The rest of the morning was dedicated to “live demos” by phonetrepreneurs (meaning developer/entrepreneurs) who lived the dream of moving from “hackathon-to-productization-to-liquidity event” in weeks or months rather than years. First on stage was Steve Martocci, co-founder of GroupMe, the year-old text messaging management service that was recently purchased by Microsoft’s Skype for $68 million. There were other demonstrations of interest, but I was particularly impressed by the use of Twilio by AirBnb, the community-driven service for discovering, listing and booking places to stay around the world. Developers at Airbnb took only a couple of days to whip up a service called Voice Connect that enables a prospective renter to call and talk to a property owner from his or her mobile phone without revealing either party’s telephone numbers.

As Andrew Vilcsak, Airbnb’s Mobile Platform Lead Developer, explained to the audience, “they just want to hear each other’s voice to seal the deal.” That’s just human nature.

But one of the breaking news items was the launch of a new service delivery regimen called Twilio Connect, which enables developers to set up their apps on Twilio but have usage billed to another customer’s Twilio account. This direct billing arrangement removes some of the complexities associated with building rate cards for services that are a combination of “minutes of use” (MOUs) on Twilio’s network, software licensing fees and maintenance. The end-user may end up paying two bills (for the app and for network usage), but in some cases that’s the best way to introduce pricing certainty even when demand is uncertain or highly variable.

The other breaking news from Twilio Conference will be made manifest this evening when Dave McClure, the man of 500Startups, announces more winners of grants from the $250,000 Start-up pool for Twilio-based applications.

The immediate beneficiaries will be SpinVox, selling its Voicemail-to-text transcription services; JoeDeveloper, selling a suite of call management features called QuickSet Pro; and Mobile Max Pro, offering mobile subscribers the ability to take control of BroadWorks-based call routing functions like call forwarding and setting “Do Not Disturb” status.

As Sebastian Rupley notes in GigaOm, the move has been met with a bit of skepticism and even ridicule. On the one hand, fragmentation of the application market across multiple application stores has been the bane of the wireless business, where Apple’s iTunes-based marketplace has attracted imitation from fellow handset makers and carriers alike.

We would argue that the world of Recombinant Telephony invites multiple marketplaces. The more there are, the merrier it will be both for end users and for 3rd Party application developers. Broadsoft has already enlisted a number of VoIP-based carriers into its fold. Comporium (Rock Hill, SC), SimpleSignal (Southern California and Central Colorado), Telesphere (HQ: Phoenix, AZ) and WorldxChange (Aukland, NZ) have already committed to operate “satellite” app stores as 2010 approaches.

Broadsoft’s Xtended Marketplace may not be as conspicuous as the shelves at the end of the aisle at Best Buy or Costco, but it has the potential to raise the profile for a number of aspiring developers of innovative, phone applications.

Kessler almost needlessly points out that the reason for the rejection is the fact that “AT&T is dying” and wants to cripple any innovation by phone app developers while it essentially overcharges for minutes of use (for voice) and kilobytes of content (for data). Whether AT&T or Apple precipitated the rejection is irrelevant. What’s more important is that a stench is building around present practices that make it hard, or expensive, for application developers to bring a host of new services to market. Kessler brings up many of the memes espoused by the Freedom to Connect (F2C) mavens, urging wholesale changes in public policy surrounding communications, especially the end of exclusivity and ownership of the airwaves.

This is no time for the FCC to treat incumbent carriers like the SEC and Treasury Dept. have treated large banks and mortgage facilitators. As Kessler puts it, “new features for apps like Google Voice are only limited by the imagination.” Hear! Hear!

Besides exhibiting Orwellian overtones – whereby apps and content can be “disappeared” overnight – the current ecosystem for mobile application development and distribution is increasingly Balkanized. The mobile application marketplace is growing more and more like a crap shoot, calling for developers to place bets on which square has the highest likelihood of paying off. Assuming that the success of the iTunes App Store is replicable, RIM (the BlackBerry App World), Nokia (Ovi Store), Microsoft (Windows Marketplace for Mobile), Google and the Android community (Android Market) and the major wireless carriers – most recently exemplified by Verizon Wireless’ announced VCast App Store (coming in Q4 2009) have joined the fray.

Each of these retail partners offer different tools, support services, revenue splits and operate at varying degrees of “openness” (meaning conformance to popular standards). From our perspective, “openness” is unambiguous. It should embrace Web standards, like HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS); Javascript; well-understood application program interfaces (APIs); and ultimate adherence to the principles of open source software. That’s why we’ve been following the roll-out.

According to Haynie, Appcelerator is not trying to tackle the challenge of “miniaturizing” desktop apps.It is to make it easier to customize for the other 20% of features of functions. Right now the company is addressing the smartphone with emphasis on iPhone and Android. Blackberry is the next logical platform, but the key is to provide a set of APIs that work across 80% of the operating systems and devices.

Appcelerator has started to gain traction for Titanium Mobile among the developer community, having attracted 3,000 new developers. It doesn’t overcome the challenges posed by the fragmentation of the mobile application retailing ecosystem, but it does make it much simpler to use cloud-base resources to extend the reach of applications across desktops, smartphones and netbooks. Boston-based Everypoint is another noteworthy mobile application development platform provider. Its Nemo platform targets delivery of rich, graphics-based applications across a multiplicity of devices and carriers. In its case, the target is feature phones, creating a target market of over one billion devices.

We’ll be watching to see how the market sorts out. With Google already declaring App Stores a dying concept and Web-browsers as the ubiquitous application environment, it’s easy to observe that “the Web has won.” That’s the easy part. But the case for rich applications that take best advantage of the geolocation, graphics, animation and automated speech processing keeps building as user expectations grow more sophisticated. Appcelerator and its cohort of platform providers an approach that promotes reuse of their existing code across a multiplicity of carriers and devices and perhaps a more rational (and profitable) way for developers to reach their rightful audience.

In terms of nominal “openness”, Verizon says it will provide APIs (application programming interfaces) allowing access Verizon’s back-end resources, including billing, location, messaging and presence.