In our April developer contest the Weather Underground API really inspired people in the community to build cool things and great mashup apps with Twilio. It was tough to choose one winner, let alone top three out of the mass of rockstar API mashups submitted.

One app did rise above the rest with both creativity and technical valor, and two runner ups followed close behind impressing our team of Weather Ground judges. Check out the apps below.

1st Place WeatherGram Sings Your Forecast

Built by developer Hung Troung, WeatherGram provides you with a new way to get your daily forecast with songs about weather. Dial 505-404-6924, put in your zipcode and hear a weather-related song that provides your forecast for the next four days. Hung took home a personal weather station thanks to Weather Underground, along with a Twilio track jacket. Follow Hung on Twitter @hungtruong.

2nd Place Canadian Thor Gives You Upcoming Rough Weather Reports

Hailing from Canada, William Cheung built an app based around the theme of Thor. Text your commands to see where in Canada you will be able to expect inclement weather like ‘fog’, ‘thunder’, or ‘ice age’. The reply will provide the forecasts with the earliest coming first. It’s a way for Canadian travellers to anticipate bad weather. This was a crowd favorite as Programmable Web featured Canadian Thor as a Mashup of the day.

3rd Place PIG-WTHR Local Conditions in Pig Latin

Anyone can get a weather forecast, but what about a weather forecast in Pig Latin? You can now exercise your fluency in the language with PIG-WTHR. To hear your local forecast call 1-888-PIG-WTHR. Developer Alex Swan created a video tutorial below if you’d like to build your own, and a great ‘How To’ blog post here. Make sure to follow this DOer @bigboldflank.

Honorable and Awesome Mentions 

There were too many awesome hacks, we couldn’t just stop at the top three. Take a look at the Overly Cautious Password Generator by Greg Baker. The best passwords are truly random and what’s more random than weather? Fill out a simple form online which generates a password based on a random weather report. You’ll then receive a call that will dictate your new password to you. Give a try on the Overly Cautious webpage here and follow Greg @grizeg.

Meet teemBOT, the app that organizes events for groups with updates around weather forecast and even updates via SMS. Developed by Willie Sanchez, It can work for managing a local club or keeping track of a pro team. Any question from “Is the game cancelled?” to “Does it look like rain?” gets an answer and if the app doesn’t know the question is forwarded to the app manager. Willi has teemBOT is in beta right now but you can sign up for updates.

First place took home a top notch personal weather station and runner ups received a Kindle with a $100 gift card. If you’re ready to put your apps up to the challenge, get inspired and grab developer glory, watch @twilio on Twitter and check www.twilio.com/contests for the latest.

WeatherGram Takes Top Prize in the @WeatherAPI & Twilio Developer Contest

Matthew Brown, CEO, That's Us Technologies

Matthew Brown, the founder of ThatsUs.com, became an early believer in cloud communications after helping hundreds of firms set up local telephone exchanges. The experience helped him appreciate the efficiencies that could be gained from accessing telephone networks through a web API rather than with physical hardware and on-premises software.

But Brown’s initial experience with apps that promised communications as a service was disappointing. He wanted to add a full communications solution to LotVantage, an app that made it easy for auto dealers to create a single listing and post it to multiple sites, like Backpage.com, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other classified and social marketing sites. But the services Brown tried weren’t reliable and lacked the functionality he needed to ultimately offer a full communications product to both the end user and consumer interested in these advertised goods.

One of Brown’s board members suggested he check out Twilio. Brown liked what he saw. “Twilio’s simple, easy-to-use, open API reminded me of our API,” Brown said. A developer at ThatsUs.com immediately got to work integrating the LotVantage app with Twilio.

Within days the developer had added not only call tracking, but also single click lead distribution and intelligent call recording. Four weeks later, the product was fully operational. This meant that customers could use LotVantage to create listings with disposable phone numbers. When a buyer called one of those numbers, he or she got transferred to a salesperson.

If a salesperson was away from his or her phone, for example, on the showroom floor, the salesperson would be alerted with a text message, and the customer would get a text message not only confirming their call had been received but also containing a direct link to the vehicle they were interested in for easy access later. Meanwhile, the data around the call was also tracked, so dealers had the information they needed to optimize their businesses.

“Twilio makes it possible for us to build the technology we want, without having to worry about the telecom back end,” Brown said. Even better, from Brown’s perspective, Twilio’s flexibility didn’t come at the expense of reliability or scalability. “By building our call tracking solution on Twilio, we ensure that no lead ever gets lost,” Brown said. “Twilio easily scales to accommodate large spikes in call volume, and its record uptime means we don’t lose any sleep worrying about our telecommunications infrastructure.”

