Please see our important announcement.
Please see our important announcement about Web21C joining Ribbit.
You may have seen the recent announcement that BT has acquired the Ribbit Corporation (http://www.ribbit.com) which accelerates our movement into a software driven services company and strengthens our commitment to developers in offering them the best tools to create innovative services and applications in the online voice arena.
Ribbit provides an open platform which enables developers to create new and innovative voice applications and services by combining telephony and internet technologies in new ways.
This acquisition gives the development community additional tools needed to innovate on a global scale and will make it even easier for developers to monetize production applications.
The award winning Web21C SDK project has been a pioneer in the telecommunications area, and has knocked-down many obstacles in online voice to make this possible. Thank you for your past and continued involvement in creation of applications based on innovative services and platforms.
We welcome you to continue to participate in this pioneering effort as BT and Ribbit move forward together.
Please see the BT/Ribbit press release here: http://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/Showarticle.cfm?ArticleID=2bc4048a-0c15-4f02-933a-0ba244a03ed9
The BT Web21C SDK recently won the Application Development category of the eWEEK Excellence Awards, against strong competition including Salesforce.com’s Force.com and ZK Ajax Web framework.
For more information, see the eWeek article.
Most problems with the services have been resolved, except InboundMessaging, which is still being investigated.
Web21c SDK Team
We are currently experiencing problems with our services. We are working on these issues and expect to resolve them soon.
Web21c SDK Team
We have released a new version of the SDK and upgraded our services.
New features are
- Text-to-speech support in CallFlow
- More flexible inbound CallFlow status retrieval
- Ability to send end-of-call notifications in CallFlow
- Several minor fixes and enhancements
The new features are documented on the usual SDK and service documentation pages.
To take advantage of these features, please download the latest version (5.2) of the Web21C SDK.
Enjoy,
Web21C SDK Team
On Monday, 28 April, we will be upgrading our services in the Sandbox and Production.
The upgrade will take place between 13:00pm and 16:00pm GMT, and will affect all services.
We will aim to minimise the actual downtime within this window, and restore services as soon as possible.
Looking for a quick and easy way to create and edit the XML for your CallFlows? Try our new graphical CallFlowDesigner.
It’s just an alpha release at the moment, so give it a try and let us know what you think.
We’ve recently recorded some demo videos to give you an overview of how to use the Web21C SDK services. These are available from the new videos tab in the help section.
We have now added the facility for you to request that your card details are stored when buying credits, allowing you to use the same card next time without having to re-enter all the data.
The card details are stored securely by the BT BuyNet service, not on our web server, and can be removed at any time from your user profile page.
For reasons beyond our control, we have had to change the number used for Shared Inbound SMS in the Sandbox.
Users who have to date been using 447781480281 will now need to use 447800000319. This number is a direct replacement, and our systems have been reconfigured to route messages sent to this number to applications previously using 447781480281.
Please let us know if you have any problems.
Web21C SDK Team
We have upgraded all our Voice services, namely Voice Call, Conferencing and CallFlow.
This update features
- ‘Comfort’ ringing tone for Voice Call called parties
- HTTPS support for CallFlow notifications and subflows
- ${callflowid} variable in CallFlow
- Several minor fixes and enhancements, particularly for CallFlow
Above all, following this release our CallFlow service is production-ready, and we expect to announce the go-live date imminently.
There are NO updates to the SDKs themselves, and you will be able to benefit from the above enhancements immediately.
Enjoy
Web21C SDK Team
On Monday, 17 March, we will be upgrading our services in the Sandbox and Production.
The upgrade will take place between 10:30am and 1:30pm GMT, and will affect all services.
We will aim to minimise the actual downtime within this window, and restore services as soon as possible.
As of 17 March, we will no longer offer Europe-only UK numbers and non-UK long numbers. This will affect both shared and dedicated numbers.
Customers who have already purchased these numbers from us will continue to be able to use them, and we currently have no plans to deprecate them.
Due to network connectivity issues, inbound SMS messages were not being delivered recently.
This issue has now been resolved, and inbound messages are being delivered.
If you are continuing to experience issues with inbound SMS, then please bring this to our attention in the messaging forum.
