If you are a developer and haven't tried out the Twilio API yet ... go do so right now. A year or so ago I discovered it late one Saturday evening and within 10 minutes I had Ruby code that was making my phone ring. The night was a write-off as a hacked my way into the wee hours of the morning to build a cool little Twilio app.
Twilio is one of the strongest supporters of the developer community we have ever seen. If we could have dreamed of two perfect sponsors for CrowdHack it would have been GitHub and Twilio. Tada! Twilio contacted us and offered to sponsor a Pizza and Salad Buffet for the whole event on Tuesday. Yep, they are cool like that. And they are also offering a bunch of free Twilio credit to the winner of our newest CrowdHack prize, "Best use of Twilio API".
So Twilio + crowdsourcing ... hmmmm ... this is going to get really fun. I don't want to steal anyone's ideas but here are some possibilities that come to mind:
- Use Twilio's Client API (copy/paste 3 lines!) to allow cloud workers to collaborate real-time on tasks by talking to each other right in their browsers.
- Use Twilio's SMS API to run instant "wisdom of crowds" experiments in a room full of people. Everyone submits their guess via SMS and the best/averaged/popular answer is instantly calculated.
- Use CloudFactory's experimental TwilioRobot being released at CrowdHack to incorporate Twilio voice calls into crowdsourcing workflows. Build an assembly line for enhanced business listings that calls to verify the phone number and asks questions like "How many vegetarian dishes do you have on your menu?" or "Do you have free WiFi at your hotel?". The recorded message after the beep is fed as input to the next task station where a cloud worker can transcribe or interpret the answers.
The possibilities are endless.
We just opened up a few more spots today so jump over to register and we'll see you at 8:30am for registration this Tuesday!
