HN user

danielle17

645 karma

working on Twilio (1st employee) since March 2009 http://www.twilio.com

Startup Weekend board member, 500Startups mentor, Teens in Tech Incubator mentor, Parisoma mentor, ask me about the $250k Twilio Fund

created TweetToCall with my husband Kevin (kevin_morrill) http://www.tweettocall.com

More: http://www.daniellemorrill.com @DanielleMorrill on Twitter danielle@twilio.com

Posts30
Comments52
View on HN
www.youtube.com 15y ago

RestSharp > Shamwow

danielle17
18pts1
mobilemadlibs.com 15y ago

Mobile Mad Libs

danielle17
1pts0
www.huffingtonpost.com 15y ago

InternMatch: Matching the Smartest Interns With the Hottest Tech Startups

danielle17
26pts1
michaelrkn.blogspot.com 15y ago

Impact Dialing's Lean Startup Model

danielle17
19pts1
techcrunch.com 15y ago

Startup Weekend LA Winner Zaarly Raises Funding, Will Launch at SXSW

danielle17
5pts0
blog.programmableweb.com 15y ago

Wisconsin Transit Tracker Costs Developer Only $75 For One Year

danielle17
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Do you celebrate employee anniversary dates at your startup?

danielle17
2pts1
blog.twilio.com 15y ago

Roger Pincombe Combines Twilio SMS with DailyBurn to Win Trip To Boston

danielle17
1pts0
blogs.mulesoft.org 15y ago

System Admins R.I.P.?

danielle17
76pts63
www.avc.com 15y ago

Music Hackday NYC

danielle17
4pts0
techcrunch.com 15y ago

500 Startups Announces First Winners Of Its $250K Twilio Micro-Fund

danielle17
30pts9
www.readwriteweb.com 15y ago

Top Cloud Computing Services for 2010

danielle17
1pts0
www.readwriteweb.com 15y ago

Programmed Robots and 4 Other Ways Developers Use Twilio

danielle17
2pts0
www.daniellemorrill.com 16y ago

How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates

danielle17
132pts35
www.stevenaitchison.co.uk 16y ago

100 Ways to Develop Your Mind

danielle17
3pts1
blog.chromium.org 16y ago

Twilio + Google Chrome Extensions Hackathon Contest Winners

danielle17
3pts0
blog.twilio.com 16y ago

Simple Phone Verification with Twilio, PHP, MySQL and jQuery

danielle17
14pts0
www.onethirdofmylife.com 16y ago

Twilio Searching for "Superstar" Web Developer

danielle17
1pts1
www.daniellemorrill.com 16y ago

My Best Friend's Wedding: The Startup

danielle17
2pts0
blog.twilio.com 16y ago

Help Wanted: Seeking Agents of Awesome for Team Twilio

danielle17
16pts4
blog.twilio.com 16y ago

Twilio + Boxee Developer Contest and Hackathon March 30 - April 11

danielle17
21pts9
techcrunch.com 16y ago

Startup Rivals: Teleku Takes On Twilio

danielle17
19pts2
blog.twilio.com 16y ago

Play: The Hertzian Collective

danielle17
3pts0
www.impactdialing.com 16y ago

Tell HN: Seeking Cofounder for Twilio-based Startup

danielle17
12pts4
twitter.com 16y ago

Tell HN: Twilio is Hiring a Developer Evangelist

danielle17
4pts1
itunes.apple.com 16y ago

Bottlr: Chatroulette for SMS iPhone App

danielle17
17pts2
blog.twilio.com 16y ago

Introducing Trails (twilio-on-rails)

danielle17
15pts3
www.youtube.com 16y ago

Yeah Toast

danielle17
1pts0
www.readwriteweb.com 16y ago

Put Your Startup on Holiday Autopilot with Twilio

danielle17
14pts6
www.twilio.com 16y ago

How To Create a Conference Call in 3 Lines of Code

danielle17
45pts15

So happy to have this out for general use. I work at Twilio, and use the OpenVBX app to manage all my voicemail for business. It's cool now, but is going to be so much more awesome with contributions from the community. I'm very interested in talking about how to expand the plugin architecture for the web app to work for mobile as well. If anyone else wants to chat about working on this drop me a note a danielle@twilio.com

There is no fee to port a number with Twilio, and once you port it in it is $1/month to hold onto the number. To port, you log into your Twilio account and visit the phone numbers tab and select "port number", or hit this URL https://www.twilio.com/user/account/phone-numbers/porting

At this point, you fill out a form asking for the billing information and then we follow up with you to get authorization to transfer the number (usually just a signature). It usually takes about 10 business days to complete the port.