We have deployed a new version of our Messsaging service. Highlights:
-
We now offer a US-based inbound SMS shortcode
Our Messaging service now supports secure eventing via HTTPS
We have simplified our inbound SMS pricing so that all amounts are now listed in credits
Please visit the Messaging service page for more information.
A SDK update is not required to take advantage of the new features.
BT are co-sponsoring the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator event which is taking place over the next fortnight (5–19 February) in Mountain View, California.
At the event, six teams of students from around the world will compete to create innovative technologies in the field of education, making use of the Web21C services.
More information can be found on the Innovation Accelerator blog.
Please note that upgrades to our Messaging service will be performed on
- Monday, 4th Feb 2008, 11:00 am GMT Sandbox
- Tuesday, 5th Feb 2008, 11:45 am GMT Production
- Wednesday, 6th Feb 2008, 10:00 am GMT Both
In all cases, the work is expected to take 20 to 30 minutes to complete, after which normal Messaging services will resume.
We would like to advise that this upgrade will affect our Messaging services. Although any actual downtime should be very minimal, we suggest that you do not attempt to send messages during this time where feasible.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
.NET SDK 5.1 Released!
The new .NET SDK is now WSE free. The loss of WSE3 has greatly reduced the set-up time for the .NET SDK. Additionally, there is now a simplified DLL structure with one Core DLL and one DLL per service.
There will be a short (5/10 minute) outage to the Messaging and Inbound SMS services on Sandbox, as well as to the CallFlow services in the Sandbox on Tuesday 29th January due to an upgrade of the services.
The same outage to the Messaging and Inbound SMS services on Production will occur on Wednesday 30th.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
We now support making calls and sending messages to SIP phones. Voice calls, including conference calls, can have a mixture of PSTN/mobile and SIP participants. The pricing page has been updated to include SIP costs.
What’s in the toolbox of a successful software craftsman?
This was the theme of a presentation delivered by the Web 21C SDK team recently at the XPDay 2007 conference, held in London on 19 and 20 November.
The Developer Community session looked at some of the tools currently in use by the team to support and facilitate agile development work. Fabrizio Cannizzo, Gabriela Marcionetti, Nathan Fisher and Paul Moser spoke about their experience with configuring and making effective use of free or open source tools – such as Eclipse IDE, Danube ScrumWorks Basic, Cruise Control and Selenium to achieve high project status visibility, immediate feedback and complete automation of development tasks.
The team also produced a poster with a map representing the toolbox currently used for the development of Web21C SDK. Attendees were invited to update the poster to include their own preferred tools.
The experiment was a great success and it was an opportunity for the team to engage in discussion and exchange experiences with other fellow agile developers.
The SDK team was delighted with the way the session went and received positive feedback from conference chairs, Angela Martin and Ivan Moore and the audience.
They also received an award for presenting the “Best Newcomers Session at XPDay 2007”.
Angela Martin said: “One of the reasons we selected your team’s presentation for a special mention this year, was that it received very good feedback. But listening to the conversations during the breaks and afterwards, it was one of the presentations people were talking about most and had remembered. So well done!”
“CallFlow Designer” is a .Net application, built for Visual Studio 2005, that helps you design and manage your CallFlow scripts and provisioned files.
It is available to download, including all source code, from CodePlex.
A new point release of the .NET SDK (5.0.2) is now available for download. This is in response to a request that we sign our assemblies. We’ve also taken the opportunity to add in our Certificate Installer tool, to install the Server Certificates and the CA Certificate. There are no API changes, although the Helpers.dll (available in 5.0.1) has been removed.
Thank you to everyone who came by the booth and spoke with us at the 2007 TechEd Developers Conference in Barcelona.
We always enjoy meeting new and current users and speaking about the possibilities that our services can bring to your business.
Please continue to use the forum to communicate with us, the new marketplace to showcase your applications and products that are powered by BT’s Web21C SDK.
Take a look at our flickr site to see the winners who took time out of their hectic conference schedule to build a prototype with the SDK. Proving once again how simple it is to get up and running with our services. Thank for a great week, we look forward to seeing you again soon.
Take a look at the video showing us at Tech Ed Barcelona. Play the Day 3 Wrap video to hear David describe how to win a helicopter.
http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/news/Pages/day3.aspx
V5.0 of the Web21C SDK is now available for Java, Python, PHP and .NET.
