I'll improve the note on the repo as well, but basically the proof of concept was to have something read PHP classes and parse out functions and parameters, then output it to a database that could be manipulated through a UI. A very rough class parser and UI were put together to show what else could be built out, but it's by no means functional or feature complete, just a proof of concept. Also, the code is quite dirty, there were 2 other contributors who jumped on the project and contributed as part of the 24 hour TechCrunch NY hackathon 2012. Perhaps someone will find elements of this useful or perhaps it's utter garbage :)

it was put together at the techcrunch hackathon last year

There are a lot of tech companies in Burlington/Waltham area, as well as the downtown Boston are (where I live and work). Honestly, the easiest way to get started is to join LinkedIn, build your network, join a lot of job groups and start networking with people working at those companies. Sites like indeed.com and developerauction.com are pretty good as well.

it's misleading to offer this free credit but have such a huge exclusion on what you can do with it.. Twilio used to have a $20 credit for all new accounts without restrictions, but now that the product matured, it's no more. if you expect people to start building things on your platform and show them off, give them real credit without the *fine print.

You can still use all our apis and xml and build your apps. Like I mentioned earlier, you can still use any of the free DID services and those will work with us.

Except you can't call out or use SMS - there aren't any free services that provide those - which constrains the apps you can build. I have to agree that this announcement is a little underwhelming especially compared to what Twilio used to offer.

Plivo Endpoints works just as great as real numbers. So, you can just build your app using endpoints and use real numbers when you are good to go.

yes, they're losing money on each one

The number itself probably isn't costing them much compared to the per-minute costs of outgoing calls. In the US, once you become a CLEC (basically a non-incumbent telco - Google isn't a CLEC but they buy from them) you can get blocks of phone numbers assigned to you and pay no recurring per-number costs. In fact, you can even charge the caller a small interconnection fee and make a tiny amount of money per call (so tiny that the caller's telco generally eats the cost). This is how services like IPKall and Callcentric (both are CLECs) can offer free phone numbers, and why I suspect Google pays very little per phone number. The equipment you need to be a CLEC is quite expensive though so consequentially IPKall and Callcentric only offer free numbers in a few area codes.

Thanks for this comment. Where can one get blocks of fax numbers. You mentioned CLEC's get block of phone numbers, is there a similar system for allocating blocks of fax numbers. For instance HelloFax usually assign Fax numbers to customers based on area code. Where do they get the fax numbers from?

Many thanks.

Same way - fax numbers are no different from regular phone numbers in the PSTN. (That said, once VoIP enters the equation, you want to use a fax-friendly codec like T.38.) HelloFax is surely not their own CLEC so they're buying phone numbers (with a monthly cost) from one or more CLECs or CLEC resellers. If you know a HelloFax phone number you can look up who the CLEC is using this form:

http://www.alcazarnetworks.com/data_services_lnp_lrn.php

Thanks for the info :)

@agwa, many thanks for the response.

settled for $500, not bad.

when would you use this, I'm curious

it's really not, just less bs

works fine for IBM

looks interesting. any plans to open source it?

Not at the moment. I did open source the FitBit API I wrote for it: https://github.com/symkat/WebService-FitBit however it's incomplete (I only have API definitions for the calls I actually use). So, while it's open-sourced, it's not of a quality yet I would put on CPAN.