Twilio Leaps The Pond: ...

Over the last few years, developer-facing services like Heroku and AWS have proven immensely popular, helping reduce the hassles that programmers have to deal with. One of the biggest success stories along these lines has been Twilio , which launched back in 2008 and has raised around $15 million in funding to date. The company does something that sounds deceptively simple: it makes baking phone calls and text messages into an app straightforward, with a handful of intuitive commands like “dial” and “say” as its basic building blocks. This API has proven to be much easier to use than the services that were used in the pre-Twilio days, and growth has surged over the last year. But there’s been one big issue: Twilio’s functionality has been severely handicapped outside of the United States. That’s changing starting today, as Twilio begins a major rollout throughout Europe. The company is holding a special event in London this morning, where it’s announcing full Twilio service in the UK. This means that developers will be able to purchase local UK phone numbers, and they’ll be able to use call functionality ( Update : SMS is currently in private beta in the UK, but is on the way). And the rest of Europe is coming soon: a beta is launching today in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark. And by the end fo 2011, it plans to support Italy, Romania, Greece, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Finland as well. Twilio will be gradually cycling each company through the beta program, so as the first five beta countries ‘graduate’, more will be added. Obviously this is a big deal for developers, as it’ll help them reach a much broader user base (even developers in the US will be able to take advantage of the local phone numbers abroad). As part of the news, Twilio is announcing that Zendesk Voice will be launching in the UK, powered by the new Twilio support. Crunchbase TWILIO Company: Twilio Website: twilio.com Funding: $15.7M 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 various communication methods into their software and programs. Twilio allows developers to use their existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve these communication problems quickly and reliably. Learn more

Job Search Engine Simpl...

Job search engine SimplyHired.com , which aggregates jobs listing across the Web, is now adding international professional social network Viadeo to its supported services. The new integration will allow users to see which of their business contacts work at the companies surfaced by job searches on SimplyHired’s website. SimplyHired previously added support for Facebook and LinkedIn to do the same. Viadeo is not as commonly known here in the U.S. as its rival LinkedIn, but it has a fairly good-sized user base of 35 million members worldwide. (In comparison, LinkedIn now reports having 120 million users.) However, Viadeo reached 30 million users back in May 2010 , which means that it has grown by just 5 million in the months since. Considering that the company has been targeting highly populated Asian countries like India and China, the opportunity for additional growth is still abundant. In May of this year, Viadeo put plans for its IPO on hold  so it could focus on growing its core business. At the time, its Chief Executive Dan Serfaty said it might revisit the question of going public in about 18 to 24 months. The new Viadeo integration goes live on SimplyHired.com in 12 countries today, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. U.S. users, though, will not have the option.

Distimo’s Latest Report...

The latest report from mobile analytics firm Distimo  examines in detail the trends surrounding the localization of mobile applications. That is, which app stores tend to have a higher or lower number of apps that are published in just one country alone. According to its findings, globally, 27% of the most popular applications are popular exclusively in one country in Apple’s App Store for iPhone. Meanwhile, Nokia’s Ovi Store has the highest proportion of apps published in just one country (29.4%) while the App Store for iPad has the lowest (3.4%). Aside from the Nokia Ovi Store (29.4%), only a small proportion of apps are tailored to one specific country in the other vendors’ apps stores, including iPhone (5.2%), iPad (3.4%), Android (4.9%) and Windows Phone (3.5%). Distimo ignored RIM in this report, it should be noted. The majority of the locally published applications in the Nokia Ovi Store target either China or Italy. Two large publishers accounting for nearly 9% of the Ovi catalog in Italy are responsible for this country’s appearance here: “3″ and “Dada.” Combined, they publish over 8,000 apps in Italy, primarily ringtones and wallpapers. China is more affected by publishing restrictions, says Distimo. In China, games can only be published to the Ovi Store through licensed aggregators KongZhong and Tom Online. Videos can only go through CNR. Together, the three account for 5,845 apps in China’s Nokia Ovi Store. Elsewhere, the U.S. and the U.K. feature the most locally published apps, with the U.S. having 7,158 apps that are exclusive to the iPhone App Store in the U.S. When the App Store (iPhone and iPad) and Google’s Android Market are combined, the U.S., U.K., South Korea and Japan are about equal in terms of locally available apps. Despite the high number of locally published apps in the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad in the U.S., the proportion of local apps is relatively low, says Distimo. 22% of  the 100 most popular iPhone apps and 19% of 100 most popular iPad apps are U.S.-only apps, it found. China and Japan have the most locally popular apps, the firm reports, and, as a general trend, local apps are very popular in all the mobile marketplaces worldwide. Distimo also examined the overlap of the top applications in the U.S. iTunes App Store, finding that top apps here tend to be popular in other English-speaking countries, but have the lowest overlap with Japan and China. Other countries seeing overlap include Mexico and Argentina (overlap 60%), Belgium, The Netherlands and France (51%), and Germany, Austria and Switzerland (57%). China and Singapore have an average overlap of 25%, which is low, but higher than the overlap between China and other countries (average 16%). The report then further breaks down the top paid and free apps in all the tracked app stores, both in the U.S. and worldwide. You can read more in the report, available here on Distimo’s website . Crunchbase DISTIMO Company: Distimo Website: distimo.com Launch Date: January 5, 2009 We know app stores. Distimo was founded to solve the challenges created by a widely fragmented app store marketplace filled with equally fragmented information and statistics. Distimo was launched shortly after the introduction of the first app store. App stores have clearly shown since that time that they are the way forward for content distribution. The app store model offers an enormous opportunity for developers to get their content out and dramatically improves content discovery by consumers. However, the mobile market... Learn more

Every City Is A Shadow ...

Grey Area , a Finnish smartphone games developer, has now launched its alternative reality game Shadow Cities across thirteen additional European countries, after its North American launch last month. The game can be downloaded for free in the local Apple iTunes App stores in Italy, France, Germany, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway ( iTunes link ). The startup recently raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures , London Venture Partners and Initial Capital .

MAS Museum: Live Intera...

This is a great way to showcase the launch of the MAS museum in Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium). This virtual tour campaign was developed by Prophets for the MAS (a new museum in Antwerp) which opened it’s doors on 17 May this year. In order to introduce the MAS to the general public, it organised a Related Digital Buzz Posts: Cellcom: Live “Interactive” Facebook Concerts Samsung Jet: Interactive Product Tour The Adobe Museum of Digital Media