Changes for this release include:- There is now Marketplace where you can submit applications to be showcased by us.
- You can now enable and disable your applications on the My Applications page.
- We have a preview of our new voice call pricing, which will go live in the near future.
Next week we are launching a ground-breaking new service (available only in the Sandbox for now) called CallFlow.
CallFlow is an innovative service aimed at facilitating rapid development of voice-enabled software applications and services. Think you will need expertise in the Telco domain to do that? Think again! Look for more information next week at Web21c.bt.com.
If you are in Barcelona at the upcoming TechEd event November 5th – 9th (http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/content/Pages/Default.aspx), come by our booth to get a demonstration of CallFlow and all of the updated and cutting-edge services. Show us an application you have built using the SDK and win a remote control helicopter (supplies are limited). Come by and get a peak at Call-Flow, Mojo – our new widget platform, and all the services!
Web21C SDK Do Less: Achieve More.
We’re shortly going to be releasing a new version of the .NET SDK.
Since our 3.0.1 release, we’ve been making a lot of changes to streamline our development process. These changes will enable us to shorten our development time, meaning that we’ll be releasing more often, and you’ll benefit earlier from updates to existing services and from releases of new services.
We’re also taking steps to standardise our interface so that all of our sdks (in various languages) will have the same names for the same things. This will mean that the new .NET SDK will look a little different to the 3.0.1 version. The API has been simplified and as a result of that your code will probably need refactoring. We’ve also removed the web and win component layers to avoid confusion over what different types of objects within the SDK should be providing. To simplify our installation process, we’ve also removed our installer to give you more control over your SDK setup and configuration.
When you download the new release, please read the documentation carefully. It will contain the specifics of the interface changes in each capability.
From the 1st October we will be dropping support for older versions of the SDK.
All SDK versions prior to version 3.0.1 will cease to operate. To keep using the services we urge you to upgrade to the latest version available from the downloads section. Developers who are accessing the services directly on xia.bt.com should also note that this will also stop working.
Web21C SDK Team
Ivelin Ivanov, creator of Mobicents, recently blogged about the role of the Web21C SDK as an essential step on the road to ‘disposable applications’.
As the frontier between convergence and Web 2.0 continues to move further away from the network, it becomes possible to create highly targeted, relevant and timely applications whose lifecycle is typically very short. Ivelin outlines just some of the many intriguing scenarios around combining web and communications technologies in this way.
We at Web21C will shortly be taking another bold step forward in this direction – watch this space!
In response to user feedback, we have changed the pre-call announcements for both Voice Call and Conference Call – they now do not mention the BT Web21C SDK.
Additionally, the following new announcement is available for both Voice Call and Conference Call:
- 60: French female
The following announcements have been deprecated for both Voice Call and Conference Call, as they still mention the BT Web21C SDK:
- 2:English female 2
- 3:English male
- 40:German male
The following has been deprecated for Conference Call only:
- 30:Polish female
The deprecated announcements are still available for use, but will be eventually withdrawn. Advance notice will be given before this happens.
Tim Stevens from the Web21C SDK team will be presenting Making Phones Ring with One Line of Code on 7th November 2007 at 10.45, this will be a good opportunity to see a live demo of the SDK and ask questions to a member of the team.
The website will down for an hour 24th September at 2pm. The Services will still be available.
Sorry for any inconvenience that this will cause.
Web21C SDK Team
Location service is currently unavailable; we are experiencing some technical difficulties. We are currently working on this issue and hope to resolve it soon.
Web21C SDK Users,
Due to unforeseen and increasing voice call costs on certain networks, we are forced to block calls to certain countries for the time being. We are working diligently to reduce the costs we are incurring on these calls and hope to open them back up as soon as we can for your use in your applications. We all want the Web21C SDK to be a success and we hope you understand this temporary blocking that needs to take place to ensure the ongoing viability of the SDK.
Whilst we are now blocking certain countries, you will notice the most of the world is still open for voice and conference calls.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please feel free to post any further questions or comments in the forums.
For your convenience, below is a list of the countries we are currently blocking calls to, and their respective region codes.
