akalsey

Unless you come in pre-funding or take a C-level position, you're typically not ever going to get rich off options.

0.1% isn't actually too bad for company that's been around long enough to get to a series C and for a middle management position.

Figure they have an option pool of 15%-20%; your 0.1% is a decent chunk of the overall pool.

Are you looking to just compile a list of the ways that someone might do this, or are you looking for a good solution?

Basically, every method listed here uses something as a proxy for a signing authority. In the real world, we have Notaries. In the online world, we often try and use some other trusted third party as a proxy for a notary.

That's what the credit card schemes are. You're trusting that the credit card company has done their homework and verified the identity of the person they're issuing a card to. Sadly, this isn't the case; I know someone who once ordered a credit card for their dog.

As with any authentication system, the first question you have to ask yourself is how important is the system you're guarding? What is the aim of the authentication?

The lower the value of the system, the less you can put into it. To sign up for an email list, you can probably just ask for an email address and send a verification link. To handle a large financial transaction with an untrusted third party, you're going to want a whole lot stronger verification.

So it really comes down to whether your interest here is for a practical application, or if it's purely academic and you're just wanting to compile a list.

Now that long distance service is essentially free for everyone and mobile phones (and VoIP) have nationwide networks, more people are choosing not to update their phone numbers when they move.

This means that there's a good chance my phone might have a Chicago area code but I live in LA now.

You could use a service that works internationally like http://tropo.com/, http://cloudvox.com, or any voicexml hosting company.

Not exactly. We created Tropo as a way of reaching a different group of developers than our VoiceXML products are used by.

We noticed that lots of developers were writing VoiceXML that was basically a couple of XML tags surrounding huge blocks of JavaScript. Or using PHP to create their VoiceXML documents. We also found that a lot of smaller projects and developers didn't need the 100% uptime SLAs and dedicated capacity.

So we created Tropo to let developers write applications natively in JavaScript, PHP, and other web languages and skip the voiceXML if they choose. It's delivered as a pay as you go cloud service running in the same carrier class datacenters as our enterprise products. And we eliminated all the things that have made telephony services hard to buy like contracts and guaranteed minimums. Just pay for what you use (and developers don't pay anything, Tropo is free for dev use).

I wouldn't say it's taken this time to hit the mainstream. It's just experiencing a second wave of popularity. VoiceXML and it's predecessors were all the rage in the late 90s among the web developer crowd. Most of the automate phone systems you call at larger companies are VoiceXML backed.

One thing that has changed in recent past is that the cost has come down significantly, making voice apps accessible to smaller developers and hobbyists.

For those that want to use Asterisk and still take advantage of a web-centric programming model. Take a look at Adhearsion. It's an open source Ruby framework for writing Asterisk apps. Voxeo is a current sponsor of the project. http://adhearsion.com/

We do plan on implementing the Adhearsion API on Tropo, allowing someone to build a portable app that runs either on their own Asterisk server or on the Tropo cloud.

We plan worldwide domination. :)

We already offer phone numbers in Japan. Some Asian countries don't allow voip services to operate or have extremely high costs. So it depends on where in Asia you're looking. From your Twitter profile, looks like you're in Singapore. We can get you a number there but they are fairly expensive. Feel free to send an email to Tropo sales or support and we can figure it out.

As noted by others, Tropo works worldwide. We've got numbers in 30 countries and 8 different European languages for text to speech. If you want a number in a place we don't list, let us know and we'll see what we can do.

Woah, that was longer than I intended. Sorry about the wall of text there.

I'm the developer evangelist for Tropo. Here's a rundown of the big differences between Tropo and Twilio.

Tropo is 100% free for developers. No credits, no limits on minutes, no ads played to you or your callers. You even get your own phone number. You decide when you're ready for production and when you're ready to start paying.

Once you're in production, Tropo's SMS and toll free minutes are cheaper. Transcription is free with Tropo. Twilio's phone numbers are cheaper by a couple of dollars each. If you're going to have less than 150 minutes per month of usage or less than 200 text messages in a month, you'll save about a buck a month using Twilio.

Tropo has speech recognition. Instead of just "push 1 for this, push 2 for that" your callers can talk to your application.

Tropo is international. We have numbers in 30 countries, speech recognition and text to speech in 8 languages, and can send SMS worldwide. More languages and countries are coming.

Tropo is a unified API. No need for one app for voice, another for SMS and a third for conferencing. A single application can do all of that. The code you use to say something over the phone can also respond via SMS, IM, and Twitter.

Tropo is more than just phones. As mentioned above, we do all the major IM networks and Twitter too. No need to code to different APIs. Click a button and you have a Jabber bot. Or a Twitter bot. Or AIM. You get the idea.

Tropo's SMS supports short codes. If you want a shortcode for your application, let us know and we'll help you out with that.

Tropo offers a web services model where we post information about a call to your server and you reply with what you want us to do with the call. We also offer a scripting model where we've extended popular web scripting languages with built-in functions for communications. You run your code on our server for reduced latency.

