Comments on: With SMS, Twilio Continues to Shake Up Communications

By: Ian Mikutel

Ian Mikutel — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:55:43 +0000

A little confused with this:

"For starters, the company, which has raised $4.3 3.7 million"

By: Danielle Morrill

Danielle Morrill — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:48:28 +0000

Hi Art,

Twilio started out with a simple cloud telephony API for voice, which is why we are referred to as a telephony company. We are certainly moving in the direction of more multi-modal communications with SMS, and it will be interesting to explore whether being able to send/receive SMS to a traditional “landline” phone proves valuable.

I encourage you to check out our website to learn more at http://www.twilio.com

Cheers,
Danielle @ Twilio

By: Art Rosenberg

Art Rosenberg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:33:15 +0000

I wish you pundits would stop confusing "telephony" with "voice." From a user's perspective, your SMS service is an exchange of short text messages and only uses the telephone network and endpoint devices for access. You could easily add in voice by translating the text to voice with TTS technology, but that's not what we are talking about.

Enabling applications to send SMS messages is certainly as useful as sending email messages, but more practical for mobile devices.

By: 6knowspring

6knowspring — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:25:31 +0000

Congrats to Twilio on this feature; will definitely be keeping an eye out for this company.

By: Denis Chukhryaev

Denis Chukhryaev — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:10:26 +0000

More options for developers are always welcomed. However, what Twillio is offering still requires software development skills plus additional infrastructure. Which may be a problem for some people. I wonder if Om would consider featuring powerful Visual Call Flow technology from Anveo (http://www.anveo.com). Anveo’s flexible Visual Call Flow technology allows anybody, without any special skills, Visually create powerful Voice 2.0 Applications which run in the Cloud without the need for any infrastructure investments.

Full disclosure: I am Founder of Anveo.com

By: Voice junkie

Voice junkie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:01:22 +0000

Realtime interactions is always good.

I like the way Invox – http://www.invox.com (I am a BIG fan of this company after I have seen this at IT Expo last year and I write about them whereever I can) integrates with IM and SMS. It can send you Instant Message (customized) when a call comes in or a text messsage etc. Comes equipped with drag and drop designer and 40 different mashups. Their showcases – 4-5 steps each show how easy it is to integrate with Twitter, Database, SF etc.

As a company, monetizing voice over phone is difficult when the costs are extremely less. 3c/min – thats a very hard chase unless looking for an acquisition.

By: Jason Goecke

Jason Goecke — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:19:04 +0000

First, congratulations to Twilio on this new feature. I firmly believe that offering real-time communications APIs is not just about voice, but about all possible channels for interacting with your users.

SMS is a good first step, but for full multi-modal applications engaging on all possible channels is a fundamental requirement. This means including instant messaging networks, Twitter and others.

This is largely what drove Voxeo’s acquisition of IMIfied (http://imified.com) which we have since added with support directly in Tropo (http://tropo.com). This allows for engaging your users via SMS, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, AIM and others, all using the same application.

I know that to engage with users you need to let the user decide how, this is not the future but right now. Full multi-modal APIs are what is going to allow a seamless engagement. Start-ups and organizations that take advantage of this increase their chances of success significantly.

Full disclosure: I am with Voxeo and responsible for Tropo.

By: Jeff Lawson

Jeff Lawson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:10:11 +0000

Hi Om,

Glad to hear we're winning you over, feature by feature :) Stay tuned for future disruptions...

-jeff Twilio.com