The new features meant that LotVantage could offer customers one of the fastest and most reliable lead distribution services in the industry. Each lead was fully traceable, making it possible to quickly identify the most effective advertising channels and to calculate monthly ROI.

Brown said dealers who use LotVantage expect a cost per lead in the single digits and realize ROI on a monthly basis almost immediately.

As for ThatsUs.com, Brown said he realized ROI on the Twilio app in six months.

ThatsUs.com plans to continue to add features to LotVantage that will set the solution apart. Brown said the company is also planning to add communications capabilities into its other business apps.

“Our mission is to is build affordable applications for small businesses that level the playing field,” he said. “With Twilio, we can add reliable communications capabilities that scale.”

That’s Us Technologies Adds Voice to Classified Ad Management with Twilio

George Spyrou

The Bay Area is very near several different faults, most notable being the San Andreas Fault and the Hayward Fault. Here at Twilio, being based in San Francisco means we’ve been through the occasional ‘quake, and more than one of our beloved non-Californians has experienced their very first earthquake while working in the area. Twilions are no strangers to earthquakes and neither is George Spyrou.

George Spyrou is the developer of the Earthquakes Monitor app for Windows Phone. Earthquakes Monitor is an application that reports any nearby earthquake activity directly to your phone. We chatted with George to learn more about how the app works and how he built it.

Earthquakes Monitor App Rocks Windows Phone

Founded in 2009, the Student Sandbox is a twelve week program designed to give student entrepreneurs the chance to accelerate their startup by providing them with access to funding, workspace, a team of mentors, and many other handy resources. Like most student incubators, the Sandbox is educational and does not retain any equity in its companies.

Witnessing the continued growth and success of this program, Syracuse University is now increasing their efforts to further cultivate entrepreneurship on campus. The University recently announced a partnership with The Tech Garden, a VC incubator in Central New York, to establish the Raymond von Dran Innovation and Disruptive Entrepreneurship Accelerator (IDEA) accelerator.

Similar to the University of Texas at Austin’s 1SemesterStartup, the IDEA program takes a hybrid approach to teaching entrepreneurship by supplementing courses with external resources. The IDEA program connects students from any discipline and provides each team with access to the Sandbox, free or discounted technical tools, and, most importantly, support from mentors in the local startup community. Courses and an IDS (IT, Design, and Startups) minor cover taking an idea to an actionable launch plan to discussing legal issues facing startups.

To get an inside perspective of what these programs mean to students, we talked to the Program Manager for the Student Sandbox and Co-Founder at Student IDEA Connect Board, Elizabeth Ruscitto.

“With the IDEA program, we help students start businesses. By providing an experiential learning environment, students can graduate with a real world understanding of what it takes to build a successful enterprise, while they create their own company.”

We join a list of other great partners and mentors supporting these thinkers of tomorrow, giving each team  Twilio credit and mentorship time. We’re excited to be involved with this group and support all of the teams involved.

If you have questions or want to learn more about this and other Twilio EDU initiatives, make sure you follow Jack Aboutboul, one of our developer evangelists who leads our EDU initiative.

Beyond the Sandbox With Twilio and Syracuse University

Jonathan Ozeran (@jozeran)

Jonathan Ozeran spent several years helping the Fortune 1000 and other organizations with the design and development of mobile app solutions before joining RECSOLU as vice president of product and mobile. Last September he spoke about Twilio and Enterprise Mobility at the inaugural TwilioCon, which you can watch now on Vimeo.

Jonathan sat down with Twilio to talk about some of the challenges those companies face joining the mobile revolution, read the in-depth interview below.

What was the thing that surprised you most about working with Fortune 1000 companies?

In talking, consulting and partnering with enterprise organizations on mobile technologies, I was most surprised by the hesitation and lack of clear vision about how and even whether to make use of mobile devices to achieve business objectives. In some cases, I observed IT blockades where product and business leaders struggled to initiate a development project simply because of a murky mobile device management plan/approach. There were also occasions where organizations were several technology generations behind current standards – both in terms of desktop software like modern browsers as well as enterprise web application coding standards – resulting in additional barriers to achieving aggressive mobility goals.

