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Twilio, the company that’s on a mission to help developers bake telephony into their applications, is launching a new feature this morning that could well give rise to a slew of startups (or, at the very least, a bunch of new features in existing web and mobile applications).

In short, it’s letting developers integrate the flexible and cost-efficient power of VoIP — the sort of technology used by services like Skype and Google Voice — into their own applications. And it saves developers the hassles involved with building out the infrastructure typically required to handle a VoIP service. Meet Twilio Client.

At a high level, Twilio Client is probably best described as a platform that facilitates embedded VoIP communications, but that’s confusing and doesn’t really demonstrate what exactly it does. So let’s try a few examples.

Say you had a social network (I’ll pick LinkedIn) that wanted to let users initiate voice calls with other users — but without requiring either party to actually hand out their phone numbers or IM handles. With Twilio Client, LinkedIn could bake that functionally in: you’d click a button next to a friend’s screen name, the other party would see a popup asking if they wanted to talk to you, and the call would be routed over Twilio’s VoIP pipes. Skype could probably offer the same thing, but it would take a special partnership — with Twilio, any app can implement this.

Another example: in addition to the web version (which is open to everyone starting today), Twilio is also launching mobile versions of Twilio Client for Android and iPhone. This means that mobile developers will be able to include voice calling functionality into their applications without requiring users to exchange phone numbers. This is obviously great for services where some anonymity is preferred (say, a dating app), but plenty of other apps could benefit from voice calls as well: marketplaces, social networks, even games.

Obviously this is going to give Skype some competition. No, Twilio itself isn’t going to be launching a direct Skype competitor any time soon, but it’s handing developers the tools to reproduce much of Skype’s voice-related technology. Back in 2008 Lawson told me Twilio could recreate GrandCentral (now Google Voice) in 15 lines of code. For this launch, he says you could reproduce Skype in the three lines below. Obviously that’s got a hefty dose of hyperbole, but the point still stands: it’s now possible for developers to mirror the basic functionality of Skype Voice, which means they’ll be able to focus on innovating above and beyond those core features.

Of course, most of this is not free. Twilio is charging 1/4 cent per minute for pure VoIP calls, and calls that are routed from a VoIP client to a normal phone line are two cents per minute (in other words, developers have a strong incentive to push users toward making VoIP-based calls).

We should note that the service offered by Twilio Client isn’t entirely unique — Jajah, for one, has done VoIP integrations on both websites and mobile apps. But Lawson says these are generally one-off deals with larger companies, as opposed to an API anyone can access. Likewise, Skype’s SkypeKit lets developers bake Skype functionality into their products, but it’s aimed primarily at consumer electronic devices.

Twilio Client could be a big deal. Twilio’s SMS API gave rise to a wave of group-texting startups, and I won’t be surprised if we see a lot of innovation on this API over the next six months (they’ll help kickstart that next wave at a Twilio conference that’s being held September 21 and 22).

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Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate...

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The world of SMS and telephony is filled with logistical hurdles. San Francisco-based startup Twilio‘s goal is to make them a lot less daunting, by offering an API that lets developers send texts, place calls, and do other common functions using some basic and initiative commands. And today they’re opening a new portion of its API to the public: The Twilio SMS shortcode API.

Shortcodes, which are typically used for sending huge volumes of text messages, are nothing new, but the process involved to acquire one can be lengthy (and it requires a long term commitment). Twilio’s looking to help with this. It can’t make the process go any faster, but once a developer submits their application, Twilio will handle all the negotiations involved with the carriers. Developers can then get started building their apps using standard 10-digit numbers, and can then switch over to their new 5- or 6- digit shortcode once it’s approved.

The API has been available to developers for some time via a private beta program (Twilio says it’s already processed over 100 short code applications). But Twilio says that, as of the beginning of the year, there were over 1031 short codes still available in the US. That may not sound like a huge opportunity for Twilio (after all, Twilio already has tens of thousands of developers using its SMS API) , but there’s a lot of money involved for each shortcode.

