How to build your own conference call number in the cloud
Do you hate conference calls? Or at least the tedium of dialing into them? Do you have 10 minutes and a credit card? Then why not build your own single-number conference line? Read more »
From zero to half-a-billion: CEO Jeff Lawson writes the perfect story for Twilio
Five years ago, Twilio, a cloud-based communication service provider couldn’t find a penny. Last week it snagged $70 million and is worth half-a-billion dollars and is on track to do $50 million in revenues in 2013. It has IPO ambitions, thanks to CEO/co-founder Jeff Lawson. Read more »
SendGrid adds Parse, Stackmob, Azure integrations
SendGrid is inching towards ubiquity with new integrations to Parse, Stackmob and Windows Azure mobile backend services. SendGrid is popular with developers who want easy email integration for their mobile apps and who don’t want to rely too much on Amazon services. Read more »
Twilio turns on global SMS service
Twilio, a cloud communication platform, is finally offering its most requested feature: global SMS support. Now, developers will be able to enable their apps and services to send and receive SMS text messages from the U.S. and Canada to more than 150 countries around the world. Read more »
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Opportunities with Communications-as-a-Service
Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) technology brings together business applications, the Internet and the world’s public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to provide businesses with new ways of enabling communication. Here’s how to leverage this new technology. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Bed Battles wants to make waking up … social?
The early bird catches the worm – and then posts about it on Facebook: Bed Battles is a new web app hack that aims to gamify getting out of bed. Are you ready to challenge your friends to get up on time? Read more »
A preacher, 500 startups, and a dream to change it all
What Billy Beane is to baseball, Dave McClure wants to be technology startups. And like Beane, he is willing to go anywhere in the world to find a slight edge to beat his richer, bigger and fancier rivals on Sand Hill Road. Read more »
Suffer: Rise of text spam creates ugly dilemma for mobile users
The number of junk text messages in the U.S. reportedly rose to 4.5 billion last year. This can create a nasty choice for consumers — pay to be spammed or pay protection money to a carrier. Read more »
Spam Lawsuits Weigh On Twilio, Group Texting Apps
photo: Flickr / whiteafrican
Group messaging apps continue to be both a hot communications tool and a legal minefield. Like other developers who decided to build first a… Read more at paidContent »
5 things I learned at AngelHack
If you’ve never been to a hackathon, give it a shot even if you can’t stick it out for the full ride. AngelHack Boston entrants started coding at noon on Saturday and finished 30 hours later. I was there for 10. Here’s what I learned. Read more »
Twilio lets iOS app makers add VoIP as a feature
Twilio, the cloud communications platform, is arming app makers with the ability to add Voice over IP features to their iOS apps. With a new Twilio Client for iOS, the company is making it easy for any app with connectivity to incorporate Skype-like functionality. Read more »
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Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twilio raises $17M to expand communications platform worldwide
Twilio, a cloud communication platform powering a wide array of apps, is capping off a huge year of growth with $17 million in Series funding from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Ventures. The new money will be used to continue Twilio’s worldwide expansion. Read more »
Appcelerator opens a market for mobile back-end services
Appcelerator has built up a community of 1.5 million developers that have used its cross-platform development tool to build more than 25,000 apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Now it’s looking to turn that community into a selling opportunity by launching a marketplace for software modules. Read more »
Twilio embraces VoIP as the phone network fades away
Twilio, which provides a service so companies and web services can add voice or SMS to their menu of options, now will offer developers the option to use all IP communications as well as the old-school phone and mobile networks. Read more »
What Amazon and Its Customers Must Learn From Last Week’s Outage
Opinion on Amazon Web Services recent outage remains somewhat divided: One side blames Amazon for its technical failings; the other holds the cloud giant’s customers responsible for their bad judgment. But the answer to where the primary responsibility lies is a little less black and white. Read more »
Need a VoIP Cloud? Just Whistle & Roll Your Own
If there’s a cloud for compute, for storage and any other variation under the sun why shouldn’t there be a VoIP cloud to deliver telephony over the Internet? With the launch of Whistle, the 2600 Hertz Project will make building a VoIP cloud cheaper and easier. Read more »
AppSumo Offers Discounted Bundle for “Lean Startups”
We’ve written before about software bundles, which have become increasingly popular. Similarly, AppSumo has put together a bundle of SaaS products that will appeal to “lean startups,” timed to coincide with the SxSW Interactive event that has just started in Austin, TX. Read more »
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Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud Communication Platform Twilio Raises $12M
Twilio, a cloud communications platform, announced it has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The San Francisco company allows other developers to build on top of its pay-as-go telecommunications platform, creating a wide array of text and phone-based applications. Read more »
GroupMe, Fast Society Create Private Mobile Social Networks
New York start-ups GroupMe and Fast Society, which both rolled out in the last couple months, are tapping into our phone contact lists to provide people with a simple way to coordinate and communicate with a small pack of roving friends. Read more »
Got a Twilio-based App? Get Some Investment Dollars
Twilio, a web-based VoIP development platform, is going to get a boost, thanks to one of its investors: Dave McClure and his fund, 500 Startups. Twilio, a San Franciso-based startup, allows web-app developers to add voice-related functionality to their web apps. Read more »
Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku
Voxeo Corp, the Orlando, Florida-based IP telephony company behind Tropo web-and-telephony cloud-based development platform is acquiring a smaller competitor for an undisclosed amount of money. Teleku. Together, Tropo and Teleku will compete with the startups such as Twilio for the cloud based web-telephony platform business Read more »
With SMS, Twilio Continues to Shake Up Communications
Twilio is launching an SMS service that allows web app developers to add SMS-based functionality into their web apps for about 3 cents a message. Twilio also cut the per-month, per-phone number price to $1 a month from $5. Read more »
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Amazon’s Web Services, Startups and Innovation
At the DLD Conference in Munich, over a cup of tea, when I sat down for a casual chat with Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, I asked him about the company’s role as a catalyst of innovation. Here are some of his thoughts. Read more »
