Hoiio Developer Blog

Still using a fax machine because you have to deal with business partners that only accept faxed documents? Now you can build apps that can send/receive fax using Hoiio’s Fax API.

Developers can use the new Fax API to send fax to over 200 countries, and also to receive fax via Hoiio numbers. We support  sending/receiving fax using PDF format. Note that in order to receive fax, you have to configure your Hoiio number and set the mode to “fax”.

The rates for our Fax API is the same as our Voice API – by per minute usage. You can check the cost of sending/receiving fax using our rate API or from our pricing page.

Singapore is a food capital with restaurants serving food from around the world. With the huge variety of restaurants, it can be hard to pick one out. After you found the ideal place to eat, booking is a must at popular restaurants to ensure that you have a seat when you arrive. Abratable is a site that lets you search for restaurants in Singapore and then book it on the spot, all from within their site.

When you book a table, Abratable makes use of Hoiio API to send an SMS to the restaurant to notify them of your booking.

From what we have heard, they even have plans to integrate IVR and other voice services in the future.

NUS Hackers organized Hack & Roll 2012 (a 24 hour hackthon from 19th Feb 1pm to 20th Feb 1pm) to encourage students to build apps that would benefit the NUS community. The Hoiio API team supported the event by offering a special signup for the participants so that they can use their free $10SGD credits without trial restrictions, i.e. they can use their credits to sms/call any number.

The following apps built during the hackathon made use of Hoiio API:

• Geek Rave by team N-Team is a web app that allows students to show off their projects and have other students “rave” about it. When someone raves about your project, you’ll get an SMS notification.
• Vigilance by Semantics3 is a mobile Android app that sends SMS alerts to parents when their child/ward is in a dangerous area.
• Cab 2gether by team GiveUsPlaybooks! is application for people who want to share cabs.

Additional coverage and results of the event can be found at e27.

Edit: added links to blog post by Semantics3

For users to call your application, you will need to provide them a Hoiio Number. Previously subscribing to a Hoiio Number has to be done manually via the Developer Portal, now we have added APIs that let your application subscribe Hoiio Numbers automatically. This means you can now subscribe to Hoiio Numbers on the fly and create applications where each user can have their own Hoiio Numbers!

The process of subscribing to a Hoiio Number is as follows: you first ask for a list of available Hoiio Numbers for a certain country, then tell us the number you want to subscribe to. You can extend an existing subscription by subscribing again.