Silicon Valley-based cloud web telephony darling Twilio has launched its Voice product in the UK as well as opening a new office in East London, allowing developers to finally purchase UK phone numbers and target local users. It’s also serious about expanding in Europe — together with the UK launch, Twilio is offering beta services to developers in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark.

Developers have longed for Twilio to go international, and now three years later it’s finally happened. The company hopes to reach 11 more countries by the end of this year (um, two more months?!).

That’s one way to spend the $12 million raised about an year ago. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have the attention of Valley super angels Dave McClure and Ron Conway. Not only do they back Twilio but also came up with the Twilio Fund ”for startups that use Twilio’s messaging platform.”

Back in September Twilio signed up Zendesk (another well-funded Silicon Valley startup) as a major customer, and incidentally both companies seem to have aligned their European ambitions — Zendesk recently opened its London office, and will offer Zendesk Voice to its European customers as well.

On the other hand Tropo, a major competitor that’s backed by Orlando-based Voxeo, was first to offer international availability, but now it looks like there’s going to be an intense race to lure developers from across the pond and beyond.

OpenVBX is an open source Web-based business phone system that’s powered by Twilio. It’s just like a lightweight PBX with typical features such as menus, voicemail, messaging, etc. except there’s one catch: it requires Twilio as the cloud telephony provider.

Not cool, right?

That requirement translates to OpenVBX having some limitations such as no international numbers or international SMS, along with some, shall we say, “speech impediments.” The good folks at Disruptive Technologies kindly released OpenVBX 2.0 that incorporates bug fixes, Tropo compatibility and features, and VoiceVault biometrics API.

Or as Chris Matthieu of Voxeo (backers of Tropo) puts it, OpenVBX has been “jailbroken“:

The coders at Disruptive Technologies added full support for the the Tropo API and Phono SIP-based VoIP web phone to the communications layer of the OpenVBX project. Of course, when selecting the Tropo API, users will now get access to all of the more advanced features of the Tropo network: speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, phone numbers in over 40 countries, international SMS, in/outbound SIP VoIP support, inbound Skype support, multiple phone numbers per callflow script, improved conferencing.

Disruptive Technologies also extended OpenVBX with the VoiceVault API to support Voice Biometrics in password resets. After adding VoiceVault credentials on the API Accounts Tab, the password reset dialog will provide an option to request a phone call to reset your OpenVBX account password.

Giving users more choices is always awesome especially in the exciting world of Web telephony. It’s also interesting to note that Tropo is Twilio’s biggest competitor and each command a loyal following of developers.

Now I cannot wait to see the next iteration of OpenVBX…

Fresh off SpeechTEK and giving insideCTI a hint of acquisition plans, tonight Voxeo announced buying out Teleku (covered on this blog before), a Web telephony API provider. Voxeo, of course, is behind Tropo, one of the first Web and cloud-based telephony development platforms.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense since Teleku is already using Voxeo technology. But I think Voxeo was looking beyond the semi-competitive technology and wanted founder Chris Matthieu to be part of the Voxeo/Tropo team. After all, Matthieu was the sole founder of Teleku and worked tirelessly to grow the product and a loyal following quickly in its young lifespan.

According to Om, Chris Matthieu will join Orland-based Voxeo as Director of Business Development. Here’s an interview of Matthieu for the latest Voxeo Emerging TechTalk episode.

Matthieu summed it up nicely in a tweet: “…Teleku was a Voxeo customer and Tropo competitor – Now it’s a serious Twilio liability.” Watch out, Twilio, and congratulations to both Voxeo and Teleku.

Future (it’s dated 8/12) press release from Voxeo:

Orlando, FL – August 12, 2010 — Today Voxeo Corporation, the leader in Unlocked Communications™, announced it has acquired Teleku, a startup enabling web developers to build powerful voice and SMS applications. Teleku founder Chris Matthieu will join the Voxeo Labs team to focus on business development and enterprise adoption of Voxeo’s Tropo cloud communications service.

Teleku provides a platform for web developers to create voice and text-based communications applications using common web programming languages. Hundreds of developers have used Teleku to build applications including outbound notification systems, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), real estate talking houses, language translators, driving directions, games, and more.

