

How I Built an Apartment Buzzer for Multiple Roommates - danielle17
http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2010/06/how-i-built-a-multi-user-door-buzzer-for-our-apartment/
full disclosure - I work on Twilio, which I used for this
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patio11
I love Twilio, let me count the ways. Doing flow control of an online or
offline process from a phone is awesomely powerful. (Particularly cell
phones.)

Here's a related example which I'm busy coding today: I wanted people to be
able to record custom appointment reminders, but (following many years of
supporting non-technical users) think microphones and MP3 encoding are
probably beyond their ken. So instead, when you click "Send Mary Smith a
custom reminder" on the site, it pops up a lightbox saying "Call 555-123-1234
and type in the code 1234", and when you do so the phone will say "Leave your
custom message for Mary Smith's appointment on June 16th from 5:00 PM to 5:30
PM after the beep." Then, after doing so, your lightbox automatically closes
and you get visual indication of success.

Bonus points: registering new numbers in Twilio is so cheap that I can
trivially afford to give every customer their own call-in number, and tell
them to put it on speed dial. Then I can use the same basic pattern for any
number of tasks.

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moolave
Awesome idea. Do you have a link to this? Would be cool to see it.

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patio11
<http://www.appointmentreminder.org> for the service. Should launch publicly
in July. I will disavow all knowledge of comments about forthcoming features
should priorities change during development ;)

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sstrudeau
This is really cool! When I was in the roommate situation, we just posted
buzzer codes composed of dots & dashes next to each name.

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sachinag
I love how the top story on Hacker News reminds me that I owe Danielle an
e-mail after TC Disrupt to get myself a Twilio t-shirt. :) _waves at Danielle_

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danielle17
_waves_ shipment goes Wednesday, make sure to get your address to me before
then

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jluxenberg
Since they're using Twillo, it now costs $0.03 to enter your apartment plus $1
per month for the phone number.

Food for thought. Does anyone know if Twillo does sub-one-minute billing?

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danielle17
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

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vault_
Wow, that's extremely cool. I remember checking Twilio out before, but I
didn't quite get what the use case might be for it. This example has managed
to flick on a light switch in my head, and I see that with a platform like
this you could build some amazing applications. I will be playing with it more
in the future.

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danielle17
full disclosure - i work on Twilio, which I used for this

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gkoberger
Danielle- hopefully it's just a coincidence, however I emailed you exactly
this idea (and outlined the implementation almost exactly like you just did)
about a year ago (our email conversation about it began on 7/7/2009; we met
prior to that at the GigaOM VIP party).

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sangaya
I hope that it's not a coincidence. A pretty neat idea was provided for
nothing a year ago and has been doing nothing but sitting around in the two of
your heads. Danielle brushed the dust off, executed, and shared the results.

What did you do with it?

I'd say this is a timely example of the "Ideas are worthless. Execution is
everything." mantra from just the other day.

~~~
branden
That frequently regurgitated phrase means that execution matters more than an
idea for a business, not that ideas are literally worthless and therefore
undeserving of attribution.

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moolave
Oh, the awesome possibilities you can create with Twilio API. =)

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klous
Archive of twilio contests, looking at these can be useful to generate new or
related ideas. <http://contests.twilio.com/archives.html>

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pvdm
What are the chances that Twillo will take an Uzi to it's API users ?

<http://twitter.com/cdixon/status/14636556473>

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progrium
Considering that Twilio is purely a platform company (even more so than Amazon
Web Services, since they primarily have an online store to run), this seems
very unlikely if not entirely impossible.

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cmelbye
I would be surprised if you said otherwise, considering you're a Twilio
employee.

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eapen
Nice usage!

At my place, I have a group ("Gate") set up in Google Voice which forwards the
number to my cell phone and if I can't access my phone, then the custom
voicemail that caller hears is the DTMF key ("9" in my case) sound and so if I
am not able to get the phone, it will automatically buzz them in.

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mattmillr
So anyone who dials your apartment gets through the gate?

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eitally
No, only the people dialing from numbers he's added to his "Gate" group in GV.

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mattmillr
The way these systems usually work, the call comes FROM the
keypad/speakerphone at the gate, TO your home number. That's how it can
recognize the DTMF and open the gate.

If the call were coming FROM his friends mobiles, TO Google Voice, how would
the gate intercept the DTMF? Note that he says the group includes "the
number," not "the numbers."

The original article states that it is possible to set up a system this way,
such that anyone who calls gets in, but it is insecure.