Services like Twilio are useful in these situations as they can quickly, efficiently, inexpensively and securely demonstrate the power of connectivity paired with enterprise data in well thought-out contexts, experiences, workflows and applications. It also allows all levels of an organization to be thinking about the problem at hand that they are solving as opposed to focusing strictly on the “look and feel,” branding, etc.

I often emphasized the importance of focusing on the users, workflows and the resulting experience design. Unfortunately, there were occasions in which a premium was placed on adding features and functionality haphazardly simply to load up on upcoming releases to demonstrate progress.

Additionally, the mentality of v1 perfection conflicted with a more comfortable and effective “ship and iterate” approach where incremental progress could be made, demonstrated and rolled out on a more frequent basis to pilot groups of excited business users in the field.

Lastly, mobility tends to necessitate a bit of (initial) discomfort for those responsible for supporting these initiatives. I often noticed a trend in which API preparedness was quite low, both from a technical as well as a business perspective. The progress, integration and deployment of new data-driven mobile solutions can be slowed significantly in the absence of proper security and API / web services availability.

What were these companies looking for in terms of a mobile solution?

Typically they were looking for something that helped improve and/or optimize training/collaboration/data collection processes, allowed for more seamless logistical flows, delivered time- and rule-based notifications and generally made data behind legacy and complex systems available in new ways on-the-go.

Throughout all of the above, organizations sought to ensure proper use of single sign-on / authentication / VPN mechanisms to provide the highest level of data transport security. There is also a growing need for access to this data in both connected and disconnected states which has resulted in a need for more advanced and robust caching and synchronization approaches.

Do you think Twilio could play a role in terms of increasing mobile app security for example, through, two-factor authentication?

Sure, I think Twilio can play a role here by serving as a useful extension to existing MDM (mobile device management) solutions. Adding multi-factor authentication, for example, becomes a much simpler task when the platform can handle the heavy lifting, avoiding weeks or months of complex systems integration effort.

What were some typical expectations around mobile app development?

Most frequently, organizations are astonished at the cost, effort, time and complexity of designing and developing mobile solutions (the mentality of inexpensive $.99 apps incorrectly translates perception-wise to dorm-room developers who can quickly deliver production-ready mobile software quickly and inexpensively).

Companies frequently (and sometimes incorrectly) assume they can apply their existing “resources” such as QA and/or development to mobile-centric projects. Beyond that, assumptions are made about the speed in which existing team members could ramp up on a mobile technology, learn it and rapidly contribute to the development.

Lastly, even with a golden app or mobile solution in hand, enterprise teams may look to apply default and potentially stale approaches to marketing, training, etc.

It sounds like these companies were several generations of technology behind, how did you help them cross the communications chasm?

The emergence and rapid rate of change of mobile technologies are particularly useful for organizations who need to play catch-up. The product design process can run independent of any technological baggage because there are likely fewer obstacles, naysayers and/or political hurdles to overcome.

A number of approaches were taken to help organizations cross the communications chasm but no one solution fits all. For example, simple prototyping and live demonstrations can go a long way in portraying and visualizing the utility of mobile technologies — this is another area where Twilio excels and helps amplify the argument of why mobility is so vital and important within the enterprise.

Beyond prototyping, applying a consistent and proven approach helped ensure that solutions focused on simplifying what are typically offline workflows, integrated smoothly with backend systems and surfaced a polished, intuitive front-end interface. Further, splitting projects into two phases (design, development/implementation) gave business/technical/executive leaders and stakeholders visibility while minimizing risk and obsolete/redundant work.

Another aspect that certainly helped companies several generations of technology behind was simply the sharing of anecdotes about others in the space (what they set out to do, goals/milestones, approaches to problem-solving, benefits once launched and how to become more flexible for future derivative mobile technologies). This led to a number of speaking engagements across the United States focused on how to best use mobile devices in enterprise contexts, including the inaugural Twilio Conference in 2011.

You can follow Jonathan Ozeran on Twitter at @jozeran.

Crossing the Communications Chasm: Building Mobile Apps for the Enterprise

We will be holding Office Hours at the Twilio HQ in San Francisco on Thursday, May 31st from 5pm until 7pm. RSVP here. 

Office Hours are a great time for you to stop by and work with your friendly local Twilio employee. We’d love to answer questions, offer suggestions, and help you solve problems.

Bring your laptop, code, and questions! It’s not strictly required that you do so, just highly recommended.

So please stop by if you have a question about Twilio, need help figuring something out, or just want to spend a few hours to working on a side-project. We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Twilio HQ is located at 501 Folsom Street, 1st floor. You’ll find the door facing 1st Street, just ring the bell when you arrive.