Using any Web programming language, developers send XML or JSON instructions to Teleku over HTTP. These instructions tell the Teleku platform how to interact with users, and can use industry-standard VoiceXML, Twilio-proprietary TwiML, or Teleku’s PhoneML formats. The Teleku platform then interacts with users via voice calls, text-messaging (SMS), or Instant Messaging (IM). Teleku Voice applications can make use of both automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multiple languages or touch-tone/DTMF input. Teleku Text-messaging works with any SMS capable phone. Teleku Instant Messaging works with AOL, Cisco Jabber/XMPP, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo IM clients.

Voxeo Labs is the innovation, incubation, and open-source focused R&D division of Voxeo. Voxeo is a profitable, employee-owned company that began building the largest world-wide communications application cloud in 1999. Voxeo’s cloud platform includes seven hosting facilities in the US, EU, and Asia and is used by half of the Fortune 100 and over 150,000 developers. Voxeo Labs’ Tropo service leverages the Voxeo Cloud to deliver reliable, mission-critical infrastructure for its customers.

Teleku was already a Voxeo customer using Voxeo’s proven real-time cloud infrastructure to deliver services and connect to voice, SIP, Skype, SMS, and IM infrastructure. Teleku will be combined with Voxeo’s Tropo (http://tropo.com) service. Existing Tropo and Teleku applications will continue to run without modification on the combined solution.

“Teleku shows how Voxeo’s cloud platform enables extremely rapid design, deployment, and scalability of new services that can respond quickly to changing developer and enterprise requirements,” said Teleku founder Chris Matthieu, “I’m excited to join Voxeo and help accelerate the adoption of the Tropo cloud communications service. Tropo enables both innovative web developers and enterprise call centers to deliver automated communications applications quickly and easily, and is an amazingly simple platform anyone can use to build multi-channel communications apps that leverage voice, SMS, IM, web and social channels like Twitter.”

“Voxeo has been making a concerted effort to provide multichannel development tools and solutions to their partners and enterprise customers. This is especially important as consumers from all walks of life adapt new devices and endpoints through which to communicate. It’s no secret that SMS is now one of the most frequently-used channels among younger consumers. Moreover, we’re seeing significant uptake of IM and Twitter as channels through which consumers interact with enterprises. Voxeo’s stack just got more powerful.”, says Ryan Joe, Associate Analyst on Ovum’s Customer Interaction team.

The Tropo.com cloud communications service is the flagship product of Voxeo Labs. Launched in 2009, thousands of developers have used Tropo to build applications that use voice, SMS, instant messaging and social channels to solve real business problems and create superior customer experiences. Tropo supports automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) in 8 languages, inbound phone numbers in over 30 countries, international outbound dialing, support for communication via Twitter and voice integration with traditional phones, SIP VoIP, and Skype.

“Voxeo’s mission has always been to make communication application development and deployment unlocked and uncomplicated for everyone,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Our focus on open standards and open source removes vendor lock-in. Our focus on the consumerization of IT and free services for developers and trials removes complexity. Chris and Teleku clearly share our vision. We are delighted to welcome Teleku to the Voxeo family.”

More information about Teleku, Tropo and how to get started with free developer accounts can be found at: http://www.tropo.com/telekufaq

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 100,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web atwww.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

Voxeo Media Contact

Megan Maxwell
Voxeo Corporation
Phone: +1 (407) 455-5848
megan@voxeo.com

The Web telephony space welcomes another competitor today: Teleku (a project of GetVocal, Inc.). For all you Web developers in search of telephony APIs, rejoice! for you have another set of programming goodies to choose from.

Why Teleku over competitors Tropo and Twilio? According to this TechCrunch piece:

So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available.

With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML.

Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition.

Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard.

Sounds like a good combination of features and user experience. VoiceXML is certainly the industry standard and would be a plus to developers who’d want portable applications. The behind-the-curtain star is certainly Voxeo, for providing the platform and speech recognition feature. But no doubt Matthieu did a tremendous job in designing PhoneML and the user-friendly online tool for making it work seamlessly.

And judging by the fact that founder/developer Matthieu tweeted last at 2:30am and got TechCrunched, he’s probably having a very busy day…