#SIGNALConf Day 2 Recap
Time to read: 4 minutes
October 19, 2018
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We had another packed day at SIGNAL featuring guest interviews, a world’s first, two more product announcements, and a visit from legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk.
So without any further ado, here we go!
The Great Communications Renaissance Needs EVERYONE
Our CEO Jeff Lawson kicked things off reminding us that the greatest thing about a Renaissance is that it brings people from all different fields and walks of life together—creators, magicians, philosophers, builders, scientists and artists.
If yesterday was all about the science, today is about the art.
Twilio.org Bringing Good to Billions
Erin Reilly, Twilio’s Vice President of Social Impact took the stage to share some exciting news about Twilio.org. Twilio.org exists to fuel the communications that give hope, power, and freedom to people around the world. The team set a goal of helping send 1 billion messages for good in 10 years and reached that milestone five years early! With billions of people on the planet, we know we can reach more than the millions we do now. So today we’re committing to our new 10-year goal: to help 1 billion people every year.
We brought one of our DOERS Award Winners, Alicia Nieves onstage as an example of someone who is using Twilio for Good.
Ailcia and her team built a community powered crisis hotline to help immigrants who are at risk of deportation. Through the work of Streetwide.org, their team is able to mobilize volunteers to and offer hope in hopeless situations.
“The value of our product and work comes from the fact that is presents a possibility that each and every one of us can contribute to a more hopeful and caring society,” Alicia said.
To help empower more organizations like Streetwide.org, we’re excited to announce Twilio Flex for Good. We believe contact centers can empower nonprofit organizations to mobilize volunteers to do things we've never imagined. We're excited to announce Twilio Flex for Good and are donating discounts and credits worth $10M to help nonprofits get up and running on Flex.
New Updates in the IoT
As a platform company, our job is to make it as easy as possible for developers to experiment and create experiences that define the future. When millions of developers are experimenting in the IoT space we will see exponential growth.
If it was as easy and inexpensive to connect devices outside the home as inside the home, imagine the opportunities you would see everywhere. You could walk out on the street and ask yourself, “why isn’t that thing connected?”
Well, today we shared two exciting updates to help in the IoT:
Twilio Super SIM
Twilio Super SIM is the only SIM you will ever need.
Over the last two years, we've worked with our customers to better understand their connectivity needs as they build and deploy IoT devices around the world.
The Twilio Super SIM takes advantage of the Super Network, an operator abstraction layer managed by Twilio. We have partnered with best in class carrier families including: Three Group, Singtel and Telefonica to deliver connectivity our developers can trust.
The Super SIM is currently in a limited pilot stage while we gather feedback and harden the systems. We look forward to onboarding customers to a public beta in the first half of 2019. We can't wait to see what you build with the Twilio Super SIM!
Twilio Narrowband in Partnership with T-Mobile
Twilio Narrowband is the first developer platform for NB-IoT. Twilio Narrowband gives you a platform to build the future of the IoT today, extending the lives of devices and providing a long-term roadmap for IoT developers.
Narrowband is designed from the ground up to improve power consumption for devices sending smaller or infrequent packets of data.
Narrowband’s technical fundamentals reduce the cost of connectivity while lowering the cost of hardware. Now, deploying billions of IoT devices is more than possible — it’s practical.
… but wait there’s more!
We debuted the first-ever public demo of an avatar chat using MagicLeap! Jeff Lawson did an avatar chat on our SIGNAL Conference stage with Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap, in Florida.
Jeff sat down with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of the series Westworld to talk about AI. With AI, "it’s clear that we live in the shadow of something that’s on its way. It’s a fascinating moment to be in," Jonathan said.
Then, someone who looks like pro-skater Tony Hawk came onstage, but we weren’t sure if it was him. So, in classic SIGNAL fashion, Jeff live coded a “Tony Hawk or Not” app where we did indeed confirm it was Tony Hawk!
We closed the keynote with an amazing immersive experience created by OKGO using Twilio. It was bananas, but you’d have to be there to believe it.
Thank you.
In addition to the keynotes, across both days of SIGNAL there were over 120 workshops hosted by our team and some of our amazing community of developers. We captured ALL of them and will have them, along with our keynotes, available online very soon.
As Jeff reminded us both days, we are in the midst of the Great Communications Renaissance, and it's not one company or carrier's job to change the world... it's all of our jobs together. It’s the millions of people who see the world differently than it is today and build something to change it.
So who will bring us the future of communication?
YOU WILL.
Developers who see the world how it could be and start building that future.
Thanks for being with us at SIGNAL. We can’t wait to see what you build.
Watch the Day 2 Keynote below.
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