The latest from TechCrunch
- Teleku Takes On Twilio, Helps Developers Integrate Telephony Services Into Web Apps
- Finally, LinkedIn Gives Its Professional Crowd A Native Blackberry App
- Gruber Hints At Possible Next-Gen iPhone Specs… Sort Of
- Chatroulette Quadruples To 4 Million Visitors In February
- Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man
| Teleku Takes On Twilio, Helps Developers Integrate Telephony Services Into Web Apps | Top |
| Back in fall 2008, we covered the launch of Twilio , a service that gives web developers an API to easily build web apps with telephony features, like audio playback, voice recording, and more recently, SMS messages . Now a new challenger is approaching: a service called Teleku offers many of the same features, but it’s taking a different approach that its founder says makes it more flexible. It’s cash-flow positive, and it was built by one man over the course of two months. Teleku is in a private beta, but you can grab an account by going here and using the code ‘techcrunch’ to sign up. So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available. With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice , and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML. Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition. Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard. Teleku is offering two pricing models: first, an ‘all-in-one’ package similar to Twilio’s that uses Voxeo as to handle its telephony services. This costs three cents a minute, which is the same as Twilio. For users that want to use Teleku in combination with a provider other than Voxeo, Teleku doesn’t charge on a per-minute basis. Instead, it adopts a web-service API model, charging on the number of calls rather than the call length. Teleku is still a small operation, but Matthieu says he’s already had early acquisition talks with potentially interested buyers. All of that said, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson contends that there are some tradeoffs that come with Teleku’s flexibility. He explains that applications ported to these other services won’t always translate properly (he says this is one of the benefits of using Twilio’s all-in-one model). He also says there are some features that Teleku doesn’t offer, like 2-way SMS. But he says Twilio isn’t necessarily opposed to the concept of portability, and that Teleku validates Twilio’s easy-to-use approach to telephony scripting (he also proudly notes that 37signals has started integrating Twilio into some of its products). CrunchBase Information GetVocal Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Finally, LinkedIn Gives Its Professional Crowd A Native Blackberry App | Top |
| As a professional social network, LinkedIn hasn’t ignored the mobile interests of its 60 million plus users. The company has consistently updated its sleek iPhone app, recently launching a new version. Last fall, LinkedIn announced that a powerful BlackBerry app would be on its way. And the app is an important connector to the enterprise crowd, which generally tend to use BlackBerry devices. Tonight, the new app officially launches. You can download the app here. The LinkedIn app for BlackBerry is as feature-rich as its iPhone cousin. You can visualize your feed of network updates, search across direct connections and the entire LinkedIn network, access any of your connections to get get profile information, and message contacts. You can also access your LinkedIn inbox, send and accept invitations and see all of your messages. And the app will suggest new connections to you. LinkedIn has been working with RIM to develop a native application that leverages the phone’s technologies. Users can integrate their LinkedIn connections with their devices’ address book, and view the profile of any contact directly on a device. LinkedIn invitations and messages will show up in the BlackBerry device’s inbox. Users can also view the LinkedIn profile of the sender of any email they receive. And users can view the LinkedIn profile of an attendee of a meeting on their BlackBerry devices’ calendar. There’s no doubt that the LinkedIn app for BlackBerry will be popular; especially considering the significant use of the device in professional environments. LinkedIn has been consistently upgrading its platform over the past few months, adding two-way integration with Twitter as well as opening up its API to developers. LinkedIn also recently unveiled a significant integration with Microsoft Outlook, allowing users to access parts of their LinkedIn accounts from Outlook. CrunchBase Information LinkedIn Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Gruber Hints At Possible Next-Gen iPhone Specs… Sort Of | Top |
| In a post tinged with just a hint of spite, Apple pundit John Gruber has responded to today's WSJ report of a forthcoming pair of new iPhones , one of which they say is headed for Verizon. His reaction? "Lame." The reason it's lame, says Gruber, is that it lacks details. Details which Gruber has. Maybe. | |
| Chatroulette Quadruples To 4 Million Visitors In February | Top |
| Whether it is all the media attention or there are just a lot of lonely people out there with a deep need to talk to strangers, Chatroulette is on a roll. In February, 2010, the young site attracted 3.9 million visitors worldwide, up from 944,000 in January, 2010, according to the latest data from comScore (see chart above). Google Trends for Websites shows a similar growth curve , with about 500,000 unique daily visitors. The quadrupling of visitors measured by comScore coincided with the relatively new site being discovered by news sites and blogs. It may just indicate the intense level of curiosity about the site, which matches random people together in a simple video chat environment. When you get bored (or creeped out) you can click to start a new session. Or it may be tapping into the basic human need to communicate. It gives “instant communications” a whole new meaning. ComScore also estimates that the average visit on Chatroulette lasted 2.8 minutes, up from 2.4 minutes in January. And the average visitor spent a total of 10.4 minutes on the site during the month, suggesting between three and four visits each. Other data we’ve published indicates that Chatroulette is 89 percent male and 13 percent perverts (there are a lot of naked guys hanging out on Chatroulette flashing each other). The site already had its Daily Show moment and is inspiring some viral videos like the now-famous Chatroulette piano improv guy , Merton (see below). Can Chatroulette keep growing, or is it a fad fueled by nothing more than idle curiosity? CrunchBase Information Chatroulette! Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man | Top |
| In the 2000 elections, incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was defeated by Governor Mel Carnahan in the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. Senate seats. The only problem? Carnahan was dead. I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better , and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town . But apparently, a ghost town still sends more traffic than the much buzzed-about Buzz. In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55. I say “at best” because it’s hard to know exactly how much traffic Buzz is sending because it’s built into Gmail. But still, I’ve drilled down into the subdomains to look for clues that it’s Buzz sending the traffic. Obviously, a solid chunk from the mail.google.com domain is coming from Buzz, and also some from google.com where Google Buzz profiles are hosted. Looking over a handful of popular stories on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information . What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service. And that’s after we even made our own Buzz button . All that being said, there is evidence that Buzz is helping to boost sharing on Google Reader, because it did help make Google Profiles more social. But still, Reader shares a miniscule when compared to rivals Twitter and Facebook. And again, Buzz was supposed to be the service that made sharing super-easy . And it’s shoved in the face of Gmail’s hundreds of millions of users, so these referral numbers are pretty pathetic. While it may be a ghost town, FriendFeed remains the example of what Buzz should be when it comes to sharing content. One reason it still destroys Buzz: Twitter. For much of its life, tweets accounted for most of the data coming into FriendFeed. Early on, with a built-in Twitter account link, tweets were also popular on Buzz. The problem is that Buzz inexplicably delays tweets for as many as 12 hours before bulk importing them all from the day — which is beyond annoying. For this reason, myself and others have unsubscribed from anyone on Buzz who imports tweets. Google has access to Twitter’s firehose, so I have no idea why they can’t import these tweets in realtime, as the small FriendFeed team was able to do. Undoubtedly, that would help with the sharing problem . But Google may not want to do that. After all, it’s not trying to build just another front-end for Twitter. It wants to be its own service — one of Facebook proportions. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening right now. And I’m seriously starting to doubt if it ever will. Those changes can’t come soon enough. [image: Miramax] CrunchBase Information Google Buzz FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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