Come Hack with us at Twilio HQ San Francisco Office Hours

Join our live developer office hours on Spreecast right now where you can grab instant answers and direct feedback on your Twilio questions.

We invite you, our noble community of Twilio hackers, to ask questions, talk about your favorite hacks, tell us what features you’d love to see, or just talk about Star Wars (disclaimer: no Jar-Jar).

Twilio Office Hours Streaming Live Now

Twilio is gearing up for a big weekend in Seattle as we’re sponsoring Seattle Startup Weekend and I’m excited to spend this time with the local tech community. Twilio was started in Seattle, so this city figures deeply into our DNA and since I’m based here, my objective was clear:  find the startups in Seattle, who is supporting them and how I can help. I’m thrilled to announce that Twilio will be hosting regular office hours in The Easy, located in the basement of Founder’s Co-op, every Wednesday, from noon-2pm.

The purpose of these office hours are for startups to get their technical and business questions answered.  Feel free to bring your code, show off your prototypes and work through your ideas while meeting other Twilio developers in Seattle.  You can just show up or sign-up for a slot.

Despite having lived in Seattle for over two years, I was just beginning to uncover the local tech community. After joining the Twilio team I spent the first few months getting to know the different places that entrepreneurs and developers spend time.  These ranged from co-working spaces to incubators to coffee shops.  I also got to know many of the people who support and provide services to startups.  I was impressed by what I saw, but also realized that Seattle has a ways to go to provide the same kind of ecosystem that startups enjoy in places like San Francisco and New York.  Still, one place that I visited really blew my socks off.

In March I had the chance to meet Chris Devore.  Chris and his business partner Andy Sack operate Founder’s Co-op.  FC is both a seed-stage fund and  one of the most vibrant spaces for startups and entrepreneurs in Seattle.  In addition to housing FC-funded companies, FC plays host to TechStars Seattle from August to November. After talking to Chris, it was obvious that FC was the logical home for the Twilio Seattle office.  So, in April we moved in!

I am really excited about Twilio’s expanding presence in Seattle and our new home in Founder’s Co-op.  Every time I turn around, a new building has gone-up in South Lake Union or a new incubator has popped-up downtown.  More and more people are taking the plunge and starting companies, which means that companies that support this (like Twilio and Startup Weekend) have a lot more people to help.  We’re looking forward to it!

Twilio Makes a Comeback in Seattle with Office Hours & Startup Weekend

Martin Pannier was looking for a way to bring the power of search similar to Siri to a wider audience, why should iPhone 4s owners have all the fun? What he built is WolfraSMS: a simple SMS app that harnesses the search capabilities of Wolfram|Alpha, powered by Twilio.

Martin is the co-founder and COO of SocialFolders, a service to organize your social content in the cloud. WolfraSMS is the very first app Martin built with Twilio – quite impressive. Follow Martin on Twitter @martinpannier and read his blog here.

What exactly is WolfraSMS?

WolfraSMS is—very simply—a way to ask the Wolfram|Alpha computational search engine questions, by sending a simple SMS. You can send a variety of questions, such as “Where was Obama born?” or “Who was the third president of the United States?” to the WolfraSMS number and it will send you back the answer in SMS form.

What was the inspiration for building WolframSMS?

I love Siri. Being able to ask questions and get the answer, and not only a series of links, is quite remarkable. But Siri is only available to iPhone 4S users. I wanted to bring some of the power of Siri to the 99%!

SMS is incredible for its ubiquity: anywhere, and with any phone, you can send and receive SMS messages. Geeks don’t quite realize the power of this ubiquity, as they always tend to have huge data plans and sophisticated smartphones.

Match the two… boom: WolfraSMS.

How are you using Twilio?

Twilio powers the whole SMS hub.

What other technologies are you using to build/support it?

The app was coded in Python and is hosted on Heroku.

How did you get started developing with Twilio?

With WolfraSMS :) It’s actually my first Twilio app.

What’s next for WolframSMS?

This is a side project for me, so with limited time on my hands, what’s realistically next is easter eggs and more thorough use of the Wolfram|Alpha answers—as for brevity reasons, only the most relevant part of the answers is returned. If I had more time, I would include the same search engines as Apple uses for Siri—starting with Yelp.

Then Siri would really be available to anyone in the world!

WolfraSMS, the Power of Search via SMS and WolframAlpha