TropolaunchIt was two years ago today, March 3, 2009, that Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor stood on stage at the Emerging Communications conference in San Francisco and announced that Voxeo was once again disrupting the communications industry, this time with a cloud communications service… Tropo.com. (You can still watch the launch video.)

It’s been an absolutely amazing two years with literally tens of thousands of applications being written by everyone from tiny startups to Fortune 100 companies – and everyone in between.

When it launched, Tropo revolutionized building communications apps in some major ways:

  • Bringing the Google AppEngine model to voice – No longer do you need to host your application on some web site somewhere… you just uploaded your app directly to the Tropo cloud and… ta da… your app was running!
  • Choice of languages – Unlike other options, Tropo launched with 5 of the most popular web languages from the start: Ruby, PHP, python, JavaScript and Groovy.
  • Free access for developers – No credit card required to get started. Free phone numbers. Free outbound calling. Free signup… for as many apps as you want. Only pay when you turn the app into a production app.
  • Free speech recognition – While entering digits via DTMF works great for many cases, speech can make applications even more powerful. Tropo gave you powerful speech recognition (ASR) for free.
  • SIP and Skype integration – From the start, Tropo was already looking at next-generation IP communications… every Tropo app could also be called via SIP or Skype…. or even through an iNum number.
  • No XML – In a departure from most all voice solutions (including Voxeo’s traditional solutions) Tropo was not an XML-based solution. Instead it was JSON and all the new shiny web languages.

Over the past two years, the Tropo team has kept on rocking and bringing even more capability, including:

  • SMS integration – using the same phone number as for voice, and also including shortcodes.
  • Twitter and SocialCRM – letting you connect your Tropo app to Twitter to automate and scale your interaction in social channels
  • Linkage to IM networks – connect to users on AIM, MSN, Yahoo!Messenger, GoogleTalk and Jabber.
  • International numbers and dialing – get inbound phone numbers in 30 countries and get outbound dialing around the world.
  • Rolled out a Web API – letting people build apps on their site using any language, including new languages like Node.js and other languages that are less common
  • Launched AGITate – enabling Asterisk users to run AGI applications directly in the Tropo cloud
  • Made Tropo available as open source – opening up the Tropo source code, so that users aren’t locked in to a proprietary closed system

And so much more! The Voxeo Labs team has traveled all over the world meeting with developers, hacking up new code and generally making Tropo rock!

It’s been an incredible two years… and we’re looking forward to seeing all the apps people will build on Tropo over the next two years. If you haven’t joined the Tropo fun yet, you can sign up now and get started!

Originally from Voxeo Blogs