Video: Jeff Lawson, CEO/Co-Founder of Twilio

Late last year I managed to pop by the Twilio offices in San Francisco to meet with Jeff Lawson, the company’s rockstar CEO and co-founder.

Twilio’s brilliance has been enabling anybody to use their telecoms infrastructure API to do almost anything you need with a telephone — and also with SMS. So, for example, if you’d like to get your billing system to call or text a confirmation, 10 lines of code will do it.

You only have to cast your eye over the example implementations (eBay, Airbnb, Hulu and so on) to see that Twilio has massive real world possibilities. (In many cases, the developers in these highlighted case studies had proof of concepts live in hours.)

Before Twilio, doing anything with the telephone system was a crazily annoying hugely complicated process.

There was one problem: Twilio used to be USA-only. You could call anyone internationally, just you had to do so from a USA number.

That’s all changed recently though — and right now, the company is supporting services locally in the UK, Canada, Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. With more to come!

Check out Jeff’s video for more perspective:

Recently Published

Ah yes, an S23 with a BlackBerry Bold Keyboard: Exactly what I (think) I need

I was playing with Midjourney, the AI/photo generation service and I asked it to show me what a Samsung S23 would look like with...

It’s ok, your moon photos aren’t fake, they are just enhanced – quite a bit

Have you taken a photo of the moon recently? I almost did, the other day, when I spotted a fabulous moment here in Dubai....

Don’t move! You’ll jinx it! This looks like a tiny bit of innovation in the mobile world

It has been quite a while since I’ve seen anything in the mobile industry that’s caused me to want to write much. Just look...

The new BlackBerry movie trailer is here

Were you a BlackBerry fan? Of course you were. At some point, almost everyone was. I still remember the days and the joy that...

Airalo: The easy way to roam globally with a data eSIM

Shortly before I began my FinTech & Banking Tour around the GCC, I popped into the Apple AppStore and searched ‘eSim’. I wondered if...

Etisalat: That’s fast

I was at the Mall of the Emirates the other day whilst I was in Dubai. I think it's almost obligatory to go there...