Thursday, February 2
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Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
Thursday, February 20
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
It was Ariane Noelle Patterson’s 21st birthday, and she was grateful to be alive.
The Gardner-Webb University student took to her Twitter account on Jan. 17 and posted the message: “Thank you God for another year of life.”
Hours later, she collapsed during a religion class and was rushed to nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead, the Associated Press reports.
via Ariane Noelle Patterson, Student, Dies After Tweeting ‘Thank You God for Another Year Of Life’.
I was interviewed by Edy and Whisker for their Zombie Tech Podcast. We chatted about the history of Geeks without Bounds, how it was conceived, the role of social media vs traditional media, and how virtual volunteers can help.
We also talk about the ideas and applications that come out of hackerspaces, hackathons, gameification, and crisis mapping. We discuss the ramification and the ethics involved in the applications, IT departments and of course Zombies! Visit Zombie Tech to stream the whole episode or download the Diggz Zombie Tech Episode 22 mp3 here.
What is the future of voice, video, text and other real-time communications technologies? Where is the innovation happening? What does our communication future look like?
That was the topic of a video interview by Chris Pirillo between VoIP industry veteran Jeff Pulver and Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor. Conducted using a Google+ Hangout, Chris described on his own site what the interview was all about and then made the video available on YouTube:
When I first started publicly talking about Geeks without Bounds, one guy immediately got my attention: Ethan Zuckerman.
Ethan Zuckerman was a co-founder of Tripod.com – before The Facebook and Twitter, before WordPress and MySpace, Tripod.com was a place where you you could set up your own website for free…in 1995. Ethan later founded the Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that sends people with technical skills to developing countries to assist in computer infrastructure development.
It just so happened that Ethan was sitting in the audience at the 140 Characters Conference in San Francisco where I first opened my trap (publicly) about Geeks without Bounds. Before I had finished talking on stage, I had already received a message from him, and the ensuing advice he’s bestowed continues to guide GWOBorg today.
One of the first people he suggested I talk to was a guy named Patrick Meier. Patrick started a company called Ushahidi. Ushahidi is an open source crisis mapping platform. It’s been used in Haiti, Egypt, Libya, Japan…all around the world to help document and make sense of fast-moving crises. The platform allows reports from cell phones and Web-connected devices to be collected and displayed on Web-based maps. I ended up meeting Patrick, who invited me to be his guest at a conference he was hosting on crisis mapping, called ICCM.
The first time I actually saw Ushahidi demoed was on October 1st 2010…at the International Conference of Crisis Mappers. The above image is my actual Foursquare check-in at the auditorium at Tufts University in Boston where the conference was held. Thanks to the efforts of Heather Leson of Crisis Commons, she cornered George Chamales from the Konpa Group who demoed Ushahidi to me. Immediately I thought…man….this thing looks just like Tweet3po. AND it also reminded me of Foursquare. Even today, when a newbie asks me what Ushahidi does, I often say…”it’s like Foursquare, but instead of pinpointing what restaurant you’re enjoying dinner at, you’re pinpointing which restaurant just got washed away.”
So I guess it makes complete sense to find out that now Ushahidi is adding a concept borrowed from Foursquare and Gowalla…check-ins.
For more check out: Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in – Technology Review.
For more about Ushahidi, you can watch this: How to set up your own Crowdmap Deployment
A few weeks ago I was in Portland at the CivicWebs Hackathon talking with Amber Case and Aaron Pareki when Amber asked me why Tropo is better than Twilio. She acknowledged that while she and Aaron love Tropo and built their GeoLoqi app on Tropo’s API, a lot of other people seem to like Twilio. “So why is Tropo better?” she asked.
I responded with all the certainty, aloofness and charm I could muster: “Because we are!”
For most normal people, that answer might suffice, but Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist. It’s hard to win her over with just charm. So I started laying out some of the reasons why Tropo is just plain better, and I figured rather than just keep them between me and Amber and Aaron, I’d share…
This is where Tropo really blows Twilio away, and even Twilio’s own people acknowledge it. At an API vendor shootout session at Internet Telephony Expo earlier this year, Danielle Morrill, Twilio’s head of marketing, said that Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features.
Twilio is great for making prank phone calls
Tropo offers a ton of advanced features that Twilio just can’t match: Voice recognition, SIP connections (critical for integration with other VoIP systems), Skype integration, instant messaging, short codes, hosting, numbers in 41 countries, speech in multiple languages, and a host of other things.
Furthermore, Tropo is a unified API. The days of needing one app for voice calls, another for SMS and a third for conferencing are over. The same code you use to say something over the phone can also respond via SMS, IM, and Twitter.
Twilio works on a credit system that requires developers to pay to play. Tropo is and always will be 100% free for developers. No credits, no limits on minutes, no ads played to you or your callers. Every developer gets 24×7 support from engineers that know how to write code. Paying customers measure their response times in minutes. Our support team is consistently ranked the highest in customer service and satisfaction, at the top of not only our industry, but above all other software and telephony companies.
Twilio’s service is based on Asterisk, a free and open source telephony framework and runs on Amazon’s EC2 network.
Tropo runs on Voxeo’s SIP Cloud, the largest worldwide voice application host. Voxeo has been running phone+web applications for 10 years. Because Voxeo’s been doing this stuff for so long they know that business customers demand security and reliability, which is why Voxeo manages their own datacenters that connect directly to major carriers and delivers tens of millions of voice minutes a day for the largest companies in the world, including half the Fortune 100.
Portability is another factor. If someone develops an app on Twilio, they’re pretty much locked in to Twilio. Hopefully it will be a happy marriage, but what happens if they want to switch providers? Tropo, on the other hand, can be run in your own network. You can even run Tropo on Amazon EC2 (if you want to).
If you haven’t tried out Tropo, you should give it a whirl. Here’s a great tutorial to help you get started: How to build a Twitter Bot using Tropo and JavaScript
Related Post: Twilio vs. Tropo AKA A little more noise for Dave McClure
Marya Murphy was kind enough to hold my iPhone and record this. As far as I know…the sole recording of this performance. The video is crappy, The audience was gracious. It starts off with me explaining how I ended up coming to the first 140 Character Conference. Jeff Pulver rocks.
Adam Kalsey from Tropo.com sponsors Chris Pirillo’s chest at Gnomedex 2010…
This is a peek at what happened this weekend at the First Gnomedex Tinkerstorm.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to present Geeks Without Borders at Gnomedex in Seattle.
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