- 1868 Americas – Trinidad and Tobago
- 244 Angola
- 973 Bahrain
- 229 Benin
- 226 Burkina Faso
- 237 Cameroon
- 00682 Cook Island
- 225 Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
- 243 Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire)
- 20 Egypt
- 503 El Salvador
- 291 Eritrea
- 251 Ethiopia
- 241 Gabon
- 233 Ghana
- 592 Guyana
- 964 Iraq
- 972 Israel
- 962 Jordan
- 254 Kenya
- 965 Kuwait
- 961 Lebanon
- 218 Libya
- 52 Mexico
- 377 Monaco, and currently also used by mobile phone networks in Kosovo.
- 212 Morocco
- 95 Myanmar
- 264 Namibia
- 977 Nepal
- 234 Nigeria
- 51 Peru
- 63 Philippines
- 974 Qatar
- 242 Republic of the Congo
- 970 reserved for the Palestinian Authority
- 966 Saudi Arabia
- 252 Somalia
- 27 South Africa
- 249 Sudan
- 963 Syria
- 255 Tanzania
- 66 Thailand
- 256 Uganda
- 971 United Arab Emirates
- 967 Yemen
- 263 Zimbabwe
When we decided to open up the Web21C SDK voice and conference services to developers outside BT, we hoped they’d be useful for people to make quick and easy phone calls to real people.
Unfortunately, some of our customers seem to have taken a different tack, and have exploited our offering to try to make money by operating various schemes and scams. In recent days, we’ve had to block increasing large ranges of phone numbers to prevent this.
We think this is unfair: we’ve updated our Terms of Use and Acceptable Use policy to make this clear.
We have just released a new version of the Web21C SDK for Java, PHP and Python.
Here is a list of the new features:
Messaging
- Unsubscribe – this enables a user to unsubscribe from receiving SMS messages by replying with “stop” as the first word in the SMS (the full list of keywords is: “stop”, “cancel”, “end”, “quit”, “stopall”, “unsubscribe”) - the application is then blocked from sending messages to that user.
- Eventing – this allows an application to send a message and pass in a URL as a parameter from which we will post HTTP requests when the status of their messages change e.g. from “Initial” to “Sent” to “Delivered”. This saves the sending application the need to poll for getMessageStatuses.
- Keyword case – previously you had to receive all inbound messages by passing your keyword into getRecievedMessages() in lowercase - it’s now case insensitive.
- Email – The messaging service can send email.
Voice Call
- Pre-call accouncement – When the first party is called, they will be played an announcement to let them know what’s going on, instead of previous situation where they got silence while second party was being called.
- Announcements are available in multiple languages and voices (1:English female 1, 2:English female 2, 3:English male, 10:Spanish male, 20:Italian male, 30:Polish male, 40:German male, 50:Greek male).
- After the pre-call announcement, the participants in a call will be prompted to “Press 1” in order to proceed.
- Participants have 30 seconds to “Press 1” – if they don’t, the call is terminated. It is possible to “Press 1” while the annoucnement is playing.
- CLI Blanking – Instead of sending a phone number to the participants in a voice call, the CLI is blanked, so they get “Number Unavailable”.
- Automatic refund – if either party does not “Press 1”, the call is terminated and credits are refunded.
- Number Blocking – calls to premium rate numbers are blocked.
Conference Call
- Pre-conference accouncement – When the first party is called, they will be played an announcement to let them know what’s going on, instead of previous situation where they got silence while second party was being called.
- Participants are played an announcement before being added to conference.
- There is the option to have no pre-conference announcement, or a choice of different announcements.
- Announcements are available in multiple languages and voices (1:English female 1, 2:English female 2, 3:English male, 10:Spanish male, 20:Italian male, 30:Polish female, 31:Polish male, 40:German male, 50:Greek male).
- After the pre-conference announcement, each participant will be prompted to “Press 1” in order to proceed.
- CLI Blanking – Instead of sending a phone number to the participants in a conference, the CLI is blanked, so they get “Number Unavailable”.
- Automatic refund of credits for unsuccessful calls.
Inbound SMS
- Help keyword – this has been reserved (effectively means its ignored if it’s the first word in an inbound SMS, so the second word acts as the keyword instead if they are using a shared number), so applications can decide to help their customers if they want to i.e. if an application picks up a message whose first word is “help” then they can respond to the sender with some useful help info.