Short code leases run $1500 per month for a custom code, or $1000 for one chosen at random — a chunk of these fees go toward acquiring licenses from organizations like the Common Short Code Administration. And customers also pay one cent per outbound and .5 cents per inbound text message sent via the API. Remember, these short codes are optimal for sending a lot of text messages, so those per-text charges can translate into a significant amount of money for Twilio. Twilio is also allowing developers to lease shortcodes on a per-quarter basis, as opposed to a standard annual contract.

Last week Twilio, the startup that makes it easy for developers to integrate SMS and telephony features into their own applications, made a significant pricing change: they dropped the price of each outbound SMS message to one cent (it used to be two cents per message). That may not sound like much, but given that some companies being built on the technology handle a huge volume of texts — including some of the group texting apps — it adds up.

I was curious how much of an impact the pricing change could have on the service (after all, there may be some great ideas out there for which Twilio wasn’t previously a viable option), so I got in touch with the company. CEO Jeff Lawson says that Twilio isn’t sharing absolute numbers around the number of text message and voice minutes it’s dealing with, but he did provide the graph above the shows how each of the service’s previous price drops have spurred  growth.

Overall, each drop looks like it contributed to a marked increase, though there is one apparent outlier (it looks like usage went down in late November). As it turns out, the bump in November is from applications built during the 2010 midterm election. Lawson says that campaigns on both sides of the fence used Twilio to build applications, and that the Democratic National Committee did especially well using it, with “order of magnitude cost savings” on an app that was built in a day (you can see the case study here). Obviously these apps were only seeing heavy usage for a limited amount of time, which is why usage peaked and then dropped a bit.

I also asked about the major inflection point you see around January 2011. Lawson says this is due to “boring stuff” — growth in new customers, and growth seen by existing customers. Though given how steep the change is, I’m guessing at least one of the customers really started to take off.

Lawson also provided some other stats: he says that despite the fact that SMS shortcodes have been around for a decade, there are only around 2,000 of them currently active. In contrast, he says that 10,000 developers are currently using Twilio SMS (which launched a year ago).

So what exactly allows Twilio to drop the prices in the first place? The company says that it can work out better deals as it handles more volume, and that it passes along those reduced prices to customers.

Startup Twilio has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and including Union Square Ventures, 500 Startups, and several prominent angel investors. Twilio previously raised $4 million in Series A and seed funding.

Twilio creates a powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps.

The Twilio service allows developers to integrate common phone actions (like placing calls or playing back a recording) using a small set of basic API commands. Building basic projects, like this Rick Roll app, takes only a few lines of code, though developers can create far more advanced applications. In fact, Twilio’s customers include Cheetos, Earth911, Tumblr, Sony Music, GroupMe, TextSlide, and FastSociety. Currently, Twilio is now serving nearly 20,000 developers and has increased the number of developers on the platform 5x since the beginning of the year.

The company recently slashed its prices, launched a Google Voice for businesses, and launched the Twilio Micro Fund for developers building off the platform.

Twilio plans to use the new funding for product development and to hire additional staff in sales, marketing,
and engineering.

Twilio, the service that enables developers to add SMS And telephony functionality to their applications with a relatively small amount of work, wants to make sure it keeps growing at a rapid pace. And to do that it’s turning to an age-old tactic: it’s slashing prices across the board.

Twilio is now serving nearly 20,000 developers, and it says that it’s using its growing volume to negotiate better deals with the telephony providers it works with (it’s also sacrificing some of its margins, but believes it will recoup those and then some as price adjustment drives further growth in its development base). And for many developers the changes are substantial — in some cases, CEO Jeff Lawson says that a developer using Twilio will see as much as 66% in savings.

The change primarily comes from the way Twilio charges for inbound and outbound calls. Before now any inbound call, and then any subsequent outbound call made as a result, cost developers 3 cents per minute. But Lawson says that many developers only used the first, inbound leg and didn’t take advantage of that second, outbound call, which meant they were paying 3 cents a minute for functionality they weren’t using. Today the two are being decoupled: developers will pay one cent a minute for inbound calls, and outbound calls are two cents a minute.

