  Everyone knows how much programmers love and need caffeine in events like this one!

@Chewbanca showing off his Google Maps, Flickr, and Socrata mashup!

Hans' leg gets repaired!

@WillowBl00 and @JohnnyDiggz

More news at 5 regarding prizes!

A group of developers will descend upon the Edgewater Hotel right next to the Gnomedex venue and build apps to help our fellow citizens. Socrata will be there with a bunch of government APIs and data sets for you to work with and Seattle’s CTO Bill Schrier will be stopping by to talk about open government from the perspective of the government. Amazon’s bringing a stack of AWS credit to help you with a place to host your apps. We’ve got a few people on hand to help you understand Tropo and create some great apps with these platforms.

We’re kicking off at 5pm on Saturday and running 24 hours straight. Dinner on Saturday, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday are being provided, as is plenty of coffee all night long. We’ve even got a cash bar running for a bit each evening. And we’ve got some great wifi provided by Meraki.

Why should you do this? Beyond the challenge of building apps that will improve the lives of all around you, we’re also handing out prizes. Want an iPad, a Flip HD, or a year of Animoto Pro? Sunday afternoon, everyone will present their apps and at 5pm on Sunday, the top apps will get some prizes.

Tropo has a number of customers who are building apps for government applications, so we’re excited to be able to be part of this. Heck, even some of our sample apps are themed around opengov or use government data, like our BART eta checker, weather forecasts, or our traffic alerts.

You don’t have to be attending Gnomedex to come to the hackathon. Go sign up (it’s free) and come by and help out. Not in Seattle but still want to participate? We’ve got an IRC channel (#tinkerstorm on Freenode) and a Google Group.

During Jay Phillip’s (@Jicksta) Adhersion keynote, he suggested that we needed an easier way for the Adhearsion community to find and share components (plug-ins).  Fifteen minutes later @ChrisMatthieu registered and contributed the domain AhnHub.com.  Fifteen more minutes went by and a starter AhnHub.com website was written in Ruby on Rails and deployed to Heroku.

By the end of the event, AhnHub was receiving automatic component repository listings and commit updates from GitHub.  All the component author has to do to share their components with AhnHub is add http://ahnhub.com to their repository’s post-receive hooks as illustrated in the example below:

AhnHub automatically lists all known Adhearsion components on the home page.  Additional components can be added to the directory by updating the GitHub post-receive hook on the component’s repository.  A record of each commit update is also logged in the directory so that others can see the dates of the updates and corresponding links and messages associated with the commit.

The component directory is currently sorted in descending order by number of watchers per repository.  You can also link out to the home page of the component and quickly note whether the repository is private or public and view the number of watchers and forks on the repository.

Future enhancements will include GitHub OAuth authorization, tagging, and better search capabilities.  This is a great example of how a community with a variety of skills can contribute to various open source projects.  If you would like to get involved in this project, please notify Chris Matthieu to be added as a Collaborator on AhnHub.com.

Have you wanted a T-shirt, hat or mug to help promote the IETF and your support of the organization?  Now you can buy one, courtesy of a new online store the Internet Society has opened up:

http://www.cafepress.com/ietf

I think it’s very cool to see because many people who attend IETF meetings have wanted to help promote the great work of the IETF… but haven’t been able to have an easy way to do so like wearing a shirt (except for the shirts they receive at IETF events).

Not being a personal fan of white T-shirts (I have young kids), I naturally wanted to see a black shirt… and while they are not there yet, I’m sure they will be at some point.  It’s from Cafe Press and all created “on-demand”, so the number of items is really only limited by ISOC’s choices as well as their ability to upload appropriate graphics (for example, black shirts do need a special image).

I’m sure they’ll be getting all sorts of feedback in the next few weeks with requests for products.  Kudos to ISOC for setting this up!

These are paired with the existing JavaScript examples that were already there, so now when you read through the guide, instead of just seeing:

You’ll see:

This effectively doubles the Guide’s comprehensiveness as well as its overall usefulness, and is just one step in our ongoing documentation enhancements.  For example, the Guide has also been revamped to include more detailed information about previously under-documented topics, such as the currentCall Global Variable.

Next on the docket?   In another blatant show of favoritism (originating from our infamous Developer Evangelist Adam Kalsey), we will be including a set of PHP examples to slide right along with JavaScript and Ruby.  Stay tuned!

While volunteering as a rescue climber for the Irish Coast Guard, Robin Blandford noticed that first responder teams all faced three common challenges. “They have a lot of equipment to train in, massive communication logistics, and large amounts of paperwork to back it up.” Robin set out to ease these issues, allowing emergency responder groups to make better, faster decisions.