Twilio can do some nifty things while you're in a call. They give you some REST apis you can hit to control sessions in progress. Voxeo's enterprise products have offered that for years, but it hasn't made it into Tropo yet.

Tropo lets you call your app via SIP and Skype. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that allows you to buy a number from any SIP provider and connect it to your application. It also allows you to forward your SIP PBX over to your application under certain conditions. Maybe you have an Asterisk box running your business. During off hours, forward to Tropo so your application can answer calls and give information to your callers.

Twilio lets you provision new numbers programatically. Tropo doesn't do that yet, but it's coming soon.

Tropo is built and hosted by telephony experts using the same platforms that power some of the largest companies in the world. Tropo is a product of Voxeo, a company that's been building voice platforms for over 10 years. We have data centers around the world that are optimized for voice. Your voice application isn't sharing space on an EC2 instance with somebody's web server.

Twilio's documentation is better. We're working on it, and in the meantime, our 24x7 support will answer your questions quickly. In most cases in less than an hour.

I'm sure that the Twilio folks have some additional thoughts on how they're different than Tropo. Instead of speaking for them too much, I'll let them reply.

You could have your Tropo app send you the audio file, too as an MP3 attachment.

Tropo also supports speech recognition (in 8 languages, even), SMS to international destinations, IM, Twitter, and does it all with a single API. No messing around with one API for voice and another for SMS. Write once, run anywhere.

Certainly with any generality, there's exceptions. But if you are a guy with an idea and don't have the ability to build it, you're unlikely to be satisfied with the outcome of hiring a freelancer.

Freelancers are not employees. They're not attached to the business on a full time basis, and while they may get excited by the business and be happy to be working with the entrepreneur, in the end they are mercenaries.

Further, when the project is over and they walk away, the knowledge behind your product and technology walks away with them. This is true of employees as well to some extent, but at least with employees there's an expectation that they will be involved for a long term. For them it's not just another contract.

Contractors can be used to augment your development staff, but should never be your entire development staff.

Sure, you CAN have a success with a product built by freelancers (Digg is an example of this) but it is very, very rare.

No one is saying the two people ARE dating and marrying. They're saying the process of finding a co-founder is LIKE dating and marrying.

That's what an analogy is. "a⋅nal⋅o⋅gy - a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based"

A business partnership is a relationship. It's certainly not a romantic relationship, but it can be just as intense and emotional as a romantic relationship.

No one is suggesting that potential business partners take each other out to the movies. But it's a good idea that they spend a lot of time together and get to know each other well before jumping into a partnership together.

That's why the analogy works. You don't meet someone at a party and marry them the next day. You shouldn't meet someone at an event and make them your co-founder immediately either.

Ideas are cheap. Everyone has them, and most have more than one. The ability to make something work is a whole different matter.

As an investor, you're determining risk vs reward. How much risk is there that I'll give my money to this guy and not ever get anything back?

If you have a prototype to play with, you at least know that the entrepreneur is capable of building his idea.

If you have actual users using the prototype, you know the entrepreneur is capable of building something others want.

And if you have any paying users, even if they aren't paying much, you you know the entrepreneur has been able to build something that people want bad enough to pay for.

Each of these steps is a reduction is risk.

The more risk an investor has, the less likely they are to invest. And if they DO invest, the more expensive their money is going to be. Anyone willing to invest in just an idea is going to want a lot more of your company for their investment, because they're absorbing a lot more risk than the entrepreneur.

Is your designer local to you? Ask them about local print shops. Most freelance designers know who can do quality work locally for a great price.

Disclosure, before I start, I run Voxeo's Developer Network.

We think there's room in the world for both API-based cloud options and XML standards-based development. We have a variety of options for building and deploying apps and a wide range of pricing. From 3 cents per minute in the cloud to enterprise apps with SLAs that run the voice applications for some of the world's largest companies.

For our enterprise customers, many of them prefer to use the w3c standard VoiceXML to avoid vendor lock-in. Some of them also use our proprietary CallXML, a simplified language for building apps. These apps run on our carrier-grade hosting facilities in the US and Europe or at the customer's data centers.

For web devlopers, we have Tropo.com, a cloud service offers APIs for popular web programming languages. Build in PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, or Python, with more options coming shortly. Pay as you go, develop in your native language, and run your apps in a cloud on top of the same infrastructure our enterprise hosting customers use.

It's more than voice. Using one code base, your app can not only make and receive phone calls, but also send and receive SMS messages and interact over IM and Twitter.

As rjurney mentioned, we're developer friendly. You can create an account on either Tropo or on our enterprise hosting for free and run there as long as you need to without charge. We don't put any artificial limits on our dev platforms. We'll give you a dedicated phone number for your app. We'll also give you Skype numbers, SIP addresses, an XMPP address, and a toll-free number. Build and test your app, hand it to your friends to try out. When you're ready to move to production, let us know.