Talking Realtime Web at TwilioCon

25 Oct 2012

A couple of days after the WebSockets panel at HTML5DevConf in San Francisco I gave a talk at TwilioCon. We were asked to try and cover a big topic and focus on a few key points. Since the conference was for Twilio, a telephony cloud service, we wanted to cover something that both incorporated Twilio and realtime web technologies such as Pusher. The topic we therefore decided to cover was How the Realtime Web is Influencing the Future of Communications. The themes that the talk would cover was:

The evolution of communication

How communication has evolved, the different forms of communication, the role that the Internet and realtime web technologies already play and how they will be the focus of how we communicate in the future. The Web is now the communications platform.

The potential to reach large audiences

The Web and Realtime web technologies make it possible to have instant interactive conversations over large distances and offer the potential to reach massive audiences.

The role of cloud services

Cloud services make it possible to bridge the gap between the telephony and Internet networks, offer access to amazing infrastructure and make it possible to add functionality to our applications that would otherwise be out of reach, or take a very long time to build and manage.

Time to innovate

We are now at a point where we have the infrastructure and tools to allow us (software developers) to truly innovate.

Future Echos*

Little did we know, but some of these key themes would be touched upon in the keynotes of both Jeff Lawson, Twilio's CEO & Co-founder, and Twilio's CTO & Co-Founder, Evan Cooke.

Jeff's focus was on Software People. He told the attendees how Twilio was built by Software People for Software People. Although they had been advised by some to build a consumer-focused product and then, later, expose their API. Instead Twilio focused on building amazing infrastructure and functionality with a focus on exposing it through a simple, but powerful, API. This has resulted in innovation using the Twilio service that the founders couldn't have imagined. Jeff future echoed one of the key points I would address in my talk; how cloud services have allowed us to reach the point that give software developers the power to truly innovate.

Evan's keynote covered how communications have evolved, again future echoing my talk (I honestly didn't know he was going to cover this - his slides were much more professional though :) ). He then focused on the importance, details and effort that has gone into Twilio's infrastructure. Again, how a cloud service, providing solid infrastructure, means that developers can use the service with confidence leaving them free to innovate.

* Red Dwarf X has started in the UK and I couldn't resist the opportunity to make this reference

Realtime Web Talk

Here are the slides from my How the Realtime Web is Influencing the Future of Communications talk at TwilioCon.

You can find the code for the demos I used in my talk here:
https://github.com/pusher/realtime-communications

It is time to innovate

We really are at a point where we have an amazing set of tools at our disposal that give us the opportunity to innovate and build awesome things. These can be software applications, services or physical devices which bridge digital and physical. All of these can be glued together with software which harness the power of the web through APIs and cloud services. Because Realtime Web technologies are now absolutely core to how we communicate we believe that Pusher is going to be a big part of this push for innovation.

*If this makes you want to innovate then look out for us at hack events - Rich Caudle will be at Hack Manchester this weekend. Here's a taster of the sorts of things you can achieve with Pusher.

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