Until now, as DuVander explains, application developers could bring Twitter-based content into their user interface through search or by pasting in the stream itself. Think of the new service as a way to include Twitter-based content that can be tailored by a viewer’s interests and keys off the activities of a selected individual or group. Twitter provides some insights and guidelines (including use cases) for the API in this post. It is telling (in a good way) that the first guideline is to declare all information in a “protected” account as “non-publice” and therefore out-of-bounds for services that refer to the output of the streamed API.

Of special interest to customer care, social CRM and VRM professionals should be the additional metadata that is included in the API or “feed”. It has the potential to let users know when a Twitterer favorites a site, retweets a message, follows a new twitter or makes changes to a list. As I recently wrote, Programmable Web was purchased by Alcatel-Lucent, which is aggressively working to to integrate (mashup?) the customer interaction management resources of Genesys Labs with the rest of its Enterprise Software Group. With so much attention focused on bringing social media content into the customer care contact center workflow, an easy way to incorporate real-time streams should be much appreciated.

TuVox was co-founded by Steve Pollock (coming over from Edify) and Ashok Khosla (who had been the Managing Director of Apple’s development labs in India among other endeavors). The two visionaries saw an opportunity for a high-tech firm that could use advanced VoiceXML, Eclipse-based application development tools and techniques bordering on artificial intelligence to shorten the time it takes to deliver speech-enabled applications that, in many ways, mimicked human-to-human interactions.

TuVox has long placed emphasis on rapid deployment and constant tuning/refinement over time. It has also exhibited high-levels of flexibility in terms of deployment strategies. It operates its own hosting facilities built largely on Genesys’ Voice Platform (GVP) technology in Texas, Florida and Georgia, but has also, at various times, had its applications running “inside” or “on top of” application servers in Tellme and Convergys’ clouds.

Going forward, West notes that AMC Entertainment, Canon, ACER (#2 PC manufacturer in the world), National Research Corporation and Progress Energy are among Tuvox’s largest clients. Over the years, however, TuVox’s tools and resources were employed to support new phone-based interfaces for an impressive customer list, that has included 1-800-Flowers.com, American Airlines, British Airways, M&T Bank, Motorola, Telecom New Zealand, Time, Inc., BECU (Boeing Employees Credit Union), Virgin America and USAA. Thus it has built an equally impressive library of showcase (but customized) voice applications for travel (especially airlines), entertainment, telecom, utilities, retailers and financial services.

With the acquisition, West Interactive is solidifying its expansion strategy, in terms of both geography and functionality. Both companies have extensive experience with GVP; but have “multi-platform” experience and aspirations. Both see growth potential beyond North America and have experienced success in Australia/New Zealand and Western Europe. Perhaps most important, they share an engagement model that promises clients rapid, rock solid deployment, constant monitoring and maintenance and reliable reporting and analysis. This product range addresses the expectations of the customers for cloud-based, hosted or “on-demand” solutions providers.

In addition to the sui generis Flip(fill-in-the-blank) there are some preselected “winners” like GigaOm, The Onion, All Things D, The Economist and a few others that streamline access to content from popular online news sources and social media. Once selected, the source can be navigated by using intuitive finger gestures (flipping). There are also icons on each story that users can touch to “like” that story or to “reply” to the original post with a comment. It’s that simple… Almost.

We characterized the launch as a “success” only if you measure success by “overcapacity” (a variant of Apple/AT&T’s formula for demand creation). Featured prominently on the “Contents” page of Flipboard are the obligatory links to Facebook and Twitter. However, flipping to those links initiates a “pop-up” message thanking the customer for downloading the (free) app and admitting that “we are currently limiting the rate at which we are accepting new Facebook and Twitter connections” The good news is that they believe it will take only “several hours” to “deploy new server infrastructure”. This makes it a shorter wait than the line at the Apple store on the first day of iPhone4 sales.

As for the business side of Flipboard. The company has reportedly closed a $10+ million Series A round from Kleiner Perkins. As for monetization strategies, the company is admittedly “early stage” but, with leading branded content providers showing such deep interest on the new user interface and navigation technique, advertisers will not be far behind; nor will ideas for subscription services.

The old joke was that, while the publication’s slogan was “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, the print version was constrained to “All the News that Fits.” It escaped those constraints more than 20 years ago by offering renditions of its information, resources and archives through various online channels and at a broad variety of price points. Today, the nytimes.com Web site is highly dynamic. Judicious support of multiple, open API’s make it a dynamic platform for advertising, as well as user-controlled services.

Framing it as a “Google v. Apple” superpower smackdown gets part of the story right; but not the most important aspect of the new service. Like most of the offerings from Google Labs (think Buzz, Wave, Translate and the original Google Voice), it is a “beta” offering. So it is very consistent with Google’s approach to lowering barriers to participation and heightening opportunities for serendipity. The elements of the offering that are “exposed” to new users appears very modest: The introductory page and video highlights access to location information (courtesy of Android’s GPS) and Android phone functions (like text messaging). This also makes it, at base, a prototypical implementation of “Recombinant Communications” (RC), a concept we introduced here over year ago, initially as “Recombinant Telephony.”

Yet this statement says it all: ” If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter.” In other words, the service is a graphically enhanced, Web-based tool for Web application development. It brings to bear the sort of high-level, drag-and-drop development environment to which a new generation of app developers have grown accustomed.

