Gattaca was very prescient and thought-provoking movie, one of my favorites. The story described a future where individuals are allowed or denied opportunity based on a genetic test at birth. I think the point was that technology cannot predict or limit the human heart.
That same idea applies here too. This article illustrates that there will be other, nuanced perils to bioinformatics besides rewarding genetic lottery winners and punishing losers. Genetic testing is a powerful tool that should be used wisely. Of course, it will be a bumpy road until society settles on what "wisely" means.
You know that product {X} has arrived when it's assumed to be so mainstream that is's being used to describe functionality {Y} in sentences like "it's like {X} for {Y}".
I was looking at kinvey.com mentioned in the comment of the article while researching an alternative for Adobe Publish at work. Their 1-2-3 explanation on the home page is compelling, except for the 1 part. Yes, one should have the option of creating or extending a custom model, but why not have a library of pre-built solutions? "Here's our e-commerce starter kit, it's got a cart, products, customers, tax tables, and inventory management. Also we built an awesome back-end and some integrations with these payment processors." If you're building a BAAS, why not pick three or four common web-app types and make the models for them.
I wonder if this is jedburg of reddit. I only say because he said "reigned" in his goodbye post today, and this pastebin said "reigned" too, when they both meant "reined". Also the writing is very similar. Similar number of sentences (48 vs. 54) and words per sentence (15 vs. 12) too. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, or it's a glitch in the matrix.
Hi, I don't speak for Twilio but as a developer I've used their system quite a bit in the past and enjoyed it lots. Haven't yet used Tropo, but I think it's really interesting. Sorry for necroposting, but I just found this via search.
Twilio isn't indefinitely free for developing like Tropo, but they do give you $30 credit when you sign up, which goes a long way towards pre-production testing. Twilio can do international outbound calls, but as you say they don't yet have international inbound.
Twilio and Tropo both have a REST API. The main difference here is that you reply to Twilio with XML and Tropo uses JSON. Although proprietary, either one is easier to use than VoiceXML IMO.
Tropo has an amazing number of nice voices you can use to read off text to the caller. Twilio has just "male" and "female", last time I checked. On the other hand, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see where Tropo could play an MP3 to the caller, whereas there are lots of ways to play recorded music or messages to the caller with Twilio. As far as recording, you have to give Tropo a place to send recordings, whereas Twilio will store the recordings for you. Twilio also has tons of API methods to access data, like list all your recordings, call logs, and so on. I don't see that for Tropo.
Hmm, this is getting long. I think a comparison blog post is in order. I love the fact that there are at least two smart, highly motivated companies in this space. I hope Twilio and Tropo push each other to greatness.
This server-side logic makes it more than just a font-face repository like I initially assumed. If you feel like rolling your own and not using Google's, you can easily download font-face kits from fontsquirrel.com.