You know we’ve moved into the era of Recombinant Telephony when one of the major VoIP service platform providers, BroadSoft, launches its own AppStore. According to this press release, the 10 year-old VoIP platform provider has stepped up its commitment to 3rd Party application providers by making Xtended Marketplace into a channel for selling applications directly to end users.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, VoIP, Rich Phone Apps