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.

I’ll give credit to Alcatel-Lucent for thinking outside the box in today’s acquisition of ProgrammableWeb, a site that catalogs Web APIs. ALU has been on an aggressive path of transformation into a Web API-centric telecom company as I’d written here before. Clearly it believes that the future of telecom is the Web, and its executive management team is doing something about it. The Web-focused strategy may just give ALU an advantage over its heavyweight competitors.

Official press release:

Paris June 29, 2010 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that it has acquired ProgrammableWeb, the technology industry’s universal source for Web APIs (application programming interfaces) used by application developers to build web, mobile, and other connected applications that serve consumers and the workplace.  Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Web APIs enable developers to create new applications leveraging various kinds of content and functionality.  Alcatel-Lucent’s acquisition of ProgrammableWeb will help bring together an ecosystem of service providers, enterprises, and developers to drive the creation of unique applications today and in the new world of broadband mobile through LTE.

ProgrammableWeb will continue to operate as a separate entity, maintaining its repository of over 2,000 Web APIs which are regularly accessed by a community of hundreds of thousands of developers, and continuing its role as the industry’s most comprehensive content source for Web services development.  Alcatel-Lucent will provide support and resources to promote the continued and robust growth of the API and developer ecosystem, and facilitate service providers’ participation within that ecosystem.

For Alcatel-Lucent this acquisition provides an important new channel to partner with the Web developer community – a dialog it has started with its Open API Service and Developer Platform.  It also gives Alcatel-Lucent access to general API usage patterns, allowing it to build highly relevant API bundles for its Open API Service. ProgrammableWeb’s API monitoring services, API trial services, and automated API updates will be integrated into Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent will be able to share its developer resources, such as its dashboard that helps developers track application monetization, with ProgrammableWeb’s developer community.

“If you look at any organization that launches an API, you quickly realize that the one thing the most successful APIs have in common is a vibrant developer ecosystem,” said Laura Merling, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s global developer strategy.  “Our goal is to protect the uniqueness and independence of ProgrammableWeb as an API repository and developer resource, while adding beneficial technologies and service provider relationships to the mix for everyone’s benefit.”

This move advances Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Enablement strategy, which is focused on combining the trusted and secure network capabilities of service providers with the speed and creativity of the Web to provide a richer end-user experience.

“ProgrammableWeb has always sought to put developers first, by giving them the most timely and comprehensive picture of everything related to APIs,” said John Musser, ProgrammableWeb founder who is moving to Alcatel-Lucent, but will continue to oversee the repository’s operation.  “That mission will be strengthened and expanded by joining forces with Alcatel-Lucent.  As APIs become more central to software strategies in all domains, we’ll make ProgrammableWeb an even better one-stop independent source.”

About ProgrammableWeb

ProgrammableWeb is the leading online destination dedicated to mashups, APIs and the Web as a development platform. Founded in 2005, ProgrammableWeb offers the Internet’s largest directory of Web 2.0 APIs and mashups. With over 2,000 open APIs and thousands of real-world mashups, users can search, contribute, and connect as part of ProgrammableWeb’s active mashup developer community. The site also offers daily industry news, analysis, case studies, tools and technical resources. Regularly featured in major publications worldwide, including Forbes, Newsweek and CIO, ProgrammableWeb is a recognized industry authority. For more information, visit www.programmableweb.com.

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted transformation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation, and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP and optics technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet:http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.

Contact the Alcatel-Lucent Press Office: press@alcatel-lucent.com

As much as I love to see another competitor in the crowded Web telephony space, I’d have to agree with Om on this one: QuickFuse (by Plum Voice) is not quick enough. Voxeo, Tropo, Twilio, Teleku, etc. have pretty much stolen the buzz in this space and then some, so I can only see QuickFuse’s entrance as a play on even more competitive pricing — shrinking margins for everyone.

Plum itself has a good list of high-profile customers, and I wonder if QuickFuse was introduced to acquire more businesses in the small and medium segment. Maybe the big clients still aren’t spending money on IVR projects in this economy.

I’m a fan of the convergence between Web and telephony technologies, so I certainly wish the best to the folks at QuickFuse/Plum. After all, it is through competition that drives innovation, and we all agree that there’s still plenty of room to innovate in Web telephony.

TechCrunch Disrupt is happening in NYC now featuring great panels and demos about so-called disruptive tech.

