diggz

While I haven't done it personally, it is theoretically possible to use AT&T's new Call Management API (powered by Tropo) along with their MMS API to send MMS messages. I suggest you check out https://developer.att.com/developer/forward.jsp?passedItemId... for more info

We know it's a terribly devastating "assassination piece by Johnny Diggz". That's why I fucking wrote it, asshat!

You make a good point, although we have little control about who links to what: But for those that care, Here's the technology page: http://voxeolabs.com/ameche/technology/

On your question regarding the division between Voxeo Labs and Voxeo:

Since 1999 Voxeo Corporation (HQ in Orlando) has had a very strong IVR (Interactive Voice Response) business and continues to grow and excel in that market. Voxeo's main offerings includes Prophecy (hosted and premise) and VoiceObjects.

Voxeo Labs (formed in 2009, with HQ in San Francisco) is a separate wholly-owned subsidiary focused on real-time communications. Labs is responsible for Tropo, Phono, PRISM and now Ameche.

Two completely different engineering teams, marketing teams, management teams and missions. But every once in a while we all still get together and play softball.

Disclaimer: I'm the Chief Evangelist for Voxeo Labs, so my opinions in here are always true. ;)

Not sure if you're our target market, however, if you want some technical merits, I posted some in the comments here: http://www.diggz.org/index.php/2012/10/16/twilio-is-like-the...

Of course I am. I spent the first 6 paragraphs of the post explaining that :)

This rocks!

On the roadmap for Q1 2012

I encourage you to try Tropo, we have thousands of very happy developers in our community and we're constantly absorbing feedback and baking it into our platform. Plus it's completely free for developers :)

I appreciate the feedback and I also agree with you on several points. Tropo's logging today IS incredibly verbose and I've been working with our product dev team to filter it to make it more developer-friendly.

You are correct that Tropo does not have built-in queueing today and I also agree that it should at least let you know if it can't deliver a message.

Better reporting is also at the top of our list for the next rev.

Again, thanks for taking the time to give me your feedback. I think you'll be pleased to see these suggestions baked into the next version of Tropo. +) Diggz

I'm Diggz, Chief Evangelist at Tropo.  I'm sorry you had a negative experience with Tropo.  We're constantly improving our docs and services and would love to hear any feedback you have.  I was recently made aware of your SMS load test with Canadian numbers and I believe with a couple of tweaks, we can get those SMS's cruising along.

For SMS-only apps that don't use voice or speech recognition, we also have http://SMSified.com which is a RESTful API based on the GSMA standard for SMS - launching in international beta soon (U.S only ATM).

International SMS is tricky (as most will agree) but we do have many devs and customers using our Tropo Canadian SMS service without performance issues.  One of the reasons we don't charge developers to test on Tropo is because we know it takes time (and lots of testing) to make an app that your customers will be able to trust and rely upon. Feel free to email me at diggz at tropo dot com.

Does this release automatically upgrade the WordPhone Wordpress "click to call" plugin or do I have to change something? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordphone/

Two men enter, one man leaves...

...hatless. ;-)

>> If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me?

I can speak fairly knowledgeably as I headed up all of Voxeo's developer community and support in the early part of this decade (and as employee #1 and co-founder Voxeo). In a pre-social media world, marketing involved a lot of face-to-face contact, primarily at conferences for developers: Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP etc. We held app contests, live coding demos making people's phones ring, sponsored meetups and conference after parties. (sound familiar?) We were out there...just apparently not at the same ones you were at (sorry).

>> Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago.

I honestly don't think any exist...not because they were lost, but because we never charged anything back then..nor have we ever charged developers. For production apps, there's no doubt that the cost of transporting data has dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. What we can do for pennies now, cost dimes 10 years ago. Of course, we also had to walk 10 miles to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways ;-)

>> But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo.

You are absolutely correct. There are some things about Tropo that are still overly complex. We're working on that. Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.

>> Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship.

I'd tend to agree. By my estimation (based on how long it took them to burn through their first round of financing) That should be right about the same time their latest round of funding runs out. No time for resting on laurels. :-)