It’s standing-room only at the Bently Reserve (where official capacity is 550) and Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson kicked off a two day get-together for phone-app developers interested in using his company’s resources to bring new services to market. Early in his keynote Lawson noted that businesses around the world spend something on the order of $250 billion on premises-based solutions for telecom, customer care and collaboration. That’s clearly the pot o’ gold at the end of the developers rainbow as they move to cloud-based resources to accelerate development and introduction of new customer-facing services.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Rich Phone Apps, Recombinant Communications, Twilio, Ventures