Twilio appears to be the only telephony-related company to sponsor this event. However, as these hackathon demos show, telephony and SMS are fast becoming a favorite feature for Web programmers.

I cannot help but think about the somewhat disruptive impact of companies and products like Twilio in the telecom applications space. They are bringing telephony to the Web, and with the population of Web programmers being far greater than telecom programmers, it’s only a matter of time before all the PBX, IVR, and CTI applications are developed with ties to Web technologies. In some ways this is already happening with the advent of Web services and cloud applications.

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• Live from the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Demos (twilio.com)
• Inside Disrupt Hackathon [Video] (techcrunch.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…

From France with love, at least for those lucky enough to be in Austin, Texas for the annual SXSW (“South-by-Southwest,” not “es-ex-es-dubya”) festivals. Yes, in a case of Big Telecom diving head first into the latest and hippest Web technologies, Alcatel-Lucent sponsored the ElevenAPI lounge this year where attendees can go to chill and exchange ideas for bridging telecom and Web:

We’re down in Austin for the first time, rocking an unbelievably popular and creative lounge and talking to what seems like a constant barrage of developers and attendees about what it means to bridge the telco and Web 2.0 worlds. Day One saw more than 200 “what app would you build?” ideas posted to our ideation wall, a highly interactive ideation session captured by our graphical facilitator, and 11 entrants in our first ever App Idol contest (where two lucky contestants took home Bose Sounddocks). Day Two saw an even more vibrant contest and a continually packed lounge (and even more discussion).

Now we know Alcatel-Lucent is serious about the U.S. market and more specifically, aiming to entice the Web-savvy generation to develop cool apps using its new API bundles. Smart move, ALU:

South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX, March 12, 2010 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced the industry’s first packaged API (Application Programming Interfaces) bundles, and an associated revenue sharing model that radically transforms application development by eliminating upfront costs for developers and opening new revenue opportunities for service providers. The announcement is part of a larger push by Alcatel-Lucent to give developers the ability to use the network as a development platform in the same way they currently build applications for mobile devices and the Web.

The company also announced a powerful new business and application modeling tool that allows developers to get the most out of their applications. This new functionality helps developers and service providers improve the potential for the success of services they are introducing and helps them better manage the overall business of their applications.

Alcatel-Lucent will showcase these and other tools, which are part of its developer platform and program (and core elements of its Application Enablement vision) at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, (March 11 – 16, 2010 Austin, TX) in the “Eleven API Lounge” of the Hilton Hotel, directly across from the Austin Convention Center.

New Bundled APIs
A bundled API is a unique offering from Alcatel-Lucent that blends service provider and third party application capabilities to support the easy creation of new applications. These API bundles enable a new revenue share model intended to transform service provider networks into an application development platform by unlocking network resources and functionality – similar to what smartphones and apps stores did for the device world.

The company’s first vertical API bundles include three social bundles supporting the creation of new mashups in the rapidly growing social gaming, advertising and virtual goods markets. Collectively, the APIs included are SMS, advertising, location, virtual goods, credit card and billing. The initial delivery of these API bundles targets the 14+ million developers worldwide and the two fastest growing and increasingly profitable applications markets today: mobile advertising and virtual goods. Recent industry research suggests mobile advertising will exceed $3 billion by 2013 and that today’s virtual goods market is between $4-6 billion globally. Alcatel-Lucent is providing developers access to beta versions of the social API bundles within a virtual sandbox for non-commercial use in a laboratory type environment. Developers can access the bundles via Alcatel-Lucent’s Open API Service.

“We welcome the pioneering social API initiative of Alcatel-Lucent to provide more upside for developers to reach better monetization through added targeting value, such as location,” said Herald Neidhardt, CMO and co-founder of Smaato Inc, a mobile advertising company.

The new revenue share model allows developers to access the API bundles without the burdensome upfront API fees that, until now, have traditionally been a major pain point, while earning a portion of the revenue from applications leveraging the APIs. Service providers, third party API contributors and Alcatel-Lucent can also share a percentage of the applications revenue for making unique APIs available in a way that safeguards the security and privacy of their subscribers’ data. By allowing service providers to make money on the applications that run “over the top” of their network, the business model addresses a sore point of increased costs associated with today’s data explosion.

