I got a great email today from Andres Krogh giving us a heads up about his new site called iamsaintnick.com which allows relatives to find out what their loved ones want for Christmas.

His elevator pitch goes as follows: “Folks can go to the site, punch in a phone number, and have Santa go call that person to covertly get gift ideas.  The call happens live on the site, and the call is recorded for the user to hear after the Santa recon is complete.”

Iamsaintnick was developed by Matt Steckler, a developer who recently lost his job at a tech startup two months ago, and designed by Andres Krogh. The telephony is powered by Twilio which was launched a only a few days ago see our review here.

What is truly impressive is that a few days after the launch of Twilio, Matt and Andres designed, spec’d, and built iamsaintnick from the ground up in the 4 days since their public launch…Well done guys 🙂

The only issue we could find was that they don’t yet announce that the call is recorded, which is a requirement in some States, and is especially important when dealing with children. But it sounds like this will be added soon. Edit: There is now a mention at the beginning of the phone call that says “this call is being recorded” to try and make it extra clear.

Check it out at iamsaintnick.com, its a great little seasonal project which has lots of potential (voice recognition product suggestions maybe?) which should give you some ideas of how you can leverage the recently launched Twilio in your own applications.

Twilio launched in private beta last week (and is now available for all), and is promising to bring some radical changes to web telephony services by enabling web developers through its simple REST API, and a simple pay as you go billing philosophy.

Thanks to Twilio you no longer have to deal with complex infrastructures, telecom programming languages, and stacks of PBX software to implement inbound and outbound phone applications.

Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that while many other web telephony services already exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands.

The Twilio REST API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions:

• Say
• Play
• Record
• Dial
• Gather a phone number

Thanks to these, its very easy to replicate some of GrandCentral’s core functionality in only around 15 lines of code!

Twilio is adopting the cloud service model, where no contracts are required and where you are charged flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed.

We really like Twilio, as it has comoditized what used to be a dark art which usually involved a lot of hardware, software and lines of complex code to achieve. Plus its a perfect example of a really attractive startup prime for an aquisition, featuring a great idea, great packaging, a talented team, and some great team experience (CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

Check it out at Twilio.com