Google is not just competing against Apple in order to stock the shelves of the Android AppStore, it is vying for more ticks and attention from a growing community of “casual programmers”. In his post, Greg Sterling calls them “do-it-yourself” programmers but, in this era of peer-to-peer communications, it is more likely that Google has built the foundation for a community of like-minded folks to share ideas, tools, resources, API’s and libraries (they call them “blocks”) of code to introduce and refine new uses for mobile devices. In that respect, they are providing a level playing field where insurgent Android developers are on equal footing with the giants of code development, software publishing and service delivery.

As the “beta” label suggests, it is still an incomplete, and largely untested product. It is incomplete because it remains quite “geeky” at its core. More importantly, there is no clear path for building a business around the apps that “App Inventor” facilitates. It is a development utility that traces its roots to “educational computing” projects at MIT. Thus it is best thought of as a training ground for application developers, growing the base of prospective publishers, perhaps, but not necessarily attracting a new set of entrepreneurs. In the ideal, people who gain experience with App Inventor today, are the raw recruits for the information services industry of tomorrow.

Lest you think this will only add more confusion to the already amorphous market for UC products, consider that it truly plays to HP’s strength. As illustrated in the chart below, the IT giant’s revenues from software and professional services are eclipsing those from printing, imaging, storage, servers and personal systems combined, making it a system integration powerhouse. As we approach the two-year anniversary of the acquisition of EDS, it is bold acknowledgment that HP is ready to apply its considerable expertise and experience with Avaya infrastructure to help smooth over many of the bumps and fill in the gaps as they apply the principles of UC in inherently multi-vendor, non-homogeneous environments.

The deal brings Avaya a partner that can provide a number of service delivery options for its core call processing and contact center technologies. HP has the potential to ease the potentially painful transition from those rock-solid, fully-depreciated, PSTN-friendsly Definity ACDs over to the more future-proof SIP-friendly world of Aura. The move looks so seamless on a project plan, but there are only a handful of system integrators that can work with customers to orchestrate the transition as a managed service encompassing resources around the globe, both on premises and “in the cloud.”

This press release provides more color on the agreement between the two firms. It clearly emphasizes such capabilities as life-cycle management and support that HP brings to multi-vendor environments that are ripe for Avaya Aura. It is clearly a professional and managed services play that also serves the purpose of helping Avaya maintain its presence in enterprise IT environments where the move to IP-telephony is an open invitation for competition from Cisco, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and others.

The ProgrammableWeb Website is literally littered with links to application development tools, community resources and (especially) a repository of more than 5,000 mashups which take advantage of more than 2,000 “open APIs” (application programming interfaces) to help glue together content or resources from the likes of IfbyPhone, Twilio, Amazon.com, Google, MapQuest, Constant Contact and WhitePages.com.

ALU provided no figure for the cost of the acquisition. Its management assured the developer community and ProgrammableWeb’s employees that the company would continue to operate as an independent entity for the foreseeable future as its continues to grow its code base and community of developers. This arm’s length strategy served ALU well in the contact center and CTI market where Genesys operated independently for roughly ten years.

This is a timely competitive move for ALU, whose management recognizes the geometric growth in demand for reliable communications infrastructure that “enterprise mashups” is fostering. It represents a quantum leap in the growth of developer resources, as well as the community of developers that use them. It is a force multiplier where community members foster the sort of geometric growth that occurs when the most popular content and services are ingrained into new portals, channels, widgets, gadgets or Web sites. In posts like this, the company’s blog chronicles how community members build services that include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Maps or Last.FM. At some point this creativity had become contagious.

Because it serves as a virtual desktop, it brings Cisco’s Quad, as well as Show and Share into the mix. Quad is a highly flexible user interface that serves as a repository for all the widgets, gadgets, applets or feeds that can be packed into a personal portal. Cisco Show and Share is positioned as a “social video community” platform which, as the name implies, provides a mechanism for employees to share videos to support the projects that they are working on with a broader team.

Cisco calls Cius an “enterprise tablet”, which differentiates it from the Apple iPad (while taking advantage of many of the technical attributes that are iPad-like). For instance, the ability to access an enterprise’s secure VPN (virtual private network) is baked in at the factory. Many of the features support quick and seamless transitions from the Cius’s “virtual desktop” to an employees physical desktop in support of mobile employees.

From a competitive standpoint, it is a nice, pre-emptive strike by Cisco against not just Apple, but any incursions by makers of Windows boxes, like Dell or Lenovo, but especially HP. Cisco is also making a bold appeal to the Android developer community by inviting them into the Cisco Developer Network (CDN).

CDN may not rival the iTunes AppStore, but building apps that conform to API’s that can be dropped into Quad and displayed on the Cius out in the wild should be a provocative challenge to Web app developers around the world.

Addendum: Cisco told the trade press that the device will be generally available in “early 2011″. It will be equipped with both front-facing and rear-facing cameras. It will connect with peripherals wirelessly through Bluetooth (in addition to WiFi) and physically through USB ports. Finally, the targeted street price is “less than $1,000.

Greg Sterling has an interesting angle on the competitive impact Cius may have on Rim’s plans to introduce a tablet here.

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