“The business model benefits everyone across the value chain. Whereas service providers did not share in an application’s revenue before, they now gain new sources of revenue from ad network or virtual goods applications. They can invest that income back into their network, which in turn supports new services innovation,” said Johnson Agogbua, head of Application Enablement solutions for Alcatel-Lucent.

New Dashboard Functionality
To support the bundled API approach, Alcatel-Lucent has also expanded its Dashboard tool to provide developers with a more personalized and detailed view of their applications and end users including: number of downloads, type of transactions, application performance, and revenue generation from campaigns and apps stores. This data is compiled across major apps stores — GetJar, Android and iTunes – to provide a comprehensive picture of how a developer’s application rates with consumers and stacks up against other industry applications. By making these additional tools available on its Dashboard, Alcatel-Lucent will expand its developer community reach to more than 20,000 developers.

Enthusiastically received by the developer community upon its introduction at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow last month, the Dashboard and API bundling model are being expanded with contributions from leading third party vendors: APIgee, Billing Revolution, Motally, SMaato and Zhing.

About Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Enablement strategy
Application enablement is an industry vision and network approach that combines the trusted capabilities of network operators and the speed and innovation of the web to provide end users and enterprises what they demand: a richer and more trusted web experience and beyond. Through a strategic focus on application enablement, Alcatel-Lucent is helping its customers create new value by exposing their network capabilities in a managed and controlled way, facilitating new business models and improving return on investment. For more information, go to http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/application_enablement/

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted transformation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation,  and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

Contact the Alcatel-Lucent Press Office: press@alcatel-lucent.com

Yesterday CRM Magazine announced its 2010 CRM Service Awards winners. Genesys dominated the contact center awards (Contact Center Infrastructure and Interactive Voice Response) whereas RightNow Technologies took home most of the web-related categories (Web Self-Service, Web Interaction Management, and Contact Center Search).

Genesys WFM failed to win the Workforce Optimization Suite award — Verint Systems won — which must prove to be somewhat frustrating as Genesys WFM has been around for a while, but continues to lag behind leaders like Verint and NICE. Recently, workforce optimization has been a focus among companies in hopes of getting the most out of their resources. This is also a lucrative offering: according to a report by DMG Consulting the WFO market grew about 14% from 2007 to 2008:

The firm’s “2009 Quality Management/Liability Recording Market Share Report” shows that the WFO market grew by 14 percent, from about $2.4 billion in 2007 to about $2.7 billion in 2008.

The contact center market contributed to about half of this growth, the report finds. Revenues from WFO solutions for the contact center grew about 4.3 percent during 2008. Although this is only modest growth, the WFO market outperformed many other IT software markets, the report finds.

Although growth slowed in 2009 due to the economic downturn, especially hitting the financial sector hard, which were the companies that had been the biggest WFO buyers. Genesys would be wise to kick it up a notch in terms of enhancing its WFM package to better compete with Verint’s. Some may argue that Genesys ought to concentrate on its forte, contact center infrastructure and IVR, but it’s clear that the company also wants a piece of the WFO and CRM pie.

…which brings up to social CRM darling RightNow Technologies. It may rule the web-based services now, but its relationship with Genesys may soon evolve from a partnership to being a “coopetition.” Genesys has hooked up with RNT competitors InQuira and Lithium to invade the desktop social CRM space, and it is not shy about it as evident from a recent analysts conference.

The contact center battle between titans like Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys would be epic, but I believe it’s the desktop CRM war that deserves attention this year. It’ll be tricky for Genesys as it tries to balance all of its products and partnerships in order to maintain the lead, but don’t be surprised if it just decides to do it “Microsoft style” and buyout a company or two in this space just to promptly acquire the technologies and market share.

Here is the CRM Magazine press release:

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CRM magazine, the leading publication in the customer relationship management industry, announced the winners of its 2010 CRM Service Awards here today, in conjunction with the magazine’s March 2010 issue.

Recognizing how the economic climate helped drive service as a significant differentiator, CRM magazine’s seventh annual CRM Service Awards honor the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies focused on high-quality customer experiences through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies.

Maintaining the eight-category breadth of last year’s awards, CRM nevertheless expanded the scope of the 2010 edition to include more companies. In each category, the magazine has again named a single Service Winner, denoting the year’s highest score relative to a peer group. Each category now also identifies three Service Leaders and at least one vendor deemed “One to Watch.”

Recipients were determined through an extensive three-month process and proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.

