Facebook Application Cloud Call Me Wins the Twilio + Windows Azure Developer Contest
Time to read: 3 minutes
September 15, 2009
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Congratulations to Dennis Palmer, who worked right up until the deadline to deliver (just 12 minutes before midnight) Cloud Call Me – a Facebook application for calling your friends using Twilio and Azure.
We were impressed to see Dennis (@CoderDennis) tweeting late at night on Sunday as he fought hard to complete his app on time, along with support from his wife Destiny (@destinypalmer). As it turns out, she was his sole beta tester.
Azure code can run in a development fabric on a local machine, but both the Facebook FBML and the Twilio TwiML needed to be tested on the live web server. You guys followed my frustration on Twitter, but even without the errors, it takes a good 20 minutes to deploy a new version to Azure because of their provisioning process.
It’s cool to be part of their CTP, and hopefully with some feedback they’ll figure out how to make that process a bit smoother.
Did you have any second thoughts about what you were building?
On Thursday of last week I was beginning to wonder if I had chosen the right idea for my contest entry. This was my first Twilio app, but it was also my first Facebook app and while I’ve been playing with the Azure tools since their first CTP, this is also my first actual live launch of an Azure app.
Of course by Thursday I didn’t have time to re-think the app as I was committed to using the Facebook platform. It actually made some things easier by providing a UI theme and handling the login process. I’m glad there was a hard deadline on this. I haven’t worked up against that kind of pressure in a long time. It felt good.
Anything else you want to tell us?
In case you didn’t put it together, you’ve blogged about me before. I was the subject of “Happy Friday, Happy Customers” back in July. It’s great to now be one of your contest winners!
Author’s Note: Wow it’s amazing how things circle back around – we didn’t make the connection right away, but we’re glad that hearing about Twilio from Steve Marx has lead you down this path, and ultimately to a Netbook.
Azure Evangelist Kevin Leneway Weights In
We asked Windows Azure evangelist Kevin Leneway to join the judging process, and here’s what he had to say about Cloud Call Me:
I thought that the scenario made a lot of sense for the technologies that he chose. Also, privacy is such a big deal and I think this is a nice way to bridge the gap between the convenience of a social network with the ubiquity of the phone. There’s also plenty of other use cases for this solution, such as a dating site or for very small businesses/sole proprietors that don’t want to publish their cell phone numbers but still want a way for their customers to call them directly.
Get Involved – Build & Submit Your Twilio App to Win
Yesterday, we announced a new category for our developer contest and this week the focus is on Twilio for government. If you’d like to submit to win a Netbook, please make sure we receive your entry by midnight on Sunday (September 20th) through out submission form. If you have any questions, or need help getting started, get in touch with us directly at help@twilio.comor through one of the many channels available online:
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