
Twilio Raises $12 Million For Powerful Telephony API - gspyrou
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/twilio-raises-12-million-for-powerful-telephony-api/
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petercooper
I was an early Twilio user and love the service (and them - some great guys
there) but added to their existing ~$4m of funding, that's $16m of funding
investors are expecting to get back (with a generous profit on top) sometime.

Can something like Twilio really become a $100m+ company? I hope so but my
ignorance blinkers me to how this could happen..

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jonknee
Why not? Companies make billions upon billions of dollars every year selling
voice service to businesses. Asterisk is still too complicated for most
businesses, I have to imagine there is a huge market for easy to use voice
apps.

They may not end up selling directly to small businesses, but power things
like patio11's reminder service that then in turn are sold to the mom and pops
of the world. OpenVBX looks pretty neat too, it's crazy how much businesses
usually pay for this sort of thing.

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petercooper
Good point - that's exactly the type of answer I was hoping to get. I guess I
forgot the value in being close to the metal. Twilio's customers aren't
necessarily end customers but companies who, themselves, are attempting to
make serious money from Twilio's products and will be forking over huge
amounts of cash on a regular basis ;-)

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jonknee
Evidence for this can be seen in their volume pricing discounts:

<http://www.twilio.com/pricing-signup/volume-pricing>

I doubt many single customers will require multiple thousands of phone numbers
or be using more than 15 million minutes a month (that's 1,500 people on the
phone for 8 hours every week day of the month).

OpenVBX is somewhat a direct-to-business play, but they stayed out of the pool
by open sourcing it and then by hinting that others are allowed to re-sell it
(more minutes for them!). It's really slick though:

<http://www.twilio.com/openvbx>

I could see a Big Telco scoop them up for tons of money in the near future.
All those cushy business lines are going away at a rapid pace, they need to
get in on the next big thing. The players are huge, a $100 million buyout
would barely even make the company newsletter (case in point, AT&T banked
$12.5B last year).

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LiveTheDream
Twilio Labs has some really neat stuff: phone calls and SMS from the command
line. You can give it an mp3 file and it will play it for a list of
recipients.

<http://labs.twilio.com/bash/index>

<http://labs.twilio.com/bash/sms>

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redstripe
I hope they invest a lot of that in innovating and not just marketing/scaling.
They've had a decent pace so far but there are still some large holes to fill.
I'd like to see:

* Conferences that support more than 10 people.

* Flash RTMP streaming (even just for outbound)

* SIP support

There's a lot of cool business stuff that is _almost_ within reach of twilio.
Keep innovating guys.

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runT1ME
Conferencing is _very_ challenging for more than ten people.

When you say SIP support, what do you mean?

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redstripe
Large scale conferencing may be challenging but it's also pretty expensive and
an attractive service to take a slice of. We currently use a service from our
telco and have run up to about 40 people for our training sessions. So it's
definitely doable.

You can't have more than a few talking at once or it becomes very unwieldy. Is
that what makes it hard? Having to multiplex 40 input channels together? Would
it be easier if most of the lines were muted? Because that is a workable
compromise.

As for SIP support, it potentially opens up twilio service to some neat
applications were one end of the phone connection could be hosting in a web
app via flash/silverlight.

~~~
runT1ME
>You can't have more than a few talking at once or it becomes very unwieldy.
Is that what makes it hard? Having to multiplex 40 input channels together?
Would it be easier if most of the lines were muted? Because that is a workable
compromise.

Oh. Yeah, I'm not sure that's even considered conferencing in the telco world.
No mixing involved if that's the case, just transmitting multiple streams.

The hard part is mixing that many people without having background noise, etc.
make everything inaudible.

>As for SIP support, it potentially opens up twilio service to some neat
applications were one end of the phone connection could be hosting in a web
app via flash/silverlight.

Ah, I see.

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jamesbritt
Interesting. Chris Matthieu gave a rockin' demo of Voxeo's PhonoSDK, a jQuery
plug-in that makes building SIP-enabled Web pages stupid easy. Looks like
there are some really interesting players in the phone space.

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runT1ME
More than a few. Ribbit is the big one, but not getting too much press these
days. Voxeo is for IVRs, but Tropo.com is owned by Voxeo and has a very
twilio-ish API.

There are a few more smaller players.

And then there's the stealth project I'm working on with some people. Going to
be quite disruptive...

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hopeless
I initially liked Twilio but I actually went with Tropo for a small project as
the ability to upload a Ruby script kept everything easy. No need to learn
another language or even use a RESTful api. Just write the script, upload and
you're good to go.

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runT1ME
I believe Twilio has wrappers around their REST API in various languages, so
you don't have to deal with any of the web stuff.

However, you'd still have to host your own scripts, so if Tropo does your
script hosting, there's that advantage. How do you communicate with the rest
of your App though? Or does it exist entirely on the Tropo 'cloud'?

Care to share what the app is if it's a public thing?

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sjtgraham
I built a Twilio Ruby gem for a project, after not being happy with the
official library (poor code quality and poor test coverage)

<http://github.com/stevegraham/twilio-rb>

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johns
We're working on all new libraries that will be MUCH better than the ones we
have now. Should be out soon.

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gspyrou
Do you plan to re-enable SMS delivery outside the US ?

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jeffiel
Hi gspyrou... yes, we'll do it and be able to fully support it like we do with
our US SMS.

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gspyrou
Glad to hear that , because at the moment this is a show stopper for our
project.

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audeyisaacs
I hope this means they're expanding to support more countries fully(number
provisioning and sms). Especially Australia.

~~~
jeffiel
Hi audeyisaacs, international capabilities are very high on our priority
list... we're listening :)

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audeyisaacs
Awesome!

