Twilio Raises $12 Million For Powerful Telephony API
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Can something like Twilio really become a $100m+ company? I hope so but my ignorance blinkers me to how this could happen..
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.
Thomas and I were talking about this the other day. A lot of potential Twilio apps replace offline processes. Let me repeat that for emphasis: replace offline processes. That puts the potential cost savings at "ginormous".
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:
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).
* 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.
When you say SIP support, what do you mean?
SIP is the IETF's answer to the ITU's H.323. It's very similar in design to HTTP and most major enterprise telephony infrastructure providers have been migrating to it at some non-trivial pace. Of course, the big problem with SIP is your SIP and my SIP aren't always the same. This is becoming less of a problem as more folks deploy it, but if you look at how Cisco bastadized the SIP implementation on the line side of their IP PBX, you'll know what I mean: lots of proprietary extensions to make the various line-side features working.
Is there a reason to want them to send SIP rather than calls over the PSTN? If you want SIP, using a hosted solution may not be the answer...
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.
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.
Have you seen Phono? http://phono.com/ - It does exactly what you're describing. Phone in the browser, talking to a SIP backend.
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...
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?
yeah, Tropo hosts the scripts for you so it meant that all the telephony stuff is handled by tropo.rb (on their servers) and this posts the mp3 to my sinatra app (phone2post.rb), which can limit itself to acting as a proxy for Posterous. I prefer the separation of concerns that this permitted me. For a more complicated app, I can definitely see the advantages of controlling the telephony side from the web app but in this case it wasn't necessary.