Blandford’s creation allows teams to monitor response readiness, team availability, valid qualifications, and rescuer experience. All a team member needs is a browser and an internet connection and they can record details from their rescue operations or training exercises. Decisions for Heroes analyzes this raw data to create charts, heatmaps and benchmarks that teams can use to find areas or strength and weakness. By studying the patterns that emerge, teams can even embark on education campaigns to reduce accidents before they happen.

Decisions for Heroes just added SMS for US and Canadian teams using Tropo. Using either a web-based interface or a mobile phone, teams can blast messages out to a specific user or an entire group. The system allows messages to be targeted to everyone or just those that are on call at that moment. Teams can use this to quickly organize a rescue effort without having to contact each member individually.

Responders can interact with D4H with SMS as well. A rescuer that’s taking a break can send a text message to Decisions for Heroes and be taken off the on-call list and can check back in via SMS when they return.

Decisions for Heroes chose Tropo to provide their SMS services. Our interconnection with large numbers of global SMS networks allows them to expand the service without worrying that their SMS provider can’t keep up. Our built-in support for PHP means their development team didn’t have to learn a new platform. Our customer obsession teams have allowed them to iterate rapidly, knowing that support is always around if questions arise.

Robin says they’re planning on adding voice services using Tropo, allowing updates and notifications anywhere you have a phone line. A prototype has been built, and plans for further development and rollout are in the works.

Want to experience our famous Customer Obsession? Build a voice or SMS app with global reach today. It’s free to get started and we’re in our forums and IRC channel 24×7 to help you out.

Our example today is a simple RSVP Twitter Bot; when someone tweets the Twitter account attached to your application, it responds back automatically with a confirmation indicating their RSVP was received.   In this case, we set it up to be password driven; if the application receives the Tweet “Tropo Rocks!”, it responds with an approval message.  Any other message will cause the Twitter bot to respond with a message indicating they sent the wrong password and to try again.

We’ll assume you have a Tropo account at this point and begin with creating your Twitter app.  If you don’t already have a account, you can click here to create one.

1) Login to your Tropo account, then go to Your Applications and click the Create New Application link:

2) Choose Tropo Scripting; this will bring up the New Application window:

3) Give the application a name; we chose ClubTropo to fit the example, but you can use whatever you’d like.  Next, click the link for Hosted File (next to What URL powers your app?) and choose Create a new hosted file for this application.  This will open the New Mapped File window:

4) You will need to give the file a name; as with the application name, it can be anything you like, but make sure this one ends with .js to identify it as Javascript .  In the box for File Text, enter in the following simple code:

answer();
message = currentCall.initialText;
if(message == "Tropo Rocks!"){
    say("You just learned how to make a Twitter bot with @Tropo for free!  Welcome to the club.");
}
else {
    say ("Say what?  Try it again - send us a tweet with the correct password to get on the list.");
}

Then click Create File to save it.

To explain what the code does:

• The answer method “picks up” the tweet, like it would “pick up” a phone call.
• We then define the variable message as currentCall.initialText, which contains the tweet sent by the user (go here for more on currentCall).
• Next, we specify what to tweet back if the user’s tweet has the correct message (i.e., Tropo Rocks!) and when it does not.
• That’s it!  That’s all the code you need.

5) Once the file has been created and you’re back on the New Application screen, you’ll see the path to your file has been automatically filled in for you.  Now click Create Application to save the application as a whole:

6) This will bring up the page in the next screenshot.  Here, we need to add our Twitter account to the application; this will be the Twitter account that will act as the bot.  Select the Twitter icon at the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a link that says Click to activate Twitter.  This will attempt to connect to whatever Twitter account you’re currently logged into, so make sure you’re in the right one before you click the link.

7) Twitter will display a webpage in your browser asking you to Deny or Allow Tropo access to your Twitter account.  If you’re definitely in the right account, go ahead and click Allow:

8) You will then return back to the Tropo New Application screen and your Twitter account name will be listed:

9) Click the Update Application button to save the change, and you’re ready to test!  Our Twitter bot is named ClubTropo and we sent it a message from two different accounts.  From TropoUser, we sent “@ClubTropo Tropo Rules!”, which was rejected.  From JD_Gryph, we sent “@ClubTropo Tropo Rocks!”, which was accepted as the correct password.  Check out the responses below:

Voila!  RSVP Twitter Bot achieved.  Feel free to test with @ClubTropo and/or create your own; the door is wide open!

For more information, check out our Tropo Scripting documentation, or check out our Tutorials and Samples.

(Sidenote:  You may want to check out this blogpost before testing any Twitter apps; Twitter can be touchy with multiple instances of identical messages)