As part of the pricing restructure, Twilio has also decided to publicly disclose its volume pricing. Many services will only share these prices in secret, and will renegotiate them on a per-case basis. Lawson says that Twilio wants to keep everything transparent, taking a page out of Amazon’s Web Services playbook, so it’s posting its volume discounts online.

In addition to the pricing news, Twilio is announcing a few other more minor developments. Last week the company added new features to its API, including the ability to search for phone numbers using vanity names (e.g. 415-JSN-RULZ). It’s also launched a gallery of customers who are pleased with the service, and a gallery showcasing what developers have built.

In terms of growth, Twilio says that it has increased the number of developers on the platform 5x since the beginning of the year and that in a single day it now connects the same volume of calls it saw in all of January.

Ever since it launched in late 2008, Twilio has a knack for making cool products. Its core service is a telephony API offering a set of commands that make it easy for developers to integrate phone and SMS services into their web-enabled applications. And today they’re releasing an open source platform based on that technology that has the potential to disrupt business-oriented call routing services in a big way — Twilio is describing it as a sort of Google Voice for businesses, with more flexibility. It’s called OpenVBX.

So what exactly does it do? OpenVBX lets you set up an advanced telephony service for your business using a drag-and-drop interface. Want a certain phone number to be routed to your entire sales team? Easy — just drag and drop each of their names into the appropriate area. And that’s only the beginning: OpenVBX lets you take advantage of all of Twilio’s integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, voicemail forwarding, and SMS messaging. You can have voicemails left at a certain number (say, tech support) automatically forwarded to your entire support staff. If you’re running a restaurant, you can use the service to automatically return a listing of your specials whenever someone sends the word MENU to your number. And all of this is done via drag and drop (see the video below for an example).

Even better: OpenVBX allows for the integration of plugins, allowing you to connect your phone system to other web services. One plugin Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson showed me hooked into 37signals’ Highrise, a web-based contact manager. Using this, you could automatically check to see if the phone number of an incoming call was already in your contact database, and route the call to a certain sales rep accordingly. A second plugin (which was actually created by a third-party developer) hooks into Foursquare, allowing you to change your telephony settings depending on where you’re located. For example, if you checked in at work, it would know to route any incoming calls to your office number rather than your house.

The open-source nature of OpenVBX can be a little confusing. Like WordPress, OpenVBX is a downloadable software package that you upload to your own server and are free to tweak as much as you’d like. However, unlike WordPress, which offers a hosted solution at WordPress.com, Twilio isn’t offering a hosted service yet (though it’s quite obvious that they’re working on launching one in the future). For the time being you’ll have to host it yourself, though Lawson notes that Dreamhost currently has a 1-click install setup, which should make things pretty simple.

Of course, OpenVBX relies heavily on Twilio’s service, tapping into Twilio SMS and telephony APIs. When you use OpenVBX you’re charged Twilio’s normal rates, which run $1 per phone line per month ($2 for a toll-free number) with usage charges of 3 cents per minute (or SMS). Lawson says that it is technically feasible for someone to use OpenVBX with a backend other than Twilio, but that it would take quite a bit of configuration.

Twilio has always been focused on catering to developers, and OpenVBX isn’t any different. While the product will obviously appeal to businesses, Twilio is encouraging developers to take the technology and make it their own by integrating tweaks and plugins. For example, an enterprising developer could tweak OpenVBX so that it’s perfect for restaurants, and then resell it as their own service. Twilio still gets paid through their per-minute and phone line charges, and the developer can charge a hefty premium on top of it.

OpenVBX will be facing a few competitors, including Grasshopper and OneBox, a well established virtual PBX solution that caters to businesses. Lawson acknowledges that there’s quite a bit of feature overlap here, but says that with its plugin system OpenVBX is more extensible than the competition.

Also see Line2, another business-specific Google Voice alternative that we’ve covered before.