• Contact Center Infrastructure — Winner: Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories
  Leaders: Avaya; Cisco Systems; Interactive Intelligence
  Ones to Watch: LiveOps; Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Interactive Voice Response — Winner: Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories
  Leaders: Avaya; Intervoice (a unit of Convergys); Voxeo
  One to Watch: Cisco Systems
• Web Self-Service — Winner: RightNow Technologies
  Leaders: Consona; InQuira; nGenera
  One to Watch: Parature
• Web Interaction Management — Winner: RightNow Technologies
  Leaders: LivePerson; nGenera; Parature
  Ones to Watch: Helpstream; Kana Software
• Enterprise Feedback Management — Winner: Allegiance
  Leaders: Confirmit; RightNow Technologies; Verint Systems
  One to Watch: Vovici
• Contact Center Search — Winner: RightNow Technologies
  Leaders: Autonomy etalk; Coveo Solutions; InQuira
  Ones to Watch: Consona; Google
• Workforce Optimization Suite — Winner: Verint Systems
  Leaders: Aspect Software; Envision Telephony; Nice Systems
  One to Watch: Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories
• Outsourcing — Winner: Convergys
  Leaders: HP Enterprise Services; Sykes; Teleperformance
  Ones to Watch: Sitel; West

The magazine also named six Service Rising Stars for the year — the most ever:

• CallCopy, an emerging midmarket player among contact center vendors providing workforce optimization suites;
• Clickability, a provider of Web content management via software-as-a-service;
• ClickFox, a specialist in customer experience analytics;
• Communispace, which provides private online communities and participant analysis;
• LiveOps, a provider of outsourcing and workforce management solutions for work-at-home contact center agents; and
• Nexidia, one of the few companies making speech analytics relevant to the contact center.

Last, but certainly not least, the magazine named five customer implementations as winners of its CRM Service Elite Award — again, a record number:

• online retailer Drugstore.com, which took a dose of RightNow Technologies to get better at making its customers look good;
• network-solutions provider Enterasys Networks, which turned to Salesforce.com to create relationships as well as efficiencies;
• Infusionsoft, a provider of email marketing software for small businesses, which used an online environment designed by Helpstream to enable customers to provide their own community-based support;
• insurance giant New York Life, which used a Verint Systems deployment to give its contact center agents something to stick around for; and
• Southwest Airlines, which, thanks to Virtual Hold Technology, now offers passengers the choice to hang on or hang up.

“CRM magazine is pleased to see the steadfast devotion to service excellence demonstrated by the companies and individuals in the 2010 CRM Service Awards,” said David Myron, the magazine’s editorial director. “These award recipients are proving that organizations can streamline business processes, maximize profitability, and improve customer service interactions.”

The 2010 CRM Service Awards will be presented at the CRM Evolution 2010 Conference (http://www.CRMevolution2010.com) at the Marriott Marquis in New York later this year. An expanded version of the results have been published in the March 2010 issue of CRM magazine—available in print and in digital NXTBook format (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm0310/index.php). The awards package was unveiled online on March 1, 2010, at http://www.destinationCRM.com.

About CRM magazine

CRM magazine is the leading publication of the customer relationship management industry, covering sales, marketing, customer service, and strategy. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual CRM Evolution conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve customer-centric business initiatives, and leaders who recognize CRM as a key strategy for creating enhanced customer value in any industry. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or CRM in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.destinationCRM.com; at our blog, http://www.destinationCRMblog.com; or on Twitter at @CRM (http://twitter.com/CRM) and @destinationCRM (http://twitter.com/destinationCRM). The destinationCRM Web site (which is updated daily) and the monthly magazine are properties of CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.

Contact:

CRM magazine
David White, 609-654-6266
dwhite@infotoday.com

I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon to find out that Google Voice has a brand new web app for the iPhone, and it is a beautiful thing.

Kudos to Google engineers for making such a great looking and usable web app with HTML5:

Today, we’re excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies. For example, AppCache lets you interact with web apps without a network connection and local databases allow you to store data locally on the device, so you don’t lose data even when you close the browser.

It took a while, but I’m glad I didn’t go the jailbreak route just to get a third party native Google Voice app on my iPhone. This web app is very close to the performance and features of a native app.

Are you also a Google Voice user, be it iPhone or Android? Do you think it’s ready for prime time?