Voxeo Talks

Our Voxeo Labs team travels all over the world speaking at developer events and helping with “___Camp” events, hack-a-thons, and any other kind of event that can help grow the developer community in that region.

We also enjoy helping build the developer community in the regions where our offices are located and so we were pleased last night to host in our Orlando, Florida, headquarters a “Ruby 101″ class taught by the Jumpstart Lab team and sponsored by Envy Labs and our own Tropo cloud communications service.

As this photo from John Higgins shows, it was a packed session full of people looking to learn more about the Ruby language:

We’re pleased to provide this space and will be looking forward to doing even more of this in Orlando as we move into our new office space over the next few months.

Have you tried out Phono yet? It’s been almost 2 weeks since we announced the Phono JavaScript library that lets you turn any web browser into a phone or chat client. If you haven’t seen the news, check out this page to get caught up on what Phono is all about:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/news/phono/

On that page, you’ll find links to the announcement and:

• introductory videos, including a live coding session
• examples of connecting Phono to applications written for Tropo, VoiceXML and CCXML
• sample applications such as “Facebook Telephone” and “Twelephone” connecting your Facebook and Twitter friends
• links to articles about Tropo
• slides from the Phono announcement

We’re very excited about Phono and will have a great number of further posts and announcements over the next while. We’ll update that Phono news page with major news, but if you are interested in staying up on Phono news your best bet is to follow PhonoSDK on either (or both) Twitter or Facebook and to also check out The Phono Blog. We’ve been very pleased to see what people have built with Phono already – and we’re looking forward to seeing even more!

If you are attending the JavaOne conference next week in San Francisco, you can hear Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn speaking about media servers and the JSR 309 standard. His talk is Tuesday, September 21, 2010, at 8:00AM and has this description:

Media Servers for Mortals – The quick guide to JSR309 madness

JSR309 brings a standard API to accessing media services from IP communications applications. One problem with it however is that it can be very overwhelming to developers who are not accustomed to it’s unique style and nuances. This session will give developers an overview of the API and a roadmap of how and where to learn more about this powerful API and how not to get hung up on some of the concepts that both make this very useful and yet difficult to master.

This session is recommended for Java developers who would like to learn the basics of communications applications and how to develop them.

Topics will include:

• API Overview
• Basic Application Tutorial
• Frameworks to assist in development
• Resources on where to learn more

If you would like to connect with RJ out at JavaOne, please drop him a line. You can also follow him on Twitter

Will you be out at ClueCon, the “Open Source Telephony Developer Conference”, in Chicago this week? If so, please do say hello.

Three of us from Voxeo will be there. Jay Phillips (who just recently joined Voxeo) will be speaking about Adhearsion, RJ Auburn will speak about developing voice applications and I (Dan York) will be speaking about VoIP security.

In my case, ClueCon organizer Brian West asked me if I would be open to reprising my “SysAdmin Steve” talk I gave at ETel back in 2007. Given that it’s probably my favorite presentation because the style is so completely different almost all my other presentations, I was glad to agree. In a sad commentary on the state of VoIP security, though, when I went to update the preso I found that.. well… it’s pretty much the same as 2007. I made a few updates and am looking forward to giving the talk.

I also agreed to help Brian out emceeing the conference as I did last year. All in all it should be a fun event… some really great presentations queued up… looking forward to learning a good bit…

Anyway, if you are out at ClueCon, please do say hello.

Technorati Tags: cluecon, development, opensource, telephony, voxeo

We’re very pleased to note that Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will be speaking early next Tuesday morning at VoiceCon Orlando 2009 on the subject of voice mashups. His panel session is “Voice Mashups – Tool or Toy?” and is from 8:00-8:45am on Tuesday, March 31st. The description is:

What’s a voice mashup, and why should you care? This session will explain how different application and services elements can be combined in an ad hoc manner by end users drawing upon enterprise resources, to create “mashups.” We’ll look at the uses for mashups, where the elements of a mashup come from, and how they can benefit your end users.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• How do you get started with voice mashups? What elements will you need to purchase, and what existing elements in your network can be included?

• What do you have to do to make elements available for mashups?
• What’s the users’ interface for a voice mashup, and how do you provide it to them?
• Do you need to maintain some control over what users do within a mashup-enabled Web Services environment?
• Why should you do this? What can voice mashups do for your end users that can’t be done another way?