Also, the following services are being deprecated due to lack of use by the existing customer base: Location, Contacts, Information About Me (IAM). Support for these services will be discontinued in a future release.
We’ll be releasing a new version of the .NET SDK for these services when it’s ready.
We’re planning to release a lot of improvements to our services on the 5th of September.
Cool stuff coming will include the ability to message email and sip endpoints, improved delivery status, annoucements and more termination information for voice calls and conference calls, and lots more…
We’re also going to be deprecating some of our services. We’re committed to delivering the very best services, but there’s only so many of us. If something’s not being used, then it tends to get the chop… From September, we’ll no longer be pushing forward with Contacts and Information About Me. We’re still support them, though.
One we’re really sad about is Location. Unfortunately, we couldn’t offer the coverage we wanted to because of the very real privacy concerns mobile phone suppliers had. Location is going to be deprecated as it is, but should be coming back soon in a greater and better form! Expect a lot of breaking change!
Oh, and as previously mentioned before, Presence will be no more… (:-(
If you’re using an older version of one of our services, please start migrating to a new version – use the latest versions of the SDK (version 3.0). A new SDK to support all this good stuff will also be released on the 4th September.
But there’s lot of cool new stuff, and even more in the SkunkWorks to come! (:-)
On Saturday, one of our vendors successfully upgraded its switches, increasing the load our networks can handle and improving resilience!
Now that the redesigned Web21C SDK portal we’re providing more information, more functionality and a better experience.
This week we’ve added how tos and papers pages to the documentation section of the site and updated the FAQs. We’ve also improved the credit purchase process, by e-mailing you a receipt whenever you top up an application.
You can also subscribe to a RSS feed telling you the status of the services at any time.
Look out for the next update in a fortnight’s time, and in the meantime don’t hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see on the site!
We’re going to be releasing some new information and updates on the website later this morning.
Look carefully after we’ve switched over and see if you can spot them…
None of our services will we affected. The website will be unavailable for upto a minute.
Raph
And with more disk space than you could shake a stick at!
We’re sorry for the inconvenience you just saw early this morning. We hadn’t got a enough disk space for all you guys out there, so we added more. A lot more!
We delayed a day because we had a little ‘oops’ moment…
Rest assured, the services were available all the time. We’re not that big a bunch of charlatans!
A little uncertain on how to get going?
Simon McManus was and did, and found it very easy. He decided to share his experience on his blog.
So easy it could be for Dummies…
Thanks Simon!
We might be in production, but the sandbox is still free!
Some of you out there have told us that you thought you now had to pay for stuff. That’s not actually true! The sandbox is alive and well, and you can still use it! Of course, the number of calls you can make each day is limited, and the duration quite short. Have a look at Sandbox Usage here.
We’ve sorted out a few teething issues people had with not being able to make their quota of calls every day.
So, you can still try things out for free!
Enjoy!
You can no longer send many messages in one service invocation
Previously, when you sent messages (SMS), you could send many messages in one call (service invocation). We’ve restricted this feature so that with one call, you can only send one SMS.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We’re in the early stages of our product offering and still fine tuning things. We did this after we became aware that using the services in this way could be abused by some customers.
We hope to be able to offer multiple message sending again in the future after we’ve worked out how to do it fairly.
If you want to send multiple messages, call ‘sendMessage’ for each message you wish to send using a loop or some other construct; ie the array can only contain one message. This will mean that you are charged per message.
We’ve had to change the durations of calls.
You’ll now only be able to make calls for a maximum duration of 60 minutes. Previously, we did not explicitly specify our call lengths, as we were still fine-tuning our product offering.
We made this change as we found that some customers were exploiting an arbitrage opportunity with our service. With the new duration, we feel that a fixed price call for 60 minutes for a few pence anywhere in the world is still one heck of a good deal. It’s certainly better than our competitors’.
We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.
We’ve decided after much soul-searching to deprecate our presence service.
In the last few months, it’s seen very little activity. Maybe it will come back in a new form in the future…
By doing this, we can then concentrate on adding more features and more capability to those services you use and like, such as Conference Call , Messaging and Voice Call
Presence will be deactivated in the next few weeks. Please contact us on the Contacts Forum if we you feel you’ll need it.
We’ve had a make-over! Have a look through our new look and features
Web21C SDK featured on Microsoft’s Channel 9
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