(I work at Twilio too)

I don't know how saying "Danielle Morrill said" is not a quote. But let the audience here, and the future, judge whether or not we "keep up". I think time will tell.

Hey Hector, thanks for this feedback I'll check with the team on the status of Puerto Rico phone numbers. Regarding TTS, you might want to take a closer look at the Twilio <Say> verb, we actually support Spanish TTS... you just have to specify the language and you'll get the right accent, like this:

<Response> <Say language="es">Es un robot que hablan español!</Say> </Response>

Also have French and Germain. Details here: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2010-04-01/twiml/say

Thanks, there are different challenges with international routing by country and by receiving carrier. I'll definitely pass this information along, and if you have specific calls (I'd need your Twilio account ID to look at them, better sent via email) that will help a lot, too. We know international support is important to developers everywhere, and we're definitely working on it.

hey curious to know what you mean about "Chinese service sucking" since we're not international yet... are you referring to outbound calls to Chinese numbers, or something else?

Hey Alex, not sure if you've logged into your Twilio account lately, but we reduced prices a couple months back so inbound calls are now $0.01/min, SMS is $0.02/msg, and phone numbers are $1/domestic or $2/toll free. We've yet to see someone actually blow through the whole $30 in trial credit, but if you run out and need more just let us know at help@twilio.com

Also not sure if you've seen this, but you can pick from English, French, German, and Spanish accents here: http://www.twilio.com/say

Looks like this is a bit of email usability fail on our part. When you first sign up for Twilio, you receive an email with the subject line "Welcome to Twilio... Learn to Build Your First Phone App in Less than 5 Minutes" and then 7 days later we send you an email introducing our CEO that says "RE: Welcome to Twilio..." in the subject line. The goal was that these would get threaded together, but they don't since the from is "Twilio" in the first and we use real names in the other emails (the one from Jeff says his name, the one from me says my name, etc.)

Sorry about that, it's an easy fix to remove the RE:

time to write a blog post about this... these "vendettas" from people outside the U.S. against startups that won't let you sign up so annoying. Maybe you should channel all that energy towards convincing your own country to make it easier for us to operate businesses within your borders... the limited resources of a startup have to be carefully spent, and thinking about foreign exchange, taxes, and laws (especially on stuff like telecom) is not a small undertaking

Everyone dials in 16 years ago

We've got a lot of people who call in remotely for our weekly team meetings, and in general I think conference calls are torture - but not because of the sound quality (putting everyone on mute except the person speaking seems to help). The thing that drives me crazy is waiting for people to call in so that the call can start. I've been hoping someone will build a Twilio app (I work for Twilio, but haven't hard time to make this one) that will call out to all the participants of the conference call, and drop them into the call when they answer so that they have to be on time.

Another cool solution is the recent feature 37Signals added to Campfire for conference calling, which posts the call transcript back into the chat - nice for people who can't be on the call, or couldn't hear very well.

Nope, Twilio doesn't do fractional billing.

I can report back on how much it costs me to run this thing after a month. With 5 people coming and going average of 2 times per day each, I expect it is going to come out to around $0.30 per day x 30 days plus the $1/mo for the phone number -- so roughly $10/month... we'll see how close my guess is

I'm sorry I had no idea I was ripping you off, I appreciate that you're a Twilio early adopter. Like you mentioned, I handle customer support for Twilio and hear about countless ideas, feature requests, etc. everyday. There's no way I could remember who came up with what, and multiple people run similar ideas by me all the time.

I built this to scratch my own itch and its also a really simple use case to illustrate the ability to control real world devices with DTMF tones. Some Twilio projects I had in mind when I built this include Buzzeromatic.com, which is also powered by Twilio and costs $1.95/month and had a very public launch. Sunlight Labs also did a door hack with Twilio and an arduino that I thought was pretty sweet.

What I think is important is that what I've built doesn't have any UI or anything like that, just a really stripped down version and I'm not looking to make it into some paid service. You could certainly take these guts and turn them into a kickass product, but these <100 lines of PHP are not the defensible secret sauce.

The ability to use DTMF tones with Twilio has been around for awhile, I got the tone generator from a Get Satisfction thread that's about a year old: http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/dtmf_tone_generatio...

Yeah I agree, and I think the oil replacement cost is pretty high (one of the top monthly line items after people expenses). McDonalds provides guidelines to franchises and then they decide how to implement, in our case we lived in a small town (an island actually) and I think the cleaning guidelines are "per X batches cooked". But yes, generally the more frequent the better both for the oil and also for the vats.