The folks at VoiceCon asked both RJ and the other presenter, Marlon Machado from IBM, to actually show mashups in action, so I know RJ’s going to have some fun stuff planned. I expect he’ll be doing some demos of Tropo.com (here’s a good summary of our Tropo announcements) and showing some of the cool mashups we’ve come up with, some of which are found in the Tropo Sample Applications and some of which we’ve written about on the Tropo blog. RJ’s a great presenter and if you are at VoiceCon I’d encourage you to check out his presentation.

P.S. And yes, if you looked at the VoiceCon schedule earlier, I (Dan York) was slated to give this presentation but due to some scheduling issues cannot attend. RJ graciously agreed to speak in my place. Given that he’s been heavily involved in mashups for years, he’s definitely got the background.

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Technorati Tags: voicecon, voxeo, rjauburn, mashups, voice, applications

This Thursday, March 19, 2009, we are very pleased to be hosting the monthly meeting of the Orlando Ruby Users Group. We’ll be showing people the Ruby interface to Tropo.com, looking at some of the Tropo sample applications in Ruby and talking about how Ruby can now be used to create all sorts of different applications that interact with voice, IM and SMS.

The evening will start with gathering downstairs at street level in the Urban Flats restaurant at 6:00pm for dinner. At 7:00pm the group will head upstairs to our office on the 20th floor. In his announcement to the ORUG mailing list, ORUG organizer Gregg Pollack indicates that if you are arriving after 7pm you should call him at 407-754-5517 so that you can be let into our office.

Our office is at 189 South Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando, FL (the “Plaza” building at the corner of Church and South Orange). There is a parking garage in the actual building where you can pay to park – enter on Church Street. There are several other parking garages in the area. A map and directions are available online.

We’re glad to host local events like this and look forward to seeing what this group of Rubyists will do with Tropo!

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Technorati Tags: ruby, orlando, orug, voxeo, tropo

It seems rather amazing that it was only a week ago at eComm 2009 that we announced the launch of Tropo.com, Voxeo’s new platform for developing voice applications in common programming languages such as JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby.

It’s been a crazy yet wonderful week! We’ve been thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve received and even more so by the number of Tropo developers we’ve seen sign up. If you missed out on the announcement last week, here are some pointers to learn more:

• a video of Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor announcing Tropo at eComm and the set of slides that accompanied the launch

• the Tropo.com website where you can sign up for a free developer account and also learn about the simple pricing
• the Tropo documentation, including the quick introduction, the API Reference and the Tutorials
• slides from the Tropo tutorial given by Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn at eComm
• over 140 sample Tropo applications written in JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby and covering a range of different application types. Some voice-centric apps like an auto-attendant… some voice mashups that give you voice access to certain services (like traffic reports, top music download lists, New York Times articles)… and some, um, “interesting” apps like the Monty Python quote server or the role-playing game someone wrote. We also announced the availability of these applications via git and Github.
• a developer contest where we will pay $100 for each selected sample app
• the Tropo FAQ which answers many questions we’ve received
• new ways to receive support for writing Tropo apps, including web forums, IRC and Skype chat
• and, of course, The Tropo Blog, where we’ll be bringing you all sorts of news about Tropo, examples of applications, sample code and much, much more.

Here at Voxeo we’ve been very excited about the reception of the Tropo launch and are already looking at how we can enhance the platform and what additional languages we’ll be adding (believe it or not, we’ve had several requests for Lisp!). We do hope that you will sign up for a free Tropo account and get started creating voice applications in programming languages you already know. And please… do send along any feedback you have, either through the web forums, as comments to this blog post or even as email. We’d love to hear what you think of it and also where you would like to see the Tropo platform go. Most of all we’re excited to see what you do with the platform!

P.S. And if you would rather develop voice apps in VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML, you can of course sign up for a free developer account at our evolution.voxeo.com developer portal and get started there. With the launch of Tropo we are in no way reducing our award-winning support for XML telephony. We’ll be continuing to enhance and expand XML support as well… but with Tropo we’re now opening up development of voice applications to a whole new range of developers.

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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, voice, applications, mashups, ecomm, python, php, javascript, groovy, ruby