Twilio Powers y!Vmail Yahoo! Hack U Win

March 24, 2009
Written by
Danielle Morrill
Contributor
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At the most recent Yahoo! Hack U event, held at the University of Michigan Department of Computer Science and Engineering, three Ph.D. students joined forces to build a Twilio application that lets you get your Yahoo! email by phone – and they did it in less than 24 hours!

With y!Vmail users can listen to and interact with email messages. With the press of a button users call anyone with a phone number stored in their Yahoo! contact list.  Long messages are summarized by keywords before being read in full, and users can easily navigate back and forth between email messages and delete messages in the same way you navigate through voicemails.

y!vMail team with judges Paul Tarjan and Rasmus Ledorf (pic courtesy of Arnab)

Seeing y!vMail in Action

The story of their adventure building y! vMail is chronicled here, and this video gives a demonstration of how it works:


y!Vmail from Arnab Nandi on Vimeo.In a few hours these talented students took a complex web-telephony integration idea and implemented a working prototype solving an important business problem  Maybe they’ll take the entrepreneurial leap to make this project a business?  We’ll have to wait and see.  Nice work Arnab